Keith Richards and Mick Jagger knew of each other's existence because they went to the same school, but they didn't actually speak to each other until the day Keith noticed that Mick had a pile of impossible-to-find blues albums with him. (He'd been ordering them directly from Chess Records in Chicago). Obviously, this kid was interested in something Keith was interested in and they started talking. Something came out of this.

Of course, this is just a very famous example of something which happens all the time, or used to. I actually don't know: does it still? Oh, of course it does, says one voice in my head. But there's a nagging doubt, and it relates to the things I've been writing about in my last three blog-posts here. Horses die and it's not worth beating them when they do, but indulge me one more time, and I promise next week's post will have a different tack.

Part of what got me thinking about this is the fact that in a few days, I'll be leaving for the United States for a while, my annual tour, which not only takes in SXSW in Texas, but stops here and there to visit friends. It was on one of these tours that I flew on Jet Blue, a lovely airline that in many ways isn't like the traditional ones, but once on board the plane, I was a bit jarred. There were screens on the back of the seats, which isn't unusual, but the content was paid, so a message appeared on the screen every now and again which said something like "Just swipe your credit card, and you can continue to be entertained!" And what was really unpleasant was that there seemed to be no way to turn off the screen. Be entertained or be hectored to be entertained seemed to be my choice here. My seatmate, however, was a Jet Blue pilot, who reached into the seatback pocket and found a piece of cardboard advertising something or other, and he expertly folded it so that it snapped into the screen's edges and blocked the visual noise out. I complemented him on his ingenuity and did the same.

It wasn't just that the fare available seemed to be all American network television programming, which I'd be avoiding under any circumstances, but that the airline seemed to think that we had, during our time in the terminal, been deprived of the basic human right of entertainment, and were now having it restored. This wasn't a long flight, especially compared to the one which had brought me from Europe to the U.S. It was a couple of hours, time you could spend reading a magazine, a paperback, the newspaper, or, as the pilot next to me did, shutting your eyes and drifting off. You could stare out the window, even, trying to make sense of what was going on below if the weather were nice enough.

I had a sudden vision of my fellow passengers as zombies with earbuds who got on the plane, replaced them with the ones provided, swiped their cards, and kept on being entertained. As I've said before, this approach to media consumption results in a sort of greying out of affect, of eliminating the peaks and valleys which comprise the emotional content of art. And I began to wonder, where did this horror vacui come from?

Horror vacui is (or so says Wikipedia) a term from the visual arts, in which the idea that there might be empty or open space is unthinkable. Tellingly, the article claims that the term was first used to describe the interior clutter of Victorian-era homes. What, after all, is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing?

Richard Hamilton's classic and pioneering Pop Art collage answers the question by piling on some horror vacui of its own, but that shouldn't distract us from its prescience: it was done in 1956, and while it attained fame as a critique of consumer culture, it's also an icon of cultural clutter, which is perhaps why it still resonates.

There are various explanations for clutter in visual art, among them mental illness on the part of the artist -- so-called art brut or outsider art is notable for this -- but it's horror vacui as a seeming lifestyle that's upsetting to me: the constantly being plugged in and the ensuing alienation from one's environment. I want to be careful to balance the alarm I feel with not overstating things, but by experiencing this avalanche of sensation as a single, isolated individual, is it possible that an end result of this is the individual's total disconnect from his environment? When a Presidential aspirant like the loathesome Rick Santorum can say that what's wrong with Obama's environmental policies is that they privilege the earth over man -- and this meets with approval from some people -- is that bizarro-world way of looking at this issue a possible symptom of people who have entertained themselves to where interconnectedness is an alien concept? Is this, perhaps, an explanation of the exceptionalism which seems to be on the rise in various parts of the world today? (I don't want to single out America for this -- not while I'm living in France, for heaven's sakes).

But wait. Aren't we more interconnected than ever these days? Isn't this what the success of Facebook and Twitter and all of these other networks is about? Well, no, not really. Facebook, in fact, is a very potent answer to this: for many users -- perhaps the majority of the ones in the West -- it's a granular network, individual grains of sand, little rocks, connecting as individuals with no larger structure. It's like the comments on articles posted on-line, the ones which aren't curated, like you find on Yahoo News or something: each individual expressing an opinion which is exclusively his own, based on a greater or lesser -- and they seem to be overwhelmingly lesser -- degree of expertise or knowledge of the subject.

Or at least that's one tendency, and one that's been with us for a while. But there's another one, with which I have little first-hand experience, but which gives me hope because of one of its more obnoxious and justifiably-reviled artifacts. Just from media reports and my occasional going to the live stream and seeing videos shot by people whose opinions I know, the Occupy people make me wonder if there isn't a turning away from ubiquitous, content-free entertainment underway. The clue? The drum circles which some of these groups seem to have felt necessary. The drum circle is the ultimate example of something that's way more fun to do than to experience. The entire thing is about a delicate balance between the individual (the beat you're playing) and the group (off of which you're creating your part in reaction/harmony). This is the absolute opposite of the walled-off, screen-dependent, sound-in-your-skull experience (and those who argue that it isn't even remotely entertainment for those who have to listen to it for hours on end aren't going to get any argument from me).

I think that for all the online interaction, there's still damn little online community building, and yet, like I say, I see a glimmer of a possibility that this may be changing. It certainly happened with the well-publicized community actions in the Middle East, and it's not impossible that it might happen in the West. Already a community-building meme has come out of this movement -- the 99% versus 1% idea -- and it's one which seems to have legs. Maybe it signals the rebirth of an almost forgotten social norm: civility. Maybe we'll turn away from our screens and start talking to each other instead of yelling at each other.

Say, you're Mick, right? So, where'd you get those albums?