www.nplusonemag.com/node/678/print
Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob Spiegel & Grau. The pages in Proust's long novel describing a first-ever telephone call are often admired for their rare sensitivity to the experience of a new technology. The narrator is speaking, across the miles of cable, to his grandmother.
alone beside me, seen without the mask of her face, I noticed in it for the first time the sorrows that had cracked it in the course of a lifetime." Proust's passage has no equivalent in any contemporary fiction I know when it comes to an account of a first email read, or first social networking profile posted. Even so, it can't tell us much about what we may really wish to know about technology: never mind losing your virginity--what is it like to live with someone? Proust seems to have recognized that domestication, as the technologists call it, was harder to describe than initiation. In a later volume, he refers in passing to the telephone as "a supernatural instrument before whose miracles we used to stand amazed, and which we now employ without giving it a thought, to summon our tailor or order an ice cream." Marx long ago characterized capitalism in terms of "the annihilation of space by time." But this of course was something different from a description of the experiential weft of a world transformed by the railroad and telegraph. Perhaps the most suggestive and sensitive account of the early industrial compression of space is Wolfgang Schivelbusch's The Railway Journey. It was first published in 1977, or about 120 years after Marx coined his phrase. Still, if today everything else is speeding up, so, maybe, can our understanding accelerate of what is happening to us as senders and recipients of so many almost instantaneously transmitted electronic messages. It's at least the case that some thoughtful books have begun to appear on the subject of our increasing intimacy with the supernatural devices--the laptops, the iPhones, the BlackBerries--at our fingertips.
t's far simpler and less expensive to communicate with someone not physically present than at any time in human history. A second palpable change is the ease with which each of us can become an author or publisher." The corollary to this increased ease of communication is of course an increased susceptibility to being communicated with. "Our relentless access to others--and them to us" is how Baron puts it. The grammatical slip (it should be "theirs to us") offers a small confirmation of Baron's fear that a superabundance of text and talk is driving out careful expression. It also suggests how hard it is keeping track of such changes. In 1999, full internet service was made available, in Japan, for the first time on a mobile phone. With the advent of PDAs and smart-phones, you could produce a galaxy of websites from your pocket as a magician draws a menagerie from a flattened top hat; the everywhere of the internet could accompany the anywhere of cellular telephony. In this current decade, an "always-on" model of communication has become the advancing norm. Most internet users in wealthy countries now pay for web access at a flat monthly rate, and many popular mobile phone subscriptions allow you to talk yourself hoarse without incurring surcharges. Notably, the displacement of dial-up by broadband service and continual refinements in microprocessing have permitted the downloading or streaming of large audio and video files. Jenkins himself describes the by now familiar difficulty of buying a mobile phone tout court--"you know, to make phone calls. I didn't want a video camera, a still camera, a Web access device, an MP3 player, or a game system. I also wasn't interested in something that could show me movie previews, would have customizable ring tones, or would allow me to read novels. I didn't want the electronic equivalent of a Swiss army knife." Of course he could have used his new device as a phone and nothing else. But today we find it difficult, even where it remains possible, to order la carte from the menu of our technological choices. Our experience more nearly resembles diving helplessly into an all-you-can-eat buffet: email, texting, G-chatting, phoning; blogs and message boards, newspapers and journals in their on-line editions, novelty and commercial sites of every kind--they are all available all the time. None of this would matter much if we were simply behaving as we did before 1984 (when answering machines began to enter our homes) or 1994 (when people first went online en masse), but with sleeker machinery. Reading the press, watching moving images and listening to recorded music, ordering products from catalogues, talking on the phone, and exchanging correspondence are all modern habits of long standing. The distinction of newer communication technologies is really to promote a intense kind of semiotic promiscuity: more messages are sent and received, and more "content" posted and consumed, while all of these communications--often competing for our attention on one or two screens--tend to become shorter, more frequent, more spontaneous, and more casual. Critiques, as opposed to mere descriptions, of internet culture emphasize the informality or (more judgmentally) the vulgarity of our promiscuous messages. These communications, in their ease, inexpensiveness, and abundance, suffer less pressure than before to be or seem important, meaningful, or definitive--in other words, to last in our minds. In their clamorous competition with one another, they more often strive to be the first noticed. The critic and erstwhile blogger Lee Siegel, in Against the Machine, a polemic against online habits, makes a list of "five open supersecrets" about bloggers: 1 Not everyone has something valuable to say. Bloggers on the whole write carelessly, their ideas are commonplace, they curry favor with readers and one another, and their popularity is no index of their worthiness. Siegel quotes Spinoza: "All things excellent are both difficult and rare." This seems inarguable, even if Siegel's preference for professional skill and authority against the digital canaille leads him to champion the execrable '90s sit-com Friends over an innocuous televised talent show like American Idol. In the days before the internet, he claims, "The audience for each medium knew its history, tradition, and development.... The creators of Friends knew the Dick Van Dyke show": a curious nostalgia. Still, the vulgarity of online life is impossible to deny. It seems merely bizarre when Henry Jenkins defines "lowest common denominator" as the "common idea that television programs appeal to basic human drives and desires--most often erotic or aggressive," as if TV had anything on porn sites or the comments sections of blogs when it comes to the solicitation of lust or anger. Digital life also clearly undermines the patience with which people used read and write. Naomi Baron proposes the notion of a linguistic "whateverism" abetted by email, instant messages, blogs, and texting: "The proliferation of writing, often done in a hurry, may be driving out the opportunity and motivation for creating carefully honed text." She recalls one of her students claiming that anything worth saying could be said in fewer than thirty pages, and quotes a fellow professor: "I can't get my students to read whole books anymore." Both Siegel and Baron are plainly describing and ruing the same condition, one that is obvious to all of us. What may be less obvious is that its chief characteristic appears to be a lack of mental discipline.
n the internet, an impulse is only seconds away from its gratification," while Baron cites with approval neuroscientists who "suggest a strong kinship between the effects of multiple pulls on our attention (thanks to information communications technologies) and attention deficit disorder." As anybody with a router can attest, this tendency toward distraction and desublimation is for real. A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than for others; what has been written without effort is generally read without pleasure; But if jabbering semiotic promiscuity entails some f...
|
http://csua.com/feed/