Vices of the Virtual (II)
In N1BR, the new online book review of the literary journal n+1, Benjamin Kunkel reviews three books about the impact of new digital media on our culture. I posted excerpts of another essay Kunkel wrote on this subject a few months ago. The review is less ambitious but more personal than the essay. Kunkel writes about still not having a cell phone, about the difference – some of it good, much of it bad – a high-speed internet connection has made in his life. He isn’t blind to the advantages of the new techonologies that are quickly replacing paper and ink. He laments that he doesn’t write letters anymore, but he points out that emails and text messages aren’t only faster than letters; they also favor certain valuable qualities of expression. “Quick communication tends to glibness, but also makes a special prize of wit…. Chatting-by-text and email are not only convenient when it comes to making plans and arrangements; they favor repartee as nothing else, and afford the accompanying pleasures.” Still, Kunkel is worried:
Naturally everyone wants to believe that by spending time online we are not steadily depriving real art, thought, and journalism of the attention and—since so much online “content” is free of charge—the money these would need to survive. It would be nice to feel that the gratifying shallowness and diversity of digital life can be balanced with fidelity to great and challenging writing and art, that our chatting won’t get in the way of our attempted masterpieces. There is no giving up the internet now. And truly no logical reason exists why you couldn’t be a thorough reader of both Proust and Gawker—both, after all, are interested in gossip—or couldn’t exchange, by snail-mail, long, unbosoming letters with the same friend with whom you trade ticklishly glib text messages. A regular visitor to YouTube—a realm of mostly short, grainy clips pitched to amusement—can in theory also be a fan of Tarkovsky’s long, eidetic, and solemn productions. The internet, as its proponents rightly remind us, makes for variety and convenience; it does not force anything on you.
Only it turns out it doesn’t feel like that at all. We don’t feel as if we had freely chosen our online practices. We feel instead that they are habits we have helplessly picked up or that history has enforced, that we are not distributing our attention as we intend or even like to. The experience of being online has at least as much to do with compulsiveness as with liberty. [...]
You could write just the single email. You could discover the single piece of information you wanted online and then log off. You could make sure that that your blog-reading and clip-watching didn’t encroach on the hours set aside for Tarkovksy and Proust, or that your social networking didn’t get in the way of your face-to-face socializing. No one is stopping you from stopping yourself. It’s just that many users of digital communications technology can’t stop. An inability to log off is hardly the most destructive habit you could acquire, but it seems unlikely there is any more widespread compulsion among the professional middle-class and their children than lingering online.
I interpret the dearth of comments as a common desire to avoid convicting oneself :-)
For what it’s worth, I tend to agree that we over-consume the internet. I try now only to check just a handful of websites a day, commonweal among them. There is too much empty chatter and too much vitriol on the internet for it meaningfully to replace other pieces of my life, though the author is right to point to its awesome, terrible draw.
But in the end it will never approximate, in any form or in any proxy, the delight of shooting hoops with your friends while you chat about the Iliad or Thomas Hobbes, or the pleasure of opening up a used hardback copy of Moby Dick.
Thank you, Matthew Boudway, for calling attention to this article. It’s too wide-ranging (as most things written about the Internet these days), but some sections are thought-provoking.
Jim Pauwels: Haha, funny comment of yours. To take one bit of the essay (which actually comes not from the essay’s author but one of the books he reviews):
“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.
2. Few people have anything original to say.
3. Only a handful of people know how to write well.
4. Most people will do almost anything to be liked.
5. “Customers” are always right, but “people” aren’t.
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.
Generally I agree with Siegel’s take. Yes, there’s plenty of careless writing, commonplace ideas, writing with half an eye towards popularity, etc. etc. At the same time, methinks Siegel (like many critics) confuses blogs, forums, and other Internet means with “writing.” IMO, it isn’t exactly writing but a mix between talking and writing.
Many blogs strike me as almost virtual equivalents of bartool or coffeeshop conversations. Some are similar to conversations after a conference panel is over and people linger around to talk on one or more specific points.
While I’d love to see the overall quality of blog/forum discussion get better, I have a more tolerant or sympathetic eye towards the Internet than Siegel and Kunkel (the latter, to judge from the article, is more ambivalent about the Internet, cell phone, and other technological developments).
Hi, Historyman, at the risk of being accused uf currying favor with you, :-), those are some good and interesting comments.
To my mind, blog discussions are like hurriedly dashed off correspondence. It would be as if Adams and Jefferson compressed their letters back and forth into a single day, with all of the corresponding loss of ripening thought and consideration. I definitely don’t talk (but do think) in the tangled and inconsistent syntax in which my comments appear here.