Really love this bit: "People come to love authors and not books, accolades and not achievement, images of 'the good' or 'the true' which are more absolving and easier to hold than the things themselves."
no, the medium really is part of the problem. A mediated experience is by definition at a remote order from 1st order experience. Crucially different from looking down at your feet, or watching your fingers typing.
I realize that it's unlikely that you can be talked out of your position. Twelve months without access to television computer screen, or phone would almost certainly change your perspective. Quitting all screens including the pre-digi medium of television is crucial, though. The attention economy era began before the social media era. In some sense, a/v phone content is merely television with a faster payoff and optional interactive features.
I agree with you about the Star System for writers. And people who confine their literacy to reading reviews, instead of actual books. But don't be hasty about consigning authors to subordinate importance to "the text." Authors who are good deserve the credit for doing a good job of using their own voice. To avoid Star Syndrome, go to the library and pick up short story anthologies. There are sleepers to be found there.
Thanks for your comment, and for seeing my point on the Star System. I don't imagine I'd talk you out of your position either, but I remember one conversation I had with a professor once that really changed my thinking, so I'll share it with you. I was talking about (as you'd expect) how the internet has changed everything and we live in such a different mode of consciousness as compared to more ancient people. And she said to me, "how dare you think your lifeworld and culture is more complex than that of a Song Dynasty peasant." Mythologies and oral traditions pressed just as close and made people just as neurotic as the internet does today. And no experience we have is really direct or first-order, even if you're out in the fields in the days of the shire, just living in the moment, no screens.
I guess what I mean by this is, I take it as a first principle that there is neither cultural decline nor cultural progress. We just are. And we have to find the best way to be for the moment we're in, not living by reference to an anticipated future or remembered past.
Thanks Frederick! I’d meant to reply earlier but got lost in the shuffle. Maybe I am drifting into Taoism, and it’s definitely something I wanna learn more about. What you’re saying resonates and describes my thinking in a way I myself hadn’t — I am trying to say “x and y just is, how do we deal with it” rather than “x is good, y is bad”
I'm not lamenting the existence of advanced media technologies. I'm making explicit note of their hazards, in order to bring those aspects into the foreground of awareness. In my observation, few people are even aware of the extent of the challenges. They're just passively swallowed up by them.
An example, from the pre-Internet TV era: the OJ Bronco chase. At that time--1994--I had been living without a television in my house for over a decade. And I knew about the case, of course, from newspapers and the radio. And I knew the chase was on. I walked by a local bar, full of people. All of them watching OJ Simpson and Al Cowlings driving 10 miles an hour with a line of police cars behind them. The streets were quiet because this is what Everybody was doing.
Except for me. I had the plot outline already. I knew that the odds were something like 99% that it was a performance. That OJ was stunting. The 1% chance being that he would blow his brains out on camera, or something. Not a situation I could affect, or that affected me. But it seemed like the rest of the world had stopped, and turned its attention to this drawn-out Hollywood reality show imitation of a crime drama. In my opinion, everyone around me had lost their mind. Presumably, anyone who noticed my lack of interest wondered what was the matter with me, for not caring.
Lewinskygate, just more of the same bullshit. Except that I already knew what the verdict would be if it ever came down to a vote in the Senate: acquittal, because I could count. And I had to endure two years of everyone around me taking it seriously. Because everyone else was in a Serious Long-Term Relationship with their Television, and I had pulled the plug back in 1981.
I have a similarly detached relationship with my iPhone, which I relegate to my apartment and use as a landline, as a rule. I see what everyone else is doing. I saw how the Occupy NY protests were broken up by the police 15 years ago, with one or two people resisting, and the rest of the "demonstrators" holding their phones up and videoing the scene. It's why I seldom attend music concerts any more. Because of the presence of an audience so conditioned by the medium that owns them that they evidently think that a concert experience is something to be recorded on video with a crappy microphone, in order to watch it later on, with shitty little headphones and a screen the size of a postcard. Complete with nonstop conversations, because the show is treated no differently than something they watch on TV in their living room.
"And no experience we have is really direct or first-order, even if you're out in the fields in the days of the shire, just living in the moment, no screens."
Stop. I don't need to hear some obfuscatory nonsense about neuroscience, and how our retinas view everything upside down, and excitatory and inhibitor neurons.
If your perception and cognitive faculties are so degraded that you can't tell the difference between the screen you're looking at, versus how to feel the immediacy of the world surrounding the breathing body you inhabit --or, worse, that you prefer the benumbed dissociation of a media screen to the natural world that keeps us alive--you are afflicted with a toxic, premorbid condition. The illusion has turned delusional. Do whatever you have to in order to quit the screen.
When phones, platforms, and free apps become dominantly slot machines premised on exploitation, abuse, and surveillance the game was over culturally. There is demonstrable improvement in the classroom for students attention, learning, and well being when the phones are literally “taken away” or put fully away. Witnessed from 1st hand experience. Taxing billionaires will not stop the immediate abuse. Literally taking phones away will. Or using non commercial apps. As a fan of the internet and its culture since the early commercial internet days— and as someone who has argued for its extreme relevance and important cultural influence to be taken seriously - the past decade has been an extreme downward spiral in its actual human cultural relevance. It’s become more of an active arm for many forms of abuse and manipulation through efficient technological means. Yes some fun memes have surfaced in the past decade but so much of online culture and behavior is responding dominantly to and overwhelming environment of abuse, surveillance, a variety of exploitations, and evolving modes of capitalism. Online culture should be deeply questioned in what it actually can speak to or express in this current decade. It’s such a manipulated rats nest at this stage. Creating in a death dungeon is not very interesting. The many ways people can scream when “being tortured” is less important to me than the larger fact of people “being tortured”. Finding ways to creatively express outside the death dungeon is more interesting to me these days.
Thanks for your comment! It's given me some food for thought. I would agree things are getting worse -- I'm not sure I'd go so far as to call the social internet a "death dungeon" at this point, but I see where you're coming from and how it could get there. I also agree with your view that a lot of memes/online culture is "responding dominantly to an overwhelming environment of abuse, surveillance..."
I suppose where I differ is that I don't think those efforts to subvert, question, or play against the abusive environment are just the cries of people "being tortured." I think they have meaning and influence -- not just because I'd like to believe so and think it's the most politically useful position, but because we see opinions shifting in response to internet culture/memes. We do see radical expression and self-assertion -- of course, that isn't the same as a policy change, because it's a meme. But when have other art forms done any better?
There's that frustrated Vonnegut quote about the power of artists protesting the Vietnam war, saying it was the equivalent of a pie dropped from a six foot ladder (did nothing). You might say internet culture has the same meaningless effect, but then you look at the influence the arts had in other cultural questions in the 60s and 70s, when Vonnegut wrote. It's a complicated circuit, between art and social change. I also think an important thing to consider is whether older cultural forms and institutions are more or less "rats-nested" by the same problematic forces -- I'd argue more, looking at the state of universities and Mo's article about cultural greatness. Realistically, there's no novel or film that's going to galvanize the masses, it'll be a series of meme trends or audios. Taken from a more pragmatic angle, what I'm saying is we don't get to choose the terrain or setting of the battle, so we have to make do with what's at hand right now.
My line about the taxing billionaires was a little reckless for sure. In an immediate sense, yes -- don't let them have the phone out during English class, that's bad pedagogy. But the phone isn't the enemy of critical thinking either. If the problem, as you say, is "exploitations and evolving modes of capitalism" then it's necessary to address the root cause rather than the symptom, so I stand by the point there.
Really love this bit: "People come to love authors and not books, accolades and not achievement, images of 'the good' or 'the true' which are more absolving and easier to hold than the things themselves."
no, the medium really is part of the problem. A mediated experience is by definition at a remote order from 1st order experience. Crucially different from looking down at your feet, or watching your fingers typing.
I realize that it's unlikely that you can be talked out of your position. Twelve months without access to television computer screen, or phone would almost certainly change your perspective. Quitting all screens including the pre-digi medium of television is crucial, though. The attention economy era began before the social media era. In some sense, a/v phone content is merely television with a faster payoff and optional interactive features.
I agree with you about the Star System for writers. And people who confine their literacy to reading reviews, instead of actual books. But don't be hasty about consigning authors to subordinate importance to "the text." Authors who are good deserve the credit for doing a good job of using their own voice. To avoid Star Syndrome, go to the library and pick up short story anthologies. There are sleepers to be found there.
Thanks for your comment, and for seeing my point on the Star System. I don't imagine I'd talk you out of your position either, but I remember one conversation I had with a professor once that really changed my thinking, so I'll share it with you. I was talking about (as you'd expect) how the internet has changed everything and we live in such a different mode of consciousness as compared to more ancient people. And she said to me, "how dare you think your lifeworld and culture is more complex than that of a Song Dynasty peasant." Mythologies and oral traditions pressed just as close and made people just as neurotic as the internet does today. And no experience we have is really direct or first-order, even if you're out in the fields in the days of the shire, just living in the moment, no screens.
I guess what I mean by this is, I take it as a first principle that there is neither cultural decline nor cultural progress. We just are. And we have to find the best way to be for the moment we're in, not living by reference to an anticipated future or remembered past.
Culture ascent and decline are very male-centric takes on reality. There are other views, other skews.
From immediate appearances one could assume ‘this is worse’ or ‘this is better’ when, to your point, there’s simply the: ‘this is.’
You’re drifting into Taoism but I’d imagine you already know — or sense that.
Another excellent post from you, Aidan.
A voice and view like yours it’s important now — it’s a neutralizing influence within our hyper-polarized world.
Thanks Frederick! I’d meant to reply earlier but got lost in the shuffle. Maybe I am drifting into Taoism, and it’s definitely something I wanna learn more about. What you’re saying resonates and describes my thinking in a way I myself hadn’t — I am trying to say “x and y just is, how do we deal with it” rather than “x is good, y is bad”
Thank you as always
I'm not lamenting the existence of advanced media technologies. I'm making explicit note of their hazards, in order to bring those aspects into the foreground of awareness. In my observation, few people are even aware of the extent of the challenges. They're just passively swallowed up by them.
An example, from the pre-Internet TV era: the OJ Bronco chase. At that time--1994--I had been living without a television in my house for over a decade. And I knew about the case, of course, from newspapers and the radio. And I knew the chase was on. I walked by a local bar, full of people. All of them watching OJ Simpson and Al Cowlings driving 10 miles an hour with a line of police cars behind them. The streets were quiet because this is what Everybody was doing.
Except for me. I had the plot outline already. I knew that the odds were something like 99% that it was a performance. That OJ was stunting. The 1% chance being that he would blow his brains out on camera, or something. Not a situation I could affect, or that affected me. But it seemed like the rest of the world had stopped, and turned its attention to this drawn-out Hollywood reality show imitation of a crime drama. In my opinion, everyone around me had lost their mind. Presumably, anyone who noticed my lack of interest wondered what was the matter with me, for not caring.
Lewinskygate, just more of the same bullshit. Except that I already knew what the verdict would be if it ever came down to a vote in the Senate: acquittal, because I could count. And I had to endure two years of everyone around me taking it seriously. Because everyone else was in a Serious Long-Term Relationship with their Television, and I had pulled the plug back in 1981.
I have a similarly detached relationship with my iPhone, which I relegate to my apartment and use as a landline, as a rule. I see what everyone else is doing. I saw how the Occupy NY protests were broken up by the police 15 years ago, with one or two people resisting, and the rest of the "demonstrators" holding their phones up and videoing the scene. It's why I seldom attend music concerts any more. Because of the presence of an audience so conditioned by the medium that owns them that they evidently think that a concert experience is something to be recorded on video with a crappy microphone, in order to watch it later on, with shitty little headphones and a screen the size of a postcard. Complete with nonstop conversations, because the show is treated no differently than something they watch on TV in their living room.
"And no experience we have is really direct or first-order, even if you're out in the fields in the days of the shire, just living in the moment, no screens."
Stop. I don't need to hear some obfuscatory nonsense about neuroscience, and how our retinas view everything upside down, and excitatory and inhibitor neurons.
If your perception and cognitive faculties are so degraded that you can't tell the difference between the screen you're looking at, versus how to feel the immediacy of the world surrounding the breathing body you inhabit --or, worse, that you prefer the benumbed dissociation of a media screen to the natural world that keeps us alive--you are afflicted with a toxic, premorbid condition. The illusion has turned delusional. Do whatever you have to in order to quit the screen.
When phones, platforms, and free apps become dominantly slot machines premised on exploitation, abuse, and surveillance the game was over culturally. There is demonstrable improvement in the classroom for students attention, learning, and well being when the phones are literally “taken away” or put fully away. Witnessed from 1st hand experience. Taxing billionaires will not stop the immediate abuse. Literally taking phones away will. Or using non commercial apps. As a fan of the internet and its culture since the early commercial internet days— and as someone who has argued for its extreme relevance and important cultural influence to be taken seriously - the past decade has been an extreme downward spiral in its actual human cultural relevance. It’s become more of an active arm for many forms of abuse and manipulation through efficient technological means. Yes some fun memes have surfaced in the past decade but so much of online culture and behavior is responding dominantly to and overwhelming environment of abuse, surveillance, a variety of exploitations, and evolving modes of capitalism. Online culture should be deeply questioned in what it actually can speak to or express in this current decade. It’s such a manipulated rats nest at this stage. Creating in a death dungeon is not very interesting. The many ways people can scream when “being tortured” is less important to me than the larger fact of people “being tortured”. Finding ways to creatively express outside the death dungeon is more interesting to me these days.
Thanks for your comment! It's given me some food for thought. I would agree things are getting worse -- I'm not sure I'd go so far as to call the social internet a "death dungeon" at this point, but I see where you're coming from and how it could get there. I also agree with your view that a lot of memes/online culture is "responding dominantly to an overwhelming environment of abuse, surveillance..."
I suppose where I differ is that I don't think those efforts to subvert, question, or play against the abusive environment are just the cries of people "being tortured." I think they have meaning and influence -- not just because I'd like to believe so and think it's the most politically useful position, but because we see opinions shifting in response to internet culture/memes. We do see radical expression and self-assertion -- of course, that isn't the same as a policy change, because it's a meme. But when have other art forms done any better?
There's that frustrated Vonnegut quote about the power of artists protesting the Vietnam war, saying it was the equivalent of a pie dropped from a six foot ladder (did nothing). You might say internet culture has the same meaningless effect, but then you look at the influence the arts had in other cultural questions in the 60s and 70s, when Vonnegut wrote. It's a complicated circuit, between art and social change. I also think an important thing to consider is whether older cultural forms and institutions are more or less "rats-nested" by the same problematic forces -- I'd argue more, looking at the state of universities and Mo's article about cultural greatness. Realistically, there's no novel or film that's going to galvanize the masses, it'll be a series of meme trends or audios. Taken from a more pragmatic angle, what I'm saying is we don't get to choose the terrain or setting of the battle, so we have to make do with what's at hand right now.
My line about the taxing billionaires was a little reckless for sure. In an immediate sense, yes -- don't let them have the phone out during English class, that's bad pedagogy. But the phone isn't the enemy of critical thinking either. If the problem, as you say, is "exploitations and evolving modes of capitalism" then it's necessary to address the root cause rather than the symptom, so I stand by the point there.