The Internet, Tamed

Aw, shucks. Who was I trying to fool? I can't leave you guys. Especially not now. I am being housed on the grounds of an institute that lies at the edge of a small city; it is too far to walk anywhere, it gets dark at around 4:30 in the afternoon, it is snowing, and I don't have a car. I have just arrived, and scarcely know anyone. I have lunch appointments with people, but for the evenings I am left to my own devices. Today I marched through the snow in my sagging athletic shorts to go to the fitness center, down the road a few blocks in the insitute's apartment complex. I was the only person there. I ran on the treadmill, and would periodically be startled by the motion I thought I saw behind me. It was my own reflection in the mirror. (I was put in mind of a movie from New Zealand that I saw in the 1980s, about a man who wakes up to find that all other human beings have disappeared. Within no time, he's talking to himself, and soon after that he begins cross-dressing.)

In the evenings I read and write (more on that soon), but from time to time I also feel the need to communicate. There is an old device plugged into the wall, with numeric buttons on it and a dangling spiral cord: a telephone, I believe, but it's been years since I've used one of those things, and I'm sure if I wanted to give it a try I'd need to know some special dialing codes and other new techniques. So I come here, and I do with you, reader, exactly what I do in my so-called real-world interactions: I struggle to portray myself. Here, unlike there, I do not need to wait patiently as others take their turn at doing the same. They can do it in the comments basement, if they feel like it, but why anyone would willingly go in for such an asymmetric form of communication is beyond me. (That said, keep them coming!)

Now I've been mentioning recently that I am extremely anxious these days about making the best use of my time, and that I have come to resent the Internet for its role in preventing me from doing so. I have acknowledged a desire to return to a style of reading and thinking that has slipped away from me, little by little, over the course of the last decade. The truth is that I always had a predisposition for Internet addiction, even long before any such diagnosis had ever been made, at a time when Internet connections were limited to only the very most hardcore geeks. When I first lived alone in the early 1990s, upon returning home I would always rush to check the red light on the telephone answering machine. To see it flashing would cause a slight surge of euphoria in me: a neurochemical phenomenon that, I am quite sure, is identical to the one I am after when I hit my 'refresh' button today. Although I am a terrible correspondent myself, I get a small boost just to know that someone --anyone-- has tried to contact me; subsequently, the boost is variously enhanced or doused depending on who it turns out to be, but either way the initial experience of the flashing red light is the same.

And if there is no one there, then my Internet, unlike my old answering machine, has an infinity of Ersätze to help me bide the time between missives: Wikipedia, YouTube, lolcats, even jehsmith.com ('I feel like reading something... I better write it first!' is how my reading habits were recently described to me by an up-close observer). And then of course there is the most seductive of all these new Ersatzfreunde: Facebook. If the Internet is cocaine, Facebook is crack. While information is pulverized in a Google search, it is in turn crytallized by the 'news feed' into more potent nuggets, more potent because they are supposedly coming from 'friends'. Like crack, what they actually deliver is little more than a desire for further nuggets. I think this is what Richard Klein (describing cigarettes) claimed is characteristic of the experience of the sublime.

Facebook's potency resides in the personalized character of the stream of information, and in the sensation that it is being delivered directly to you as a result of real agency and even solicitude. But it cannot be fully personalized, and on reflection I note that I've spent a lot of time reading about and looking at things that are really of no interest to me whatsoever. I've figured out how to block Farmville and MafiaWars and obscene stuff like that, but there's no way to similarly keep at bay the barrage of images of other people's babies (a sensitive issue at this stage of the life-cycle), nor the whooping and hollering of sports fans (no less tedious in its written than in its audible form), nor all the bickering about having to grade papers among my academic peers, nor the predictable self-affirmations of the mainline liberals who make up the greater part of my cohort.

Certainly I do read a lot of things that interest me. The best updates are the ones that hew to a consistent theme (like the friend of mine who posts nothing but news of the latest film he has watched, and asks his friends to name films that share similar elements). But all in all, it is considerably less edifying than the books I've just checked out of the library. To extend my earlier analogy a bit further, I feel the need to go back to authentic Andean tradition, and to chew on raw coca leaves for a while-- that is, to start reading books again, from cover to cover. It is not that this is an inherently superior mode of learning; in fact I believe it is dying out. But it is how I first started learning, and recently I've begun to miss it.

My first experiences in the library in which I will be working for the next several months have been characterized by a sort of noetic ecstacy (neurochemically very different, I think, from the experience of the flashing red light). I am permitted to go in after hours, and to browse the stacks entirely by myself. In large part, perhaps, because the building is a stunning example of sleek, midcentury-modern architecture, I am easily put in mind of the supercomputers that were, around the same time and not so far away, being constructed by IBM. When I browse the stacks, it is as if I am somehow going inside the Internet, or the thing that would eventually be distilled into the Internet, but that used to be an expansive physical enviroment, filled with information in heavy chunks --books-- which one could grab, open, and read, rather than search, click, and skim. The information in these chunks remains of a vastly higher quality, for contingent reasons that may someday be overcome, than its ethereal, clickable descendants. There is also no danger in these chunks of pop-up ads for weight-loss pills, no straightforward incitements to fucking, no paeans to the strength and prowess of still-living athletes. It is like the Internet, but purer, and sleeker. And you can go inside of it.

For many years I was one of those insufferable people who would proclaim that he had no need of television. It only recently became clear to me why I have stopped doing this more recently: not because I have become more circumspect in the things I proclaim of myself, but because the Internet had served as a Trojan horse that let television, along with a host of other modern blights, into the daily lives of countless people who had earlier worked hard to carve out a space for themselves in the world that was free from such degradations. Most of us did not even notice, since we were able to tell ourselves that the funny animal vids we were watching on YouTube were a better use of our time than, say, America's Funniest Home Videos would have been two decades earlier. After all, we were 'curating' them ourselves. We learned to think of ourselves as master DJ's, which at the very same time was coming to be a public identity of sky-rocketing prestige. We could even curate for ourselves the opening credits to, say, The Love Boat, and tell ourselves that this was not the same thing as watching Captain Stubing, Gopher, Vicki, and the rest of the gang, since it was now a historical 'document', and we weren't watching it so much as studying it. I do not mean entirely to denigrate this curating and studying; in the end, I really do think it is a more valuable endeavor than what watching TV overwhelmingly was throughout the era of that device's horrible reign. Television brought no good at all; it was not a Shiva, destroying and giving at once. It was just Satan (not Milton's subtle Satan, but just your average pastor's wholly and unambiguously bad Satan), and it only began yielding up something valuable when we were at long last able to start picking it apart, mashing it up, and turning it inside out, on our own terms, with the help of the new media.

Anyway, I had thought about more radical forms of separation from you, dear reader, but in my life radical measures either never work, or they work far too well. So instead I intend for the next several months not to shut down any accounts, nor to Satanize a historical development that leaves me feeling for the most part very hopeful, but only to anchor my interventions here to that midcentury moment, when the information-processing machines were still big enough to crawl inside of them, and when books were one thing, TV another. I'll be devoting my attention to books, not TV, turning first, when I have a free moment, to The Laws of Manu, and Nietzsche's queer reading of them...

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Comments

[Feggy]

Jolly good show! My intentions exactly.

[The Necromancer]

Well said. Enjoyed these last two reflections on our modern media maelstrom and how easy it is to "get lost at sea". Not having a TV or internet access in my home for the next four months may seem monastic compared to the typical. But following your analogy, I've needed to kick the habit.

You could go to the gym...Endorphins are a drug too...

But reading (more) books also sounds just fine.

[Forest]

Oh writer of words I wish I could... I will gladly mete out praises from the basement.

[Kinelm]

Just started reading your stuff and very much enjoying it; so glad you're not cutting us off.

I knew there had to be some philosophical and intelligent bloggers on the internet, but the time it took to find one is astounding.

[michael reidy]

I beg you to consider in the bowels of your library that the ereader may be a mutation of the book that masks itself by taking on some of the properties of its bitty foe. I of course refer to the ereader that does not have any sort of connectivity other than that of the host womb. The magic hour is 1941 for legal download which means that Virginia Woolf is on, Jacob's Room, The Voyage Out, the hilarious miserabilism of Gissing The Private Papers of Henry Rycroft, the marvellous Kierkegaard vs Regina in his Journals and the Michelmas Geese.
All this and more in a platen that I can shove in my coat pocket.

Add to that the capacity to 'underline' and to substitute for the sheaves of post-its that fatten the great texts eg. the table talk of S.T.C. and I think we have an 'extension' that is virtually prosthetic.