More time mucking about with the Nikon. I’m beginning to warm to it, although I hate using the view finder. It irritates me always having the camera lens identified with the eye.
I’ve just finished Jaron Lanier’s You are Not a Gadget, a driven critique of online life and current trends in computing. Jaron was a Bard while I was there, and gained a reputation as a “cyber-visionary” in the late 80′s, so he’s not coming at this from an anti-tech perspective. He understands the ways that the architecture of the internet and especially what has been touted at Web 2.0 information structures can diminish the possibilities for social conciousness not to mention social change. He’s particularly savage about structures build on information aggregation such as Google, Facebook and Wikipedia.
There’s a lot in the book that mirrors recent thoughts I’ve been having, and I’m happy to see how forcefully he argues for the individual quirks of each of us as being the most valuable. Some of it is meandering, but it’s core thesis, that the advocates of computer convergence and transcendence are leading us down a path of moral philosophical and fiscal collapse, is bitingly apt.
I was thinking about this last night when discussing the ways that online interactions can drive out nuanced communication between people: say you have a profile somewhere online, like a dating site. When you fill it out, you have a a space restriction. You are tempted to be terse and in doing so reach for those words that will have the most impact. You are also driven by the language of those around you: saying you enjoy something seems tepid compared to saying IT RULEZ!!!!!. The temptation to grab for the most attention in the shortest time echoes throughout our current media. In essence we are all being encouraged to think like advertisers, the field that has had the most experience with shocking imagery and punchy slogans. Advertising is all about stopping the thought process and starting the purchase process. It tries to avoid ambiguity, deploying it only in certain situations as an enticement to find resolution by identifying what’s for sale. It revels in repetition, regularity.
I think that as communication vehicles become more and more condensed, the temptation is to make each utterance louder and more aggressive. There are people who’s blogs I read online who seem to describe themselves in only two states of consciousness: utter ecstasy, or dire peril. Either they are orgamsing over a cupcake they ate or they are going to commit suicide because a lightbulb burned out. These are not shallow people, but they have adopted a rhetorical structure to represent their experience that makes them seem shallow. And certain aspects of online communities reward that rhetoric by normalizing it.
Over the past year I’ve been reading a number of blogs about blogging, sites like problogger or copyblogger or writetodone. I got started with them by chance, thinking that they were about “productivity” in some way, but now I see that they are about trying to monetize the online experience. There are endless posts about SEO (for and against), about “passion” in your writing, about “storytelling” and message delivery. It’s a weird mix of hucksterism and self actualization and the more I’ve read it the more I’ve worried about my own blog, whether I could be upping my page rankings and so on.
I don’t need to point out to you that this is ludicrous, but it’s the subtle pressure of groupthink combined with technology structures that tempts me down that path. Because the web offers something that I have come to think of as response, I become habituated to and desirous of that response. On livejournal it’s the number of comments. On twitter it’s chat and retweets, on tumblr it’s “likes” and new “followers”. “Friends” on Facebook. Google analytics shows me how many people looked at my website daily, how long they stayed and what they looked at. But it tells me nothing about the individual nature of those “visits”, turning all of them into the same interchangeable units of time and click. And I think in doing so, it has encouraged me to devalue them.
I’m going to risk a formulation here: Social structures that rely on interchangeability inevitably produce cheapness, creating junk. Making food stuffs interchangeable in their production and distribution produces junk food. Interchangeable bits produce junk thought and junk emotion. When you have one unit of currency, you think you know the value of everything because you have a convenient way to measure it. But ultimately, such measuring devices are zombies, killing off every thing that doesn’t fit to their standard, and making all else the same. Once everyone is screaming at the same pitch, anything we might meaningfully call communication ceases. Sure, everyone speaks, everyone is heard, but “hearing” and “speaking” no longer mean anything.
I’m not yet sure where I’m going with this, in terms of what it might mean for my own practices. But I do know that I’m going to take a close look at what I choose to do online, and where I choose to do it.
Jaron’s book is well worth the read – I’d urge you to pick it up.
Tags: advertising, books, daily photo, Jaron Lanier, online life, rantlet, reading
Hi Nayland,
Thank you very much for giving voice to something that has been on my mind for sometime, or more accurately has been a source of dismay. I’ve been reticent about Facebook for while for the reasons you mentioned: it does establish a form, tone and culture that is the communication. I used to think that the cadence of a voicemail was a kind of audition for attention. However, the analogy to advertising in online communication is depressingly astute. Just yesterday while composing a long over-due catch up email to a beloved friend in London I found myself writing in that punchy, phrases by phrase style. I had to remind myself that I didn’t need to “maximize impact” in what used to be called a letter to someone I haven’t seen in a year. I haven’t seen much critique in this direction, I will look into Jaron Lanier’s book.