What do you mean ‘we’, Paleface?
An old joke: Tonto and the Lone Ranger are surrounded by hostile Indians. The Lone Ranger: It’s looks like we’re in a lot of trouble, old friend! Tonto: What do you mean “we”, Paleface?
I think of that joke whenever I read articles like this one about how “we” live, think, and experience things these days. The article claims immersive experiences- and above all else the inwardness they require- are now dead on the lips of the twenty-first century:
“The problem is: We just don’t do whole things anymore. We don’t read complete books — just excerpts. We don’t listen to whole CDs — just samplings. We don’t sit through whole baseball games — just a few innings. Don’t even write whole sentences. Or read whole stories like this one.
We care more about the parts and less about the entire. We are into snippets and smidgens and clips and tweets. We are not only a fragmented society, but a fragment society.
And the result: What we gain is the knowledge — or the illusion of knowledge — of many new, different and variegated aspects of life. What we lose is still being understood.”
What the article describes- going through life only having glancing, surface-level experiences of things- nibbling from the free sample platter instead of ever having a meal, never really taking part in your own life- sounds really horrible, actually. It sounds like making due with only mix-tape, short-attention span, slivers of identity and humanity. I suppose the way to avoid asking yourself if that’s any way to live would be to project that onto the rest of “us” and say that “we” still don’t understand if the death of inwardness and absorption in real life experiences will have any drawbacks. But, as for myself Paleface, I think I’d rather hedge my bets and make a family with silence and slow time.
Meh, standard boilerplate “durned kids aren’t doin things the way they should be done!” (the cited article, not your post obviously).Report
“When I was a kid, I had the phone numbers of everybody in my class memorized! Kids these days can’t memorize anything! They just point their iPhones at each other!”Report
But it’s not even kids though. I do know what they’re talking about and that’s pretty much how my mother does things now. But not me. What drives me nuts is making the behavior of certain people out to be the status quo.Report
I mean, I read whole books. I listen to whole albums. I watch whole movies. I read full articles. Sure, there are people who are too impatient to do those things, but that’s sort of their issue in my opinion, and not the zeitgeist.Report
What he also overlooks is that the people who are currently snatching only fragments of articles; who’re sending only small fragments of text messages; who’re following only small amounts of written media online are NOT people who would otherwise be scholarly and thoughtfully reading lengthy treatises in the absence of these media. They are people who, before, likely didn’t read (or wouldn’t have read) anything at all.Report
I have heard that joke about a thousand times over the last 35 years. It was (and is) a favourite of my father.
I found it amusing that he cited a dude from Purdue who – for his job – couldn’t read novels, but had to read agriculture-related trials and research papers. What the hell was he supposed to read?Report
Okay, not to ramble, but you know what it reminded me of? Those articles about nutrition in which the writer will say, “These days, we Americans don’t eat very well or take good care of our bodies. Instead, we eat too many meals on the run, too much junk food, and pay too little attention to nutrition.” I always think, hey, speak for yourself there, Buddy!Report
Could you try to write shorter posts, Rufus? I had a hard time making it all the way through — Ooh, shiny!Report
Right, they often tell me I have “attention deficit… oh, something. I didn’t catch it.Report
Linton Weeks lost two sons in a car crash. If he wanders through the ruins of a Border’s bookstore and sees the detritus of a culture which destroyed the mom-n-pop bookstore in its turn, there’s nothing like losing children to give a man perspective on life.
If Linton Weeks bemoans the sacrifice of context and quality for quickness and quantity, it’s a point worth making. NYTimes retreats behind its paywall again. NPR’s subsidies are under assault. We should not be surprised to see the Summarization and Relentless Twitterization of the world: else we should be drinking from the fire hose of information.
Shelley sorta summed this up in Prometheus Unbound.
The good want power, but to weep barren tears.
The powerful goodness want: worse need for them.
The wise want love, and those who love want wisdom;
And all best things are thus confused to ill.
I will always love real books. I can’t carry many of them around in my truck, but I can’t bear to part with maybe fifty kilos worth. I’ve been reading books in bars since I was old enough to drink. I put on my glasses and wrap the place around me like a well-worn overcoat and pretty women serve me drinks, it’s my personal vision of paradise, gentlemen. Books are the best of friends: raconteurs who sit patiently in my leather bag, ready to continue the conversation at a moment’s notice, at any hour. I suppose I should get an electronic reader but I look at a screen all day long.
Time is the one thing money won’t buy. I’m not entirely convinced the Browser is the window into the future. If we seem superficial, looking for summaries, the heart won’t settle for abbreviated emotions. There will always be a place for the storyteller at the fireside.Report
“If Linton Weeks bemoans the sacrifice of context and quality for quickness and quantity, it’s a point worth making.”
I think it’s a point worth making. I thought I agreed with him. I just wish he’d made it a bit more strongly, as opposed to couching it in “the way we are these days”. If you want to say that a certain behavior is a sort of mild vice, it cushions the blow to say that it’s a general characteristic of those of us who live in this time period. I mean, one still has the choice in these matters, regardless of whether or not that puts them at odds with their contemporaries. Not to mention the fact that today’s norms are tomorrow’s “what were they thinking?”Report
Well, yes, I agree with both you and Weeks. His day job is at Digital News for NPR. If he bemoans the Here and Now, it was always a weak line of rhetoric which I call O Tempura O Morels and very ancient.
There’s a brand new talk
And it’s not very clear
That people from good homes
Are talking this year
It’s loud and it’s tasteless
And I’ve heard it before
You shout it while dancing
On the ol’ dance floor.
Fashion.
We do have more choices “these days” and the endless repetition of the news cycle and the shitflies of drosophila talkingheadensis endlessly consume and regurgitate the few facts at our disposal. But that’s not the whole picture. It’s also a world of self-service identity, of otaku-jin and hyper-specialization. The Web was invented as a footnoting system. Thoughtful people such as some I have found here are not satisfied with Pat Answers. For those of you, and for me, who demand more from life than the mix tape and resent the trivialization, the HREF tag has given us a great gift: the ability to summarize and to expand at will, to back up our arguments with such facts as we can summon up.Report