The Internet...

sucks you in. My girl DZT sent me a letter a little while back that she had typed on a typewriter. In it she mentioned the immense difficulty she had been having staying with her parents, in large part because of the amount of time that they spent staring at screens (computer and television). I spend almost no time staring at the television screen, but I spend virtually all of my time on the Internet.

It hasn't always been true. Being home is reminding me of a more immediate, tactile life. Being in my parents' house, where I spent years entertaining myself by rummaging and reading and writing and not even having access to a computer, returns me, creature of memory-habit, to those pleasures. Being in this city in the 65-and-sunny is reminiscent of my May to August, hectic months where I was working or socializing or cooking or washing the floor or biking or walking, rarely sitting down, rarely by myself, let alone sitting down at length in front of a screen.

This lifestyle change has to do with a lot of things. One is my job, which fatigues me mentally and emotionally and often drives me to my bedroom at the end of the day. My bedroom where my computer lives not just in the room, but in my bed with me. One is my distance from a lot of loved ones, which drives me to spend a lot of time writing emails. And while I'm writing emails, I spend a lot of time "socially networking." One is the fact that most of my writing and art-absorbing and art-making and information and news-absorbing and sharing happens on my computer or on the internet, now. And if it happens outside the internet, I feel an urge to rush back to the computer immediately to immortalize it in digitalia.

I spend a lot of time on the computer because I am a collector of people and friendships. When a person has been important in an immediate way in my life, I do not like to let them go when we are distant. I like to check in. I write to a lot of people and I know from experience that most people, in our digital world, do not have the patience or attention span for call-and-response via tangible mail. It is historically my way of deepening and maintaining my relationships to write and write and write my way through them. I don't even know if you read this blog or not, Andrew Foreman, but if you do, it is one of my favorite things about you that you rag on me to keep me in check. So when I say hyperobvious things during conversations with you like "I mean, I feel like the written medium is a pretty good one," you say things like, "Naaaaaaah...you? You? Never."

Being at home, right now, I am still spending a fair amount of time on the computer. But I am also spending a fair amount of time out in the world, living a very tactile, very immediate life. It feels better and I feel more one with myself. This is a big lesson to keep. 

Our culture is extraordinarily mediated by the Internet now. This is sometimes frightening. For example, when a young rap group who are mostly popularized on the Internet dive into a realm of deep wit and violence in their songs that is so smoothly abject (in the Kristevan sense) that it is impossible to determine whether they are brilliantly satirical or horrifically irresponsible. There is a pretty good article about this over here. What is going on with Odd Future is incredibly complex and fascinating and their music compels and confuses and disgusts me all on visceral levels - I can't figure it out - and that's because I am a child of the Internet - I can't do it justice here and now, but I can say that the in-between-space they occupy, permitted to be political as fuck and also protected from political accountability, is something born of the digital media age.

My brother, who is 20 years old and more astute than most people I know, wrote this in a brilliant essay about print v. digital culture, print v. digital media, independent bookstores in general and the independent bookstore we grew up in:

"...And the more time I spend on the internet, utilizing email and Twitter to communicate, reading long pdf texts and internet news articles for class, typing my papers on a computer, the further I feel from other people. I spend hours writing short emails. I have deleted my facebook, and feel liberated by the lack of a marketed persona. The news that I read online is brief and interesting. The resources are neverending, but the connections between them are linear, based on search engines and similar words. My mind is unable to free-roam in the manner that it does when looking at a bookshelf. I am privately engaged with something that I should be publicly engaged with. I cannot express my ideas without writing abstract roundabouts of phrase. I cannot, on a computer, type a sentence in a straight line, from capital to punctuation, because I become distracted by everything else happening on my computer screen. I’m so caught up in my own head, watching ideas that I don’t necessarily care about collide, that I cannot be caught up in the ideas that I want to collide. I don’t have anybody else, outside of a few people who also notice the inherent problems of border-living, to bounce these ideas off of.

And the more time I spend dealing with digital commerce, the more distant I feel from reality. I feel anxious spending tangible money in stores, because I’m aware that it’s cheaper and simpler on the internet. I feel that I’ve lost a particular sort of conversational quality, that I’ve lost the ability to transact and talk to the person I’m transacting with—I’ve been conditioned to the emptiness of e-commerce. I don’t know how to interact with money in my hands; I’m unsure of what this sort of relationship is meant to be like."

...There is so much that is good and powerful about computers, the Internet. And there is so much that we are losing to them. Hours and seconds and also accountability, relatability...ach.