technology

Chain Chain Chain

By in bring me the head of nicholas carr, technology, writing

Scott Rosenberg:

Links have become an essential part of how I write, and also part of how I read. Given a choice between reading something on paper and reading it online, I much prefer reading online: I can follow up on an article’s links to explore source material, gain a deeper understanding of a complex point, or just look up some term of art with which I’m unfamiliar.
There is, I think, nothing unusual about this today. So I was flummoxed earlier this year when Nicholas Carr started a campaign against the humble link, and found at least partial support from some other estimable writers (among them Laura Miller, Marshall Kirkpatrick, Jason Fry and Ryan Chittum). Carr’s “delinkification” critique is part of a larger argument contained in his book “The Shallows.” I read the book this summer and plan to write about it more. But for now let’s zero in on Carr’s case against links, on pages 126-129 of his book as well as in his “delinkification” post.
The nub of Carr’s argument is that every link in a text imposes “a little cognitive load” that makes reading less efficient. Each link forces us to ask, “Should I click?” As a result, Carr wrote in the “delinkification” post, “People who read hypertext comprehend and learn less, studies show, than those who read the same material in printed form.”
This appearance of the word “hypertext” is a tipoff to one of the big problems with Carr’s argument: it mixes up two quite different visions of linking.
…For Carr and his sympathizers, links impede understanding; I believe that they deepen it. Back in 1997 Steven Johnson (in his book “Interface Culture”) made the case for links as a tool for synthesis — “a way of drawing connections between things,” a device that creates “threads of association,” a means to bring coherence to our overflowing cornucopia of information. The Web’s links don’t make it a vast wasteland or a murky shallows; they organize and enrich it.
…Links, you see, do so much more than just whisk us from one Web page to another. They are not just textual tunnel-hops or narrative chutes-and-ladders. Links, properly used, don’t just pile one “And now this!” upon another. They tell us, “This relates to this, which relates to that.”
Thank you. I remember reading about Carr’s campaign a while ago and being mystified. I’ve always loved the ability to link, for aesthetics as much as the extra informational content. Prose is able to flow much more smoothly when you don’t have to break it up in order to add a long-winded, explanatory parenthetical aside, and I find footnotes in a book to be far more distracting than links on a webpage.

I Reflect and Elect to Reject

By in books, technology

These articles all had slightly different aims, but their bottom line was the same: Of course you need to buy an e-reader. What are you, a Mennonite?
One recent story in the New York Times went so far as to claim that iPads and Kindles and Nooks are making the very act of reading better by — of course — making it social. As one user explained, “We are in a high-tech era and the sleekness and portability of the iPad erases any negative notions or stigmas associated with reading alone.” Hear that? There’s a stigma about reading alone. (How does everyone else read before bed — in pre-organized groups?)
My fifth-grade teacher once told my parents that she was worried about my behavior. It seems that when she gave the class free time, most normal kids ran around like crack-addled chimpanzees, “but Damian goes off in a corner and reads a book by himself!” So I suppose there always has been that sort of stigma.
But like I said before, I think it’s encouraging to consider that a fair number of people in addition to Silvers and myself are likely reacting against that very mindset, the one that sees someone sitting alone with a book, ignoring the outside world, and starts thinking up ways to “improve” the experience. No doubt a number of people will think e-readers are the greatest thing ever, and we’ll hear all their stories dutifully repeated in the media ad nauseum for the next several years. But the rest of us will carry on buying actual books as long as they’re available, even taking an elitist pride, perhaps, in being part of an underground clique.
I smiled at this part:

That was part of it, I realized, trying to analyze my own ridiculous, knee-jerk judgment of this stranger. I couldn’t see what she was reading, and it bothered me. I couldn’t peer in that tiny window onto someone’s interior world, or delight in the juxtaposition that a book choice sometimes presents — when you notice a stuffy, 90-something grandma buried in a trashy romance novel, or a would-be gangsta engrossed in “Love in the Time of Cholera.”

I always love sneaking a peek at what other people are engrossed in reading, and even a surly misanthrope like me can appreciate the unexpected conversations that can bloom from someone noticing your own book and commenting on it. I first met my friend/co-blogger Arthur when I was training him on a job. As I was putting some stuff I needed to carry along in a backpack, he noticed the cover of the book I was reading, Arthur Herman’s The Idea of Decline in Western History. “Whoa!” he exclaimed. “Are you some kind of egghead?” “Some kind,” I said. And we spent so much time bullshitting about history, politics, literature, philosophy and current events that day that I never did train him properly, and he ended up quitting the job soon after. But I’m sure we’d both say it was worth it!

Everything Dies

By in buried alive, fresh hell, jests japes jokes jollies, technology

So, we’ve recently learned that printed books and blogs are both dead. Anything else? Any more traditions or trends on their way — oh, what’s that, Wired magazine? Gasp! The web itself is dead? Goddamn! How can it— ? What the— ? I just saw it yesterday, and…*sniff*…and…oh gods, we were just talking about how we had finally gotten to a good place and there was still so much to look forward to! *Sob*

There’s just one thing…

I hereby proclaim the death of fatuous, sensationalist proclamations of death from hipsters who can’t be bothered to differentiate between hyperbole and analysis. Let the word go forth.

Postmodern Love

By in foolosophy, marriage, socmed, technology

What’s good about both the Stanford study and the durability of even not-so-cool sites like eHarmony is that being proactive about connection is no longer viewed as unromantic or loserish. Somewhere along the line, enough friends and friends-of-friends started meeting cool people and even falling in love to make the “Let’s just say we met at the deli” cover story moot.
But as eHarmony’s new campaign makes clear, love — or even a really good hookup — isn’t always a simple matter of what matches up perfectly on a survey. “What if you were loved for you?” it asks. What if? What if we had a way of finding people who share our interests and like our pictures, so we could be out dancing instead of sitting at home lonely? And what if, along with all the practicality and purposefulness and monthly fees the Internet brings, it turns out we still hope, in our hearts, for something approaching magic?
A friend of mine semi-shamefully admitted to me once that she had tried eHarmony out, like she was half-expecting me to burst out laughing and flash the L-for-loser sign at her. My attitude about online dating has always been, why the hell not? Her biggest complaint about it was that “people lie” about themselves in that environment. Yeah? And? Like they don’t do that anywhere else?
More than half of all marriages end in divorce, and who knows how many serious, committed relationships don’t even make it to marriage before they dissolve. Basically, the odds are overwhelming that whoever you’re currently with is not The One For You. Of course, the biggest problem with that is the idea that people meeting in their twenties or thirties and staying together for several more decades till death does them part is normal, but anyway. The point is, most traditionally-formed relationships are doomed to collapse at some point, so why stigmatize those who want to try to take a slightly more scientific approach to dating?
Most of us probably meet our prospective partners either through work or mutual friends, which in many instances can provide a paltry enough dating pool. Shy people who don’t necessarily enjoy making the social scene are even more screwed. Whereas on the Internet, you can easily find groups devoted to whatever bizarre hobby or fetish you enjoy. Whatever constellation of traits and beliefs are most important to you, there’s almost certainly people out there who match up pretty well with them. Of course there’s much more to a relationship than how it shapes up on paper, but I can’t help but think it’s an improvement to already know you have so much common ground to get started on.

The Recline of Western Civilization

By in buried alive, foolosophy, fresh hell, socmed, technology, writing

Richard is talking primarily about the China blogosphere, but what he says is of course applicable to blogging in general, and it reflects a similar sentiment I’ve started to see expressed with increasing frequency; namely, that blogging itself is outdated, obsolete and generally not what the cool kids are doing anymore (in the comments, his exchange with Bob Page fleshes out the theme a little more).

Twitter has obliterated what I used to use the blog for, namely sharing links and offering some commentary. And the China blogosphere is so fragmented it’s much harder to be heard above the din. The fact that I’m caught up in my own issues (I’m planning to launch my own small business soon; I’ll keep you posted) hasn’t helped make this blog more productive. But even if I were as productive as in 2003, the site would be in decline. China blogs are too many, and blogging in general is becoming increasingly antique.

I do miss the “golden age,” from 2003-2005, when I could open a thread before bedtime and wake up to 300 comments. But that required full-time posting and, at its peak, the help of three or four other bloggers all putting up copy throughout the day.

I was running down the blogroll last week, and I saw where Micah Ian Wright of the Propaganda Remix Project had stopped the site’s blog over three years ago:

C’mon… this blog is, like, dead, already
Come Join Me On FacebookI found blogging on Facebook to just be a LOT easier than using Blogger… maybe if I get super famous or something I’ll start a -real- blog, but if you’re just a friend or a fan (or an enemy) looking to touch base, Facebook is the site where you’ll find me.

My first thought was, what the fuck does “easier” have to do with it? Where does “effort” enter into this format at all? You mean I have to save a totally different bookmark for Blogger? And then I have to log in and everything, even if I let my browser save my ID and password? OH GODS THE PAIN MY CLICKY FINGER CAN’T TAKE IT ANYMORE!

Seriously, I remember way back in the mist-enshrouded days of, oh, just under a decade ago when a couple friends and I were talking about building a blog/website from scratch, and what a godsend it seemed like by comparison to go to Blogspot with a name in mind, get a URL, choose a template, and start blogging five minutes later. I can understand people simply preferring Facebook for whatever reason, but it seems insanely spoiled and lazy to act as if it’s too much trouble for people to come to a blog to read your thoughts as opposed to a Facebook wall, just like it flabbergasts me to see how people act as if emailing is a laborious chore when you could just be texting instead. If only we could have electrodes implanted in our brains that would process and distribute our thoughts for us so we didn’t have to go to the excruciating effort of typing them by hand…!

Like I was just saying about the prophesying of the printed book’s extinction, I think we’ve always been infatuated with portentously declaring the death of traditions and trends, when often all we mean is that they don’t have their glitzy novelty anymore. I can understand why people would say that about blogs, but to be honest, I rarely find the mega-blogs worth reading anyway, so I really don’t care if they start to suffer precipitous drop-offs in traffic and commentary (comments at huge political blogs are comparable to YouTube for sheer inanity) as users flock to newer social media. They tend to be lowest-common-denominator sinkholes who only link to other members of the blogosphere’s upper-class, so good riddance in any event. (Though if someone like Atrios started posting exclusively on Twitter, would it even make a difference in his writing style?)

At any rate, it greatly amuses me to think that I could already be some sort of dinosaur by preferring to stick to blogging and email for communication. A digital Luddite. But I prefer a small audience anyway, which is why I make zero effort to promote this space. Aside from the apparent correlation between number of commenters and lack of intelligent discussion, I like being able to actually talk back and forth with those who do comment; I wouldn’t want to have to take a removed role of regulating trolls and refereeing fights. And I imagine I can’t be the only one who prefers a format that allows us to attempt to make Proust look like a haiku poet with our witless ramblings. Hasn’t anyone considered what will become of all the windbags if no one reads blogs anymore? We’ll be right back to bothering you in person again, that’s what.

Let the majority move on to twatting and friending each other silly. Those of us who remain can possibly settle down to making blogging into something more artistic and substantial, free of trendy, superficial attention.

The Mask and the Mirror

By in psychology, socmed, technology

But for all the downsides of comments-thread anonymity, there’s a major upside: It shows us the American id in all its snaggletoothed, pustulent glory, with a transparency that didn’t exist before the Internet. And in its rather twisted way, that’s a public service.
…And yet anonymous comments — all of them, even the written equivalent of high-speed drive-by shootings — serve a useful function. They show us what the species is really like: the full spectrum of human behavior, not just the part that we find reassuring and enlightening.
As someone who has been long fascinated by the irrational side of human nature, I agree completely. I don’t waste any time reading comments at YouTube, say, because they make me weep for humanity and contemplate suicide. But I don’t think it’s ever a good idea to let the way you want things to be get in the way of clearly perceiving how they actually are. If the majority of people, even the ones who are computer literate and somewhat technologically savvy, are a mass of hooting, mean-spirited, feces-flinging ignoramuses who need to have their names tattooed on their knuckles to help them remember how to spell them, well then. That’s what we’ve got to work with, that’s where we have to start. Dream of the Enlightenment all you want, but put on your sewer boots and wade into reality.
I’m unabashedly in favor of allowing people their online anonymity, because frankly, leaving aside obvious examples of violent threats and personal stalking, the only thing most anonymous net denizens are guilty of is failing to respect fraudulent authority. From Lee Siegel to CNN anchors, when you hear people whining and complaining about anonymity, it’s a certain sign that their fragile egos, so long sheltered by the polite agreement among other pretentious, ignorant gasbags in the chattering class, have been shattered by being nimbly mocked, pantsed, debunked and outwitted by the stereotypical Guy in His Mom’s Basement Wearing Pajamas.
My favorite example was when Marshall Wittmann, former Christian Coalition hack turned DLC hack turned Joe Lieberman flunky, had his ridiculous “Bull Moose” blog, where he referred to himself in the third person constantly, sort of like The Rock, only not cool, and not funny. Anyway, one day he summed up his center-right political philosophy by saying, “The Bull Moose grazes in the vital center,” no doubt mightily impressed with his own high-mindedness and poetic grace. To which a pseudonymous commenter quickly replied, “Best euphemism for cunnilingus ever!”
 
To me, that alone suffices as proof for why we need expression on the Internet to remain free and anarchic. One sacred clown like that makes up for a ton of unimaginative trolls.
It’s funny, because in the blogosphere, I was always more irritated by the idiots who couldn’t/wouldn’t stop rising to the bait whenever an obvious troll would show up in the comments. They’re easy enough to ignore if you really want to, but the sad truth is, even mostly intelligent people don’t want to. I stopped reading blogs like Sadly, No! years ago because their comment section turned into a retarded wasteland of trolls, meta-trolls, and imbeciles who couldn’t tell the difference and thus argued with both.
When a person comments anonymously, we’re told, they’re putting a mask on. But the more time I spend online the more I’m convinced that this analogy gets it backward.
The self that we show in anonymous comments, the fantasy self, the self we see in the mirror when we fantasize about being tough and strong and feared, the face we would present to the world if there were no such thing as consequences: That’s the real us.
The civil self is the mask.
I’ll beg to differ here, though. He’s right that the unrestrained, impulsive self is more immediate, more direct, but that doesn’t mean it’s more “real” than our social selves. Things are not their origins. Roots aren’t more “real” than branches and leaves. Humans, being another species of ape, are social animals through and through. We didn’t spring fully formed out of sensory deprivation chambers. There is no such thing as a “pure” human nature independent of the family, the tribe, the clan, the hamlet, the town, the global village. Even Nell had a mother and sister. From the time we’re toddlers, we’re constantly learning to modify our needs and wishes based on the reaction we get from those around us. It’s possible, in our modern age, for an adult to cultivate an isolated, solitary existence, but they don’t totally reinvent their character and historical habits in the process. All their memories, experiences and ingrained habits travel with them, even if they shut themselves off from allowing any new stimulation or information to enter their experience.
Now this was just funny:

Restricting or eliminating anonymity discourages gratuitous jerk behavior, just as the invention of caller ID turned prank phone calls into nostalgic memory.

O RLLY? Online soundboards have brought about a new golden age of prank calling! Besides, you never heard of punching *67 before dialing the number?

Rumors of Our Deaths

By in books, foolosophy, socmed, technology, writing

Authors will survive and thrive. Thousands of years ago, some creative individuals painted the caves of Lascaux and began the art of storytelling, which has survived far more than the introduction of the e-book.
Finally, Johannes Gutenberg can relax. Long into the future, the printed book will continue to survive because of its portability, durability, and flexibility. Many readers will prefer to read printed books for a variety of reasons that will endure. Though massive print runs will decline, today’s print technology allows a book to be manufactured and delivered within 24 hours of placing an order. I foresee a future when all of the electronic devices will have a button to press when you decide you really want that hardcover or paperback copy mailed to your home. Because no matter how exciting the world of enhanced media books becomes, I suspect there will be some like me who want it both ways. I may love my new iPad, but I still look forward to reading that relic of the past, the good old-fashioned, printed book.
Even as something about this feels true to your pessimistic soul—you can’t help but feel that we are not all slaves to technological progress. There are still backward parts of the world, like the theater companies of London, New York, Paris, and Buenos Aires where human beings still commit vast amounts of words to memory. You have friends who, when they get drunk, recite Keats, Yeats, and Wallace Stevens. In some kind of group unconscious our oral culture has survived after thousands of years, and so too “book culture” will survive. We live simultaneously in several times and ages of civilization. Human beings carry the past within them as they move into the future.
The “future of the book” is, by definition, unknowable. There are only attitudes towards the future which shape possible futures from the vantage of the present: foully apocalyptic, silvery utopian, cautiously conservationist. These attitudes can even coexist within each of us. When you think about the crisis of the book you are really confronted with a crisis of your will. You can choose the culture you want, although you may not get it exactly as you dreamed. If you commit yourself, again and again—and it is an ongoing commitment, less easy than it used to be—to the culture of thought, inquiry, and rhetorical expression that arose in conjunction with the written word, inevitably you will carry books with you in whatever form, and inevitably you’ll want to “access them” and compose them in their traditional bound and printed form, if only to feel a shimmer of connection to earlier human generations.
It’s undeniable that you do want this connection and that you’re not alone. American as you are, deracinated, modern: you have cause to regret so much waste, so many ruins created in the name of “fresh starts” and blank slates. The British psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott suggested that the fear of having a breakdown is our way of remembering an earlier breakdown. And so it is with industrialism and the book. American culture has killed so much that once gave pleasure to so many that it seems only logical to expect that books will be next. But the cycle of regret, too, is deeply ingrained in American life. After the buffalo were hunted to extinction on the western plains, the people who did it tried to bring them back; along the Northeastern rail lines, developers and architects eye the abandoned and rebuking factories and wonder what to make of them now. The old bones are what we have left, because we’ve surrendered the will and capacity to build newer structures like them. They are our pyramids and cathedrals, and the knowledge they once represented is lost to us, the pain that went into their labor has been distributed elsewhere, although we have not cured the pain of the laborer. To look on them is to know that it did not have to turn out that way.
Possibly due to the fact that our relative youth as a nation has been one of seemingly endless expansion and innovation, Americans are inordinately fond of melodramatic declarations about the end of an epoch, the death of a tradition. We practice a cult worship of gadgetry and novelty for its own sake. Just a couple things to keep in mind as we hear once again, in what is becoming a tradition in its own right, how books are going to be rudely shoved aside by Progress into History’s comforting embrace.
I was just talking about this with someone earlier this week. My essential feeling about it hasn’t changed; I think, as Prichard said, that it’s not a zero-sum situation. Most people will supplement their actual books with their electronic siblings to varying degrees. I don’t see many people just outright abandoning printed material for a Kindle, Nook, or iPad.
However the content gets packaged and delivered, I think Roth is right when he suggests that writing itself is what’s changing the most, that our fragmented writing style is an adaptation to fit our hyperactive attention spans. Like I said, it’s probably wise to stay a little jaded as Americans chase one shiny object or another like seven year-olds on a soccer field, yet even so, I can’t help but worry a bit when you see the relentless fixation on speed, convenience and half-baked opinions exemplified by something like Twitter, while it’s difficult to find anyone who cares to put more than two or three lines into an email. I think a lot of what worries people over this issue is the symbolic significance of the book itself, that of quiet, largely solitary contemplation and reflection. This, of course, is incomprehensible to a culture that sees time as money, something to be invested wisely and spent on accomplishments. If even private time with a book isn’t safe from a grotesque mentality that incessantly seeks to “improve” things, to mindlessly increase speed and efficiency, well…
Me, I think I’m going to follow the ideal suggested by Morris Berman and become a Taoist hermit, ensconced deep in the woods with my library. Feel free to stop by and borrow a book if you’re in the area.

Idleness, Indolence, Insolence

By in calvin and hobbes, foolosophy, santutthi, socmed, technology, work

We have created a monster that is consuming us. And I don’t mean that “the Internet is bad” in that hypocritical and falsely ascetic way. I mean that we, along with the phones that travel with us, the texts we type in movie theaters, the instant messages we receive now even on some planes, the social media many of us are expected to participate in on behalf of our jobs, and the complexes and work ethics we have all inherited from our diverse array of guilt-generating forebears, have bubbled together into a frenzy of ceaseless professional engagement that is boiling us dry.
[…] I don’t own an iPhone or a BlackBerry because I do not want to receive e-mail all day every day. Increasingly I understand this preference to be naive, impractical and really rather twee. On several occasions in the past year, days when I’ve run between appointments and not brought my laptop, I’ve had to call my boyfriend to ask him to log into my e-mail and tell me whether I’ve missed anything urgent. I should get a smart phone because I live in the real world. And in the real world, where I used to receive a few dozen e-mails a day, I now receive hundreds.
[…] I don’t think the notion that we have to be constantly plugged in is just in our heads: I think it’s also in the heads of our superiors, our colleagues, our future employers and our prospective employees. There will be judgment, or at least a note made, perhaps by a boss who’s tried to reach you unsuccessfully, or an employee who has an urgent question that goes briefly unanswered.
To not be reachable if called upon at any time, except perhaps the dead of night, feels sinful; unavailability betrays disconnectedness, and disconnectedness has come to stand for idleness and indolence. How many people have sent needless e-mails at 7 a.m. or perhaps 11 p.m., with the thought, if not the conscious intention, of communicating an intensity of professional commitment, demonstrating defensively or passive-aggressively or in the hopes of beating the next round of layoffs that they were beavering away at every odd hour of the day and night.
America’s excesses are never far from sight: Our endless enthusiasms for boundless capitalism, materialism and hedonism persist. But these three have always had a complicated but close relationship with their uptight buddy, Puritanism, and I can’t help feeling these days like Cotton Mather and Jonathan Edwards have insinuated themselves into everyone’s friends and family network, preaching the gospel of a work world without end.
Well, yes. Once again, though, the machines were created to address the perceived need of more productivity, more convenience, so yes, those fucking Puritans and their diseased minds. We’re still suffering the effects of living in a country they founded. But honestly, how much of what we do for a paycheck is, you know, vital? And how much of it is just frenetic activity in the service of manipulating manufactured desires? We long ago passed the point where we could produce enough of the essentials for everyone to live comfortably. Most of what we do now is try to convince people they can’t live without something they never even knew existed five minutes ago, something that will make them feel special for a moment or two before needing to be replaced with something bigger, better, flashier, newer. Like all drugs.
I think the system will eat itself eventually. In the meantime, though, it’s just a question of how much you’re willing to do without, how much you’re willing to be a pariah, how firmly you’re willing to defend your perception of what is absolutely necessary for you to be content, come what may. Personally, I would rather work as a janitor or hanging off the back of a sanitation truck than to become a white-collar professional (and yes, I’ve done similar work before, so that’s not empty bravado). Luckily, I sat down and thought through this at a time when most of my peers were busy trying to craft fake IDs to get hold of beer, so I was able to avoid the debt that traps most people in this hamster wheel consumer society.

O Moments Big as Years!

By in foolosophy, psychology, technology

From misty memories of commuter happy hours to rotary dial apps: Why are we addicted to romanticizing the past?

— Mary Elizabeth Williams

Because of the certainty, something we rarely ever have in real time. Once an object or event is safely stored away in the past, it loses its ability to give us any nasty surprises. It’s much like how reading a book or watching a movie for the second time through allows you to take your time and savor the details — you know how it all turns out in the end, so there’s no anxiety. Our nostalgic mistake is projecting that certainty backwards, as if the people living at the time weren’t beset by the same insecurities and fear of the future as we have today. We’re forever in a hurry to get away from where we are, but afraid that we’re rushing headlong into something worse. That leaves the past as the obvious place to look for a contentedness that we always feel has to exist outside of ourselves.

And, of course, when you’ve lived long enough to see so many things you took for granted change, fade, and be replaced, it starts to weigh on you in a particularly heavy, existential way that one day, it’s going to happen to you too. Hence a tendency to start digging in our fingers, not wanting things to slip away quite so easily.

In every age “the good old days” were a myth. No one ever thought they were good at the time. For every age has consisted of crises that seemed intolerable to the people who lived through them.

— Brooks Atkinson

If you look back at various writers in ancient Greece — the cradle of Western civilization, ferfucksakes! — you can’t help notice a familiar theme: bitching about these damn kids today, how they don’t make things like they used to, we’re going to hell in a handbasket, and on and on. I love a lot of ancient Chinese poetry, and it’s the same story there. There was always some Golden Age in the past when everything was great, and somehow, we’ve fallen away from it and are now living in a debased time, one step away from barbarism. Second verse, same as the first. Clearly it’s just an fundamental feature of human psychology.

Pace Ms. Williams and an otherwise good essay, though, I have to say that I hate the way so many of these ruminations end up fixating on technology as one of the main culprits that have stolen our time, innocence, social grace, what have you, rather than seeing it as a mere symbol of the restless hyperactivity and anxious activity that give birth to it in the first place.

The Word Museum

By in books, technology

Did I want to sell? To my surprise, almost without exception, I did not. Seems I’ve formed an emotional attachment to them, I would miss them even if I never give them quality time and attention ever again. Guess that marks me as a bibliomaniac…So I have my answer as to the impact iPad likely will have on me personally: I’m still in the book-buying biz too.

– Phil Oliver

Visiting my parents over the holidays, my mom started enthusing to me about how she had made several hundred dollars selling a lot of her unwanted books on Amazon, and recommended I should do it too, since I have so many. I don’t think I could have been more viscerally shocked if she had suggested I should kill and eat my dogs. “Unwanted” books? Does not compute!

I am grateful to her for at least making it so that I grew up in a house where books were absolutely everywhere, and trips to the bookstore were a cause for jumping for joy. She tended towards a lot of pulp fiction and New Age spiritbabble (even more so now, with a heavy helping of lunatic Republican propaganda thrown in), but still, to a little kid, it was all fascinating. I recall her laughing once, when I must have been five or six years old, and she found me gamely trying to pretend I was deeply into some Bruce Catton book about the Civil War. Pretensions of intellectuality even then!

But such a casual attitude toward buying and disposing of books…that’s just utterly foreign to me. Not just because money isn’t quite so free as to allow me the opportunity to waste it on books I’ll never read; there’s a whole process involved in obtaining them that makes them more than just objects to me. Like I said, just being in a bookstore is a special event for me. Having the luxury to browse for a couple hours is even better. I’ll make a mental list of anything that looks interesting and look them up on Amazon’s network of independent sellers with used copies, where I usually find them for a fraction of the price. Then I get to enjoy the anticipation of waiting for it to show up in the mail. And you can damn sure bet that I’m going to actually read anything I’ve bothered to check into and buy, not just toss it aside and lose interest in it.

Or maybe I’ve just had a topic on my mind, perhaps even just an inchoate mess of thoughts loosely orbiting a vague subject, and I’ll just get online and start searching to see what, if anything, has been written about it. I’ve already lost count of how many times I’ve been thrilled to find the perfect book, one I had never seen in a store and didn’t even know existed.

So there’s almost always a little history between me and any given book; maybe, just like how certain songs always have the ability to pin themselves to certain events in your life, and instantly allow you to relive them upon hearing the song again, looking at a book reminds me what was going on in my life at the time when I read it, and makes particular memories more vivid. The whole book buying/reading/collecting experience is an integral part of my identity; it’s not something subject to utilitarian considerations of convenience and practicality.

Besides, how much you wanna bet that people in such a hurry to get rid of all their bookcases are just going to fill the space with some bric-a-brac and ugly furniture?

YY UUUU

By in books, language, socmed, technology, writing

I have to partially disagree with Ed (and Heywood) here.* Not on the galling aesthetics of texting or Twittering, no indeed. I’ve never even read anything on Twitter, let alone used it, and I’ve never sent a text message — what, as if having instant electronic mail and a tiny phone you carry everywhere isn’t fast enough for all your communication needs? Regular readers know my opinion on the amount of care and attention that should be devoted to email correspondence. And I’ve had eleven people shot for not being able to tell the difference between “they’re”, “their” and “there”! So, with my literary snob bona fides firmly established, let us move along.

I think it was reading The Lexicographer’s Dilemma by Jack Lynch that softened my attitude on this sort of thing. To wit:

Once again, traditionalists see in these messages a society on the verge of collapse — young people can’t spell, they don’t know grammar, they don’t know punctuation! But this misses the point entirely. Yes, the writers of these things violate the rules of spelling, grammar and punctuation — but they do so intentionally. The comic effect comes not from an ignorance of the rules, but from a willful flouting of the rules. If the authors and their audience didn’t know what proper grammar and spelling were, those passages would lose all their force. In a way, playful lolcatters and texters aren’t ignoring the traditional rules of English; they’re depending on the existence of those rules in order to raise a laugh.

[…]

Crystal’s summary is probably the wisest take on the whole phenomenon of extravagantly nonstandard English in electronic forums. “Some people dislike texting,” he says. “Some are bemused by it. But it is merely the latest manifestation of the human ability to be linguistically creative and and to adapt language to suit the demands of diverse settings. There is no disaster pending. We will not see a new generation of adults growing up unable to write proper English. The language as a whole will not decline. In texting, what we are seeing, in a way, is language in evolution.”

There’s much more, of course, including plenty of humbling reminders that words and spellings and abbreviations we take completely for granted today as standard and proper were once similarly bemoaned as linguistic barbarities. I remember rules I was taught in seventh grade English that are pretty much obsolete now and would make me look bizarre if I employed them, and I remember some that I choose to pointedly ignore, such as the dispute over commas and periods inside quotation marks. Point being, I like to think I have at least an above-average facility with written words, but I’m sure a professional editor would find all sorts of things to cover with red ink on this blog. Who really cares as long as you get my meaning?

But I repeat: I’m not arguing that text messages or lol-speak are equal to well-crafted prose, obviously not. I’m just saying that most of those kids probably know better, and if they don’t, they’ll probably learn enough to get by, so relax already. Speaking of which: how much clear writing ability are any of us going to need when we’re all working as slaves on Chinese robot farms? I mean, I’d personally love it if we all wrote and spoke like modern-day Shakespeares, but let’s be real: most people just don’t need that ability in order to succeed in the business world, which is increasingly the only one that mattters.

So it comes to personal taste, then, and like I said, I shudder at the sight of misspelled words and random, erratic punctuation and capitalization myself. I guess I’ve just gotten to a point where it’s not worth the energy to pull my hair out over it anymore. Of course there are countless dolts out there with mundane thoughts and near-illegible ways of expressing them, but when has it ever been otherwise? I’m not usually known for optimism, but it seems like the glass can easily be half-full if you want: mass education and technology have helped create more good writers than at any other time in history. And as much as I’d love to believe otherwise, bitter experience does not show me any solid connection between a person’s writing and thinking. Too many people can do one but not the other. Being able to construct a grammatically correct sentence does not necessarily imply an equal ability to think logically, or even sanely. Different parts of the brain involved, I suppose.

As for Twitter itself, it seems to me that the problem is the fact that someone felt it to be a necessary invention in the first place, not the fact that people have to come up with inventive shorthand to stay below the 140-character limit. Again, I say, complain about the fact that the pace of modern life is out of control and always mindlessly speeding up if you want to complain about something threatening to our civilization, not the cosmetic ways people attempt to adapt to it.

*I’m only addressing the parts of their posts regarding language and technology. As for She Who Shall Not Be Named, I couldn’t care less what she said or how she said it. Her phenomenon, such as it is, has been exhaustively mined for all symbolism and significance, and seeing as how she seems content to remain a poli-celebrity, unlikely to bother with actually running for office again, I don’t see any point in continuing to pay her undeserved attention. Yes, she’s the avatar of fucking idiocy in this great nation of ours, but that constituency has always been with us and always will be. She just happens to be a charismatic, photogenic expression of it. There’s really not much more to say about it.

Norma Scrittura

By in books, foolosophy, language, socmed, technology, work, writing

Even when you’ve got hold of it, e-mail—so often dashed off in place of a phone call—rarely achieves a high literary standard. And it almost never supplies the biographically useful details that letter-writing did back when the contents of a sealed envelope were the best means of communication over a long distance.

…Although nothing stings quite like being “flamed” over the e-waves, Mallon mourns the passing of the handwritten, or even hand-typed, letter—whether loving or vicious. “The glaze of impersonality over what pops up on that computer screen” spoils what once was the thrill of learning to “recognize the quirks of a person’s typing, and typewriter” or a new friend’s handwriting, which “has an intimacy and force that can never be matched.” Never mind biographers; all of humanity will lose something incalculable as letters—those “tactile couriers”—vanish, to be replaced with “uniform pixels on a monitor.”

Mallon quotes Ralph Waldo Emerson’s definition of the letter as “a kind of picture of a voice.” Handwriting, even if simply a signature scrawled at the bottom of a typed page, has always been part of that picture. Some of Mallon’s correspondents, like WWI poet Wilfred Owen, considered letters an embodiment of the letter writer. “It seems wrong,” Owen wrote to his mother from the front in January 1917, “that even your dear handwriting should come into such a Gehenna as this.” It’s hard to feel the same way about e-mail, IM, or a text message. No matter how you receive it, an electronic transmission, with “Forward” just a click away, can never seem as personal, private, or real as a handwritten letter meant for you alone.

– Megan Marshall

I’ve written sympathetically before about the tendency to cling protectively to one’s aesthetic preferences in the face of seemingly inevitable “progress”, whether it be people who will always prefer books to Kindles, or hard copies of music to mp3s. So, sure, if you honestly get a tactile thrill from the idiosyncrasies of someone’s handwriting on paper, more power to you.

But when oh when are we ever going to stop hearing this mindless romantic complaint about how email isn’t as authentic as pen on paper? Why stop there? Why isn’t quill and parchment more “real”? What about papyrus for all the anti-paper snobs? Cuneiform script on clay tablets with a reed stylus?

Once again, shallow romantics perceive essence where there is only form. There is nothing inherent in the medium of email that prevents users from creating interesting letters full of wit and personality, addressed affectionately to people they know well. I do it all the time with friends. And I also have old handwritten letters from friends that aren’t all that interesting, written in that stilted, uncomfortable style of those who don’t spend a lot of time cultivating and expressing interesting thoughts. It’s not the tools you use, it’s the effort you put into the work. Don’t shoot the instant messenger.

Speaking of work, it bears repeating: one thing that has changed in the last few decades is the fact that more people have to work longer hours for declining wages at less rewarding jobs. Thus, all we do with our “labor-saving” devices is use the little bit of time we save to cram in more work in the vain hope of getting ahead — or, as the case may be, just trying to stay level. And so we see thunderfuckingly stupid products like this made available. In that sense, I can’t really blame people for feeling like they don’t have the time to make emails into an entertaining event. While myopic aesthetes are sniffling about our declining literary standards, a ravenous all-business-no-pleasure culture is devouring and excreting everything of value it gets its claws into.

One thing you can fairly say about our emails, texts, cell phones, Twitter accounts, etc. is that they’ve done away with what I would call the formality and ritual that formerly accompanied letter-writing. You used to have to set aside a certain amount of time and effort to do nothing else; you couldn’t exactly be writing a letter while cradling a kid under one arm and stirring dinner with your hand, all while balancing a corded phone on your shoulder. Now you can put on your Bluetooth headset and send quick messages on your iPhone, which is connected to the Internet and more powerful than the desktop computer you had ten years ago. Like I keep saying, it’s not impossible to sit down and concentrate on nothing else but typing a worthwhile email. It’s just that the ever-increasing pace of modern life makes it so that you have to dig in your heels to do it. Our gadgets have made it so that personal communication, something that used to require a little special time and focus, is now just another mindless chore to be done as quickly as possible so that we can chase the next shiny object. And even if you don’t want to be that way, the fact that everyone else does it means that you either grudgingly join in or find yourself getting left behind in various ways, some of them financially uncomfortable.

This is where we leave behind the nitpicking over technological minutiae and get into questions of human nature: why are we so easily bored, constantly seeking novelty and stimulation? Why is it so difficult to have a philosophical sense of when enough is enough? Why don’t we see that, despite all the rhetoric equating increased consumer choice with freedom, it ironically traps us in different types of anxieties and status games we can never win? Buddhist writers talk a lot about mindfulness, the need to cultivate a sense of how to just be, how to exist in this moment. Focus on what’s right in front of you right now, whatever that may be, no matter how mundane you think it is. Focus on the person you’re having a conversation with, pay attention to them like you’ve got nothing else to do, don’t spend your time craning your head to look over their shoulder, hoping to see something more interesting happening somewhere else. Carry that around with you, and you’ll be surprised how you can find profundity and meaning even in the midst of what you’ve been conditioned to see as a sterile wasteland.

Ozymandias’s Lament

By in science, technology, the big sleep

And while I’m quoting from Gray’s book, I thought of it again when I read this article about Stanley Kurzweil claiming that immortality is only twenty years away. Gray refers to Stanislaw Lem’s novel Summa Technologie, in which a ‘phantomatic generator’ enables users to exist in virtual worlds:

Virtual reality is a technological simulation of techniques of lucid dreaming practiced by shamans for millennia. Using fasting, music, dance and psychotropic plants, the shaman leaves the everyday world to enter another, returning to find everyday reality transformed. Like virtual reality technology, shamanistic techniques disrupt the consensual hallucination of everyday life. But with this crucial difference: the shamans know that neither the ordinary world nor the alternate worlds they explore in trance are of their own making.

[…] The phantomat enables us to live, die and be born again at will. By glazing over the fact of mortality, it leaves us with no check on our wishes. Our experiences are confections of our desires, and no longer connect us with anything else…Lem’s prescience regarding virtual reality technology is extraordinary; but the risk of all-encompassing unreality to which he points is itself unreal. The idea that we may be on the way to contriving a fiction from which there is no exit endows technology with a power it can never possess.

[…] Lucid dreaming is a dangerous sport; those who practice it must expect to encounter things they could not have imagined…Lem envisaged his phantomat as a generator of perfect illusions, but any actual machine will be prone to accident and decay. Sooner or later, errors will creep into the program its designers have written for it, and the virtual worlds it conjures up will come to resemble the actual world it was meant to transcend. At that point, we will find ourselves once again in a world we have not made. We have dreamt of machines that can deliver us from ourselves, but the dream worlds they make for us contain rifts and gaps that return us to mortal life.

Personally, I still think that the ultimate nasty surprise would be realizing that knowing you were immortal would actually be a form of hell, a torment you’d soon be desperate to escape from.

Dull Minds, Shiny Objects

By in foolosophy, socmed, technology

Hey, get this — different mediums of communication lend themselves to different types of communication! No, really.

I’ve never joined Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, etc. Email has always been perfectly adequate for communicating quickly and sharing whatever I want from the web. So perhaps I know not of which I speak, but I’m not sure what people expect from social networking sites, really — literary salons or something? When you participate in a medium that’s built on easy access, speed, and the constant stimulation of trivial novelty, why are you surprised to discover how shallow, selfish or boring people can be? When you take a moment to notice how jejune most of your mental activity is, why on Earth would you want unfiltered, 24/7 access to other people’s heads?

This brings us to our first dilemma: Amidst all this heightened chatter, we’re not saying much that’s interesting, folks. Rather, we’re breaking a cardinal rule of companionship: Thou Shalt Not Bore Thy Friends.

It’s funny that she seems to think that “chatter” and “interesting” aren’t mutually exclusive. The real problem is that most of us are boring much of the time, especially those of us who never shut up. The trick is recognizing that unflattering fact and learning how to balance your time with friends with time alone, where you wait for interesting thoughts to develop and interesting experiences to occur, rather than allow your cloying neediness to impose you on others’ attention. Of course, one afternoon alone in the howling abyss of their own mindscape has most people grasping for the phone, the remote, or the car keys to save them from themselves.

Really, this is such an incredibly disingenuous complaint. In my experience, intellectual stimulation or deep, meaningful conversation is just one of those things we think we’re supposed to profess a yearning for, like learning how to cook tasty vegetable dishes, getting in shape or taking time to stop and smell the roses. People don’t seem to actually want much of it. They want companionship, even if it means just an inert, monosyllabic lump on the other end of the couch. They want the reassuring sound of another person’s voice, even if all it’s communicating is inane drivel. And in an online environment, they’ll take kitten pictures and lol-speak as symbols of someone’s reassuring presence. Meaningless chatter is the meat and potatoes of most people’s conversations! Talking about shit that doesn’t matter to people only halfway paying attention is what greases the wheels of social living. If you want thoughts and ideas that speak to the essence of what it is to be human, well, that’s what art is for. (I don’t even say that as some sort of bitter idealist who thinks everyday conversations should be Shakespearean dialogue about topics of monumental significance; while I don’t have much patience for small talk, and prefer to remain silent rather than babble just to fill the air, I accept that being somewhat of a recluse is just the price you pay for that inclination.) As long as you’re not looking in the wrong places, there are plenty of weighty conversations to be had out there, many of them online, even! And yet, and yet…there we find ourselves, channel surfing, living shallowly and sucking out all the marrow of some sour cream ‘n’ salsa pork rinds.

Poor technology! It cuts a tragic figure, almost akin to Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor, shouldering the burden of taking away the freedom we don’t really want while receiving nothing but scorn for its trouble, lest we be forced to confront our own pale, languid existences.

All Your Books Are Belong to Us

By in augean stables, books, technology

Wow. This kind of techno-gadget triumphalism makes Thomas “Moustache of Understanding” Friedman look like Ned Ludd. Kind of reminds me of the glory days of the mid-nineties when people would gush about how the Internet would allow ordinary people to access the Library of Congress, when, as it turns out, it just gave most of them more convenient ways to jerk off to porn and stay au fait on all the latest inane jokes.

But that’s all fine. I’m only bothered by the, well, Friedmanesque way she just blithely burns tons of working-class jobs on the glorious altar of FutureProgress (even uses the line about the world getting flatter in there somewhere). I suppose those lucky duckies can just take out some exorbitant student loans and go back to school to learn some useful skills, after all, like how to speculate on trillions of dollars of imaginary money. But I digress:

Why go to Barnes & Noble when the digital download will always be pristine and Kindles on the same account can read the same book at the same time? Households of multiple Harry Potter fans, sorry, those are still not available in digital format. There would be less mail through our postal service, fewer delivery drivers of many flavors, the people who run the giant printing presses and sawmills will find themselves out of jobs. The demands for water, wood pulp, and oil would drop and a great deal of our quasi-recyclable trash would disappear. An argument for smaller home footprints could even be made, for as the iPod decimated the need for a home CD collection, the home library would also disappear.

I have an iPod and I love it for its convenience. Yet I still have a huge collection of CDs, which I use to loan to friends as well as pop into the CD player when I’m working, and I always still buy the actual disc when my favorite bands release new material. The only real advantages to downloading for me are the instant gratification (which any adult can admit is a fun luxury, hardly a necessity) and the ability to perhaps find old, out-of-print music that isn’t considered worth putting out in new disc form — although it’s often just as likely that no one will bother putting those recordings on iTunes, Napster or eMusic, and you’ll have to find it on LimeWire where someone has uploaded it from…an actual CD. I remember one thread on a music site about downloading where a woman talked about how her CD collection was her equivalent of a trophy case, something to show off and take pride in. I feel the same way — I like the actual, physical look and presence of my wrought-iron CD rack with hundreds of discs lined up. It’s just not the same thing to scroll down in iTunes over thousands of mp3s.

I suppose if you have a severe reductionist attitude that sees books as merely serving a utilitarian purpose of transferring information from point A to point B, then a more streamlined, faster way of doing that would seem like an improvement. But for me, the whole “book” experience is much more than that with so many intangibles involved that form a greater whole. I like to go to Barnes & Noble (and almost any bookstore, really, especially little hole-in-the-wall stores specializing in old, used books) just to browse and enjoy the atmosphere. I love the smell of the coffee bar, the sound of the classical music playing, and the sight of thousands of books lined up on shelves. Even a misanthrope like me can feel a sense of kinship among other people there for the same purpose, or even enjoy vaguely overhearing people chattering to each other about this author or that series. I love the smell of brand-new books and old, musty ones at a library basement sale. And, of course, I love the sight of my own books on their shelves in my house. I could see possibly owning a Kindle one day, though I have no burning desire to get one now, but as with the iPod, it would supplement, not replace the existing format.

The author had to go to the publishers; they had the presses, the publicists, and the access to the public via television appearances, contacts with wholesalers, etc. The new digital stores, a relatively unknown author can get his/her work before the audience quickly. They can self-publish on a Web site or contract directly with a store and be instantly available to e-readers around the world. Now the publishing houses own some very expensive scrap metal and logos.

Sigh. Yes, they certainly can publish a blog or even a book through a place like Lulu.com, but as anyone who has toured the blogosphere knows, there’s a whole lotta nobodies out there with a whole lotta nothin’ to say (and I certainly include myself in that description). Nobody has the time and patience to sift through the oceans of misspelled and poorly crafted essays and novellas online, just like nobody sits and listens to countless thousands of mp3s of various garage bands online. Anyone who does will be quickly begging for editors, publishers, anything to force some sort of Spencerian survival of the fittest into effect.

But again, that kind of optimistic “behold the power of pure, undiluted democracy” rhetoric is more amusing than anything else. The thing that eats at me is the relentless speeding up, the need to cram as many objects and as much action as possible into the shortest possible time and smallest possible space. I’ve said it before, and I’m sure I’ll say it many times again, but I really wish people had a wider perspective that would allow for things and activities to be enjoyed for their own sake, not as means to an end. It shouldn’t always be about the bottom line. Enough already with the incessant, obsessive drive to make everything sleeker, faster, shinier, more efficient. As shopworn as the saying may be, oftentimes half the fun is getting there.

Simplify, Sim–

By in art, foolosophy, technology, work

Am I the only one who finds that ironically amusing? Unnecessary repetition in a phrase being used to symbolize the need to strip away superfluous ornamentation and clutter? Perhaps Thoreau was just a student at the School of Redundancy School.

Anyway! I recently had an email correspondence with a former teacher in which she apologized a couple times for her “verbosity” – in this case, writing about three or four good-sized paragraphs per email. It wouldn’t have even been two pages of a book if printed out. I thought, what a shame it is that anyone should feel bad about expecting you to take a whopping several minutes of your day to read something they felt was important enough to share with you. It reminded me of something Susan Jacoby wrote:

E-mail, often cited as the savior of written communication and as a worthy successor to obsolete snail mail, has delivered the coup de grâce to the traditional letter.

…I know this because of the haste and inattentiveness with which my close friends and I approach the reading and writing of our own e-mail today. Neither I, nor anyone I know, turns to e-mail with anything like the sense of anticipation and pleasure that used to accompany my opening of the mailbox. How could we?

…When I receive an e-mail from someone dear to me, I am happy. But the contents usually amount to, “Hi, I was thinking about you when I read this article the other day,” followed by a link. And I answer in the same nondiscursive way. When I first went online, I was excited about e-mail because I thought it would replace the long letters I used to send and receive, but I soon found that lengthy e-mails elicited very brief responses – even when the person was someone who liked me or loved me. So I started replying in kind.

There undoubtedly are a few people who save their e-mail correspondence with good friends and who write e-mails as interesting as the letters many of us used to write during the snail-mail era. For the most part, though, e-mail as a medium really is the message – and the message is short.

I’ve always been one to put a lot of time and effort into my own emails, occasionally saying (and only partially joking) that I aim for them to be events. And I greatly prefer them to handwritten letters – my handwriting is terrible, for one thing, but also for the ability to easily choose aesthetic touches like color, font size and style, and especially for the ability to add hyperlinks, something that I think adds much more depth to an email that wouldn’t be possible in a traditional letter, unless you wanted to have endless footnotes and parenthetical asides, which I’ve always felt makes for a distracting reading experience. I have no problem with the medium at all; it’s just a question of how much effort you care to put into it. The majority of people I write to usually send back terse three-or-four line responses if they bother to respond at all, so I understand Jacoby’s frustration here, but it’s not a question of a monitor versus a piece of paper, or a keyboard versus a pen. My co-blogger Arthur and I have written some incredibly ostentatious emails just for the fun of writing and crafting them. The future may belong to the small mammals texting each other in their retarded lol-speak, but it’s still possible to be a big, plodding thesaurus-saurus and enjoy it. Just make the effort.

S.O.S. texted from a cell phone.
Please tell me I’m not the only one
that thinks we’re taking ourselves too seriously.
Just a little too enamored with inflated self-purpose.

Constant entertainment for our restless minds.
Constant stimulation for epic appetites.

Don’t lose touch.
— Against Me!

Of course, that raises the question of why no one ever makes the effort. Jacoby blames the “culture of distraction”, and I partially agree – the fun ‘n’ games aspect of our wired world certainly places a lot more demand on the attention of people with ever-shortening spans. Who wants to sit at the computer for forty-five minutes concentrating on communicating with one person when you could be instant-messaging several others rapid-fire while watching TV and listening to music in the background?

But the culture of work is where I would mostly look. She looks back fondly on her correspondence with her then-fiancé in the ’60s and is skeptical of the thought of a similar correspondence being possible today through email, but other, more important changes than the means by which we write to each other have occurred since then as well. It’s a cliché, but unfortunately no less true, that people are too busy working all the time to pay (with wages that have been stagnant since the early ’70s) for all the stuff they never have time to enjoy because they’re too busy working, and on and on in an Ourobouran frenzy. One of the greatest philosophers ever, Bill Watterson, noted this in a strip featuring Calvin’s dad, where he groused about how modern technology had only made people expect everything to get done instantaneously, and said that if we wanted more leisure time, we’d invent machines to do things less efficiently. With all the “labor-saving devices” we’ve invented in the last half-century or so, why are we all working longer hours for less money than ever before?

I would just suggest that it’s because few people take a reflective view on life, work and leisure. They never figure out a way to make time for those things, like good conversation and time to relax (not merely collapsing in a vegetative, catatonic state or an alcoholic stupor, but actually relaxing), and by the time they start to wonder how it could be done, they’ve probably got themselves stuck on the hamster wheel of working just a little longer to get a little extra money…only to realize that what was once just a temporary extra effort quickly becomes a required norm, especially once everyone else starts doing it too. Maybe Max Weber was on to something, and we’ve just thoughtlessly inherited a tradition of slaving away beyond all practical need to prevent idle hands from doing the devil’s work, or in the hopes of receiving some slight reassurance by means of material blessings that an insanely hateful, fickle God favored us for a trip to paradise. Maybe we just need to develop a stronger concept of art for art’s own sake in our notoriously practical, no-nonsense business-oriented culture, to do certain things just because they’re inherently fun and valuable, not as means to an end that never comes.

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