I still stand by his main point, which is this: "This handheld technology and endlessly flowing content might make for a lot of great things; it might save lives daily; it might upend power structures and governments; it might reconnect you with your 8th grade besty–but we need to face the dramatic truth: phones, texting, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, and left swiping are Xanax for the narrative soul." Chuck is writing about the same kinds of things I did in talking about that cafe in Brooklyn that I wrote about a few weeks back. Big picture, I am not at all sure that this is the right road for humanity to be traveling. Long term, where does it get us, this mediated communication, these anonymous comments sections?
Culturally, what is important, anyway? What does "culture" even mean anymore? If shared experience fades from memory, if the way we define ourselves (gender, ethnicity, politics, nationality e.g.) becomes fluid and then gaseous, who are we as a group of people? Just humanity? Well, whose version of humanity? Apple's?
Mike and I recently talked about the Hoboken train station and how much time we spent there while we traveled together to and from Regis. We've got some great memories of that station, including the greatest Paydirt game ever played on the stairs while a blizzard was underway and no trains were running. Imagine the scene as PATH trains, one after the other, disgorged thousands of commuters into the Hoboken station while no surface trains budged! We had a nice crowd for our umpteenth Pats-Raiders grudge match. Lots of middle-aged guys asking what we were doing, taking sides, and cheering us on.
Anyway, I was there again this summer and marveled at how intact it was, how very little had changed. (Glad I saw it before the train accident. Some good old stuff was destroyed in the accident, sad to report.) There was one big change, however. The newsstands are gone! I am ambivalent about pulping the forests of the world to print the internet each day, but newspapers used to be the powerful attractive force that drew together a community. Reading the daily paper was a shared experience that helped to define a city, and culture, a moment in time. I assert that we toss forces like these aside at our own peril. Here is a study of the effect on civic engagement following the closing of two major metropolitan newspapers (short version) (long version).
(It is ironic, given my overall thesis, that the people in this picture are conspicuously not talking to each other as they read their papers. I understand that and am not sure what to say about that.)
All of this reminds me also of the ending of Lester Bangs' famous obituary of Elvis in the Village Voice (8/29/77):
"If love truly is going out of fashion forever, which I do not believe, then along with our nurtured indifference to each other will be an even more contemptuous indifference to each others’ objects of reverence. [...] We will continue to fragment in this manner, because solipsism holds all the cards at present; it is a king whose domain engulfs even Elvis’s. But I can guarantee you one thing: we will never again agree on anything as we agreed on Elvis. So I won’t bother saying good-bye to his corpse. I will say good-bye to you."
I know, I know. The internet allowed me to find the Voice article instantly and to share it effortlessly. I get it. But you have to admit: it was fin seeing those original pages in the Voice, all those ads, the endorsement of a mayoral candidate. It came down to Herman Badillo, Mario Cuomo, Ed Koch, and Bella Abzug. Did you read who they picked? Remember a time when everyone would have read that same article? When what was in the Voice (or the Daily News or the Times) was a starting point for a conversation with (almost) anybody in NYC?
(I still seem to be on the outs with posting anything. Maybe I'm just not signed in correctly or am looking at the wrong thing, but I don't seem to be able to launch my own post.)
ReplyDeleteBill, I see what you're saying, I truly do. I see it everyday in the classroom and even among the teachers. But I do think you're perhaps romanticizing those past ages, the glory of shared newspapers, and the ability of strangers to connect on a train. I don't think it was quite as common an occurrence as you are remembering (as per the above picture). But even if you are right, even if there were such halcyon days, perhaps they belonged to another generation and that this new generation has a different sense of shared community.
I direct you to Arthur C. Clarke's marvelous "Childhood's End," where when it was all over and the aliens had changed the world, the older generation just couldn't understand the next generation, couldn't follow their ways of communication.
Recently, I discovered that some of my students have been "snapchatting" during my class (a girlfriend of a student told me that she recognized me from the pictures being sent). At first, I was angry -- I don't like those snapchatty things, especially when they decide to alter the picture with funny faces or dog ears or whatever. I just don't like it (said in my grumpiest old man voice). The student apologized but tried to explain that it was out of love for the class and that he was sharing my ideas along with the pictures. Another student added that the whole snapchat thing was a way for students to get comfortable with their own images, to recognize that they are not always perfect or pretty, and that being caught up in a moment can be a lot cooler than a perfectly planned photo. After thinking about it for a while, I relented, accepting them at their word. It did bug me that I didn't get it, and that maybe they were playing me for a fool, but these are not mean kids.
Part 2:
ReplyDeleteAnother experience I had was with Pete's daughter. We were having a discussion one day about her schoolwork and I was making some salient point about how important even the stuff she thinks she'll never use again is, when a voice chirped up from her cellphone. Our whole conversation had had another participant of whom I was unaware. Victoria is often on FaceTime and shares so much with friends present or not. Again, I was annoyed. I like knowing with whom I am speaking, but again I realized that it is a new world now, one in which people share all kinds of intimate detail with people they might never meet in person. Becky and I have a friend we made through a friend we know online and so we've never met them and yet know everything about her kids, her pets, her politics (yikes!), and so forth. Even the way they look at private communication is completely different.
I lament more the fact that when we used to write our words lingered (and still do). I have kept every letter and card sent to me -- mainly because I'm a hoarder -- but also because all those words mean so much to me. All this snapchatting and facebooking and imguring and so forth just disappear into air, into thin air. And like the baseless fabric of this vision... oh you know. It all just blows away. But maybe that's a better attitude. I swim under a sea of paper (don't get me wrong, I do it by my own choice) and dream of lost days and years and think about stuff I'd like to find, while this generation lets it all just blow away. We used to say "say it, forget it; write it, regret it," but I'm not so sure that is true anymore with social media and email and all of that.
So I get what you're saying: the new generation shares in a very different way from the way we did it. And yet it all still lingers in human memory. Despite Socrates's warning about writing, and extending it to the more common media of the day, I do think the human memory still remains the most important part of the universe we share with one another. More to come...