Tomorrow afternoon I’ll be getting on a plane and returning to the (still) United Kingdom in search of more “Portals of Stone.”
But for pure landscape drama, you can’t beat Norway. Go head and spend five minutes looking at this:
Category - commentary
Acerbic observations on the state of the world, art, politics, and culture.
Every story on the front page of the New York Times iPad edition this morning is about ebola:
What’s wrong with this picture?
A friend sent me this video yesterday – along with the ironic observation that a rap decrying our obsession with screens was delivered – how else? – by screen. And that a screed lambasting Facebook would show up – where else? – on Facebook.
*
I have managed to more or less maintain my “social media” embargo for the better part of three weeks now. I have ranted a few times via Twitter @Comcastcares (they don’t, really, it was a full week before anybody tweet-replied to the most recent distress signal. Hence the ensuing hash tag #Comcastjustpretendstocare).
And I have made one or two ‘guerilla strikes’ each day into Facebook to see if there are any actual pressing matters that have been left for me there. So far, no so much.
So I am learning that an Internet addict CAN manage their consumption of digits, just as an overeater can learn how to manage their consumption of calories.
More parallel ironies come to mind. I have said on several occasions that over the past few months my engagement with the ‘social media’ firmament has been recalling my relationship with Johnny Walker and Stolichnaya in the months before I finally started going to AA meetings in the fall of 1987. Some arithmetic is in order:
I started getting stoned, etc. in the spring of 1969, and closed the book on that chapter of my life in the fall of 1987. That’s roughly 18-1/2 years.
I got on the Internet in earnest in 1995 (though I’ve been online since 300 baud in 1979) and put myself on this “Digital Rehab” program in 2014. That’s, umm… roughly 19 years. Close enough for the sake of ironic symmetry.
Obvious, I am still on the Internet even though I haven’t had a sip, a snif, or a puff in… it’ll be 27 years this coming Thanksgiving Day.
As I’ve said, that’s the difference between being an alcoholic and a digi-holic. Being a digi-holic is more like being an overeater. A recovering alcoholic can get along fine for the rest of his life without a drop of liquor ever passing over his lips. An overeater is going to have to find away to eat.
And I will have to find a way to integrate all this nonsense back into my existence.
Starting with creating and maintaining effective filters on what constitutes “nonsense.”
Which starts by withdrawing completely from the ‘random trivia generator’ that a Facebook ‘news feed’ has become.
Oh, I still have access to several random trivia generators.
I use the Pulse RSS reader (now ‘LinkedIn Pulse’ since LinkedIn acquired the company, though it is still the only real use I’ve found for anything having to do with LinkedIn), several times a day. But the information I’m accessing through that app is a tad better filtered than what I typically get on Facebook: I decide what the feeds are, have them categorized in pages, and can pretty much decide what I information I care to avail myself to at any time. That’s where I keep Andrew Sullivan, Salon, Cult of Mac, This Modern World (the Tom Tomorrow comic) and a couple dozen photography sources. It comes in very handy when I’m standing on a line somewhere – like when it takes 30 minutes to return a appliance to Comcast.
So still no Facebook on my mobile devices, and still no default email account. That way there is nothing tugging at my attention on my phone. On a conscious level I know there is nothing new – no new emails, no notifications from Facebook – so there is no reason to “check” my device(s).
Which leaves me to observe and ignore the subconscious impulse to “check” every couple of minutes.
And my “phone”? It’s mostly an audio book player these days… I’m learning a lot about the first decades of English colonization in the New World…
Trying to cope with WTF is going in Iraq and Syria?
I generally don’t do political commentaries here. I kinda gave that up after waxing forth at great length in The Weekly Screed during the 2004 election cycle. Bush was re-elected (or was he re-un-elected?) so it was pretty obvious nobody was paying attention to my brilliant dissertations, so I just went back to whatever else I was doing at the time (which was mostly writing an incomprehensible/unfinishable book).
But I just read Andrew Sullivan trying to come to grips with whatthefuck President Obama is doing in the MIddle East now, and that reminded me of this clear and simple explanation, which I found recently on another site:
Yeah, I understand now. Nobody knows from nuthin, just drop some bombs somewhere.
I sympathize with Sullivan’s conclusion:
I feel, I have to confess, helpless in the face of this – and my job requires me to understand these issues as well as anyone. What of other Americans, going on with their lives, struggling to make ends meet much of the time, barely able to digest what’s left of the news? It’s a recipe for passivity and acceptance, as the CIA and the Pentagon and their myriad lobbyists and fear-mongers do what they want – with no accountability even for war crimes, let alone policy mistakes.
Unlike Andrew, “it’s not my job, señor…” to make sense of what strikes me as essentially senseless (of course, I’m not sure just what my ‘job’ is but that’s a topic for a different post altogether…) I am struggling to understand how Obama has morphed into Bush Redux. I wonder “do they know something that we don’t know” (and why aren’t they telling us?) and how does the Congress and the sheeple let him get away with starting yet another undeclared, and likely endless war in an area that is perfectly capable of tearing itself apart without US intervention?
And yet life goes on… and we all have really important things to do. T
Like me, I’m waiting for the Comcast guy. He’s supposed to be here any minute now.. well sometime before 5 PM…
I guess that’s better than a beheading. At least when he leaves I’ll be able to watch the videos.
Thursday, September 25, 10:21 AM
Jeez, is it already almost 10:30? I was so sure I’d be at the keyboard by 10. A few minutes before 10, I was almost done clearing my inbox of the detritus that I’d let accumulate by mostly ignoring it the day before. And then one thing and another… and now it’s 10:21. Another half hour I’ll never get back…
See, that’s the quandary.
Time slips by in tiny increments… one small distraction after another, and before you know it a quarter, a half, a whole hour has slipped by and there’s nothing to show for it except time spent with the RTG – The Random Trivia Generator.
The Random Trivia Generator is not just Facebook. It’s the whole Universe of digital distractions. Here we see the downside in the interconnectedness of all things. Maybe it starts with an indispensable tool like e-mail, which by now is mostly littered with e-newsletters of varying degrees of actual interest, each with their own links to something brighter and shinier beyond. Once you’re in the browser, there are more links, most of them of the “link bait” variety that promise even deeper satisfaction if you just give into your curiosity and… click here.
I’d snuck into Facebook for a minute. Just to clear an item I’d left in my inbox from yesterday, a link I needed to post to The 1861 Project’s Facebook page, which these days serves as the Project’s website. Since the actual website attracts so little traffic – and conversely the Facebook page gathers whatever interest there actually is in the project – we just redirected the domain to the Facebook page and we “engage” our “audience” there.
Tales of distraction: I’m suddenly tempted to drop the developing stream of consciousness that was forming here in order to follow up a phone call I made a few minutes ago with an text msg. But when I open the phone I discover that an e-mail I thought I’d sent from my phone hadn’t actually been sent. It was stuck in a digital limbo called “Outbox.” So I had to (?) drill down into my mailboxes to find the unsent message and attempt to “Send” again.
And now I’m tempted to check the device again to see if the message has sent. And that’s when I realize:
This is where our lives go. Read More
well, sorta. ok, not really…
Somewhere I read about a study that revealed that the typical digially-addicted person can go about four minutes before they have to check their gizmo again.
I know the impuse… all to well.
I know what it feels like to slow down at a red light and immediately reach for the mobile device that’s mounted on my dashboard.
Or what it feels like to hit a lull in a conversation and cast a sideward glance at my gizmo…. hey, maybe I’ve got a new e-mail or a notification on Facebook!
And I know what it feels like to retrieve whatever is waiting for me out there in the digital firmament – only to to discover that all that’s waiting for me is near-spam, people and organizations clamoring for my attention even as I’m clamoring for something to be attentive to.
Only now I know what it feels like to feel the urge to check. To feel the urge countless times a day but but be relieved of the temptation because there’s not a whole lot I can do about it.
I have deactivated my primary email account from both of my mobile gizmos (iPhone and iPad); I have also deleted Facebook from both devices.
So now when I feel the urge… it’s sorta like taking a long walk off a short digital pier: I feel the urge, just like I have for years, but as soon as it strikes the impulse part of the cortex (or limbic system?), some other part remembers: “There’s nothing there. Don’t bother.”
So now the temptation is a phantom – like the impulses and sensations an amputee feels from a missing limb. Like I’ve amputated my gizmos.
Again, the analogy to alcohol and drug recovery seems apt: If this concerted attempt at behavior modification – and focus/concentration recovery – is going to succeed, then it makes sense to treat this as the first 30 days of digital abstinence. Or, at least, near abstinence. Mobile, abstinence, at least.
And, again, in the parlance of ‘the program,’ I had a bit of a “slip” today. I logged onto Facebook this morning just long enough to see if there was anything pressing in the form of a notification or message.
There wasn’t. Just the usual random trivia. But I sat there scrolling through it for five or ten minutes. Just like sidling up to a bar and saying “I’ll just have a sip…”
So I guess that 30 days starts again tomorrow…
“We live in a media culture where we are buried in information,
but we know nothing.
— Ken Burns
I’ve just returned from five days on a marshy island called Cedar Key in the “big bend” corner of the Gulf of Mexico – where the Florida panhandle meets the peninsula.
Before I left I started disconnecting.
First I Googled the phrase “off the grid” and found images to use for my cover and profile photos on Facebook. I have not looked at Facebook since.
Then I posted an auto response to my email that said I was gonna be “off the grid” for a few days – “off the grid” being defined these days as “no signal” on my mobile devices. There was still plenty of electricity at our destination – and WiFi in a lot of locations – but I made a conscious and deliberate decision to be “unplugged” for a few days.
As we were driving down to the island – about 11-1/2 hours with stops along the way – I went a step further in my digital rehab: I removed the Facebook apps from my iPhone and iPad.
Wednesday night, once Ann and I had settled into our accommodations (provided by AirBnB, naturally…), I opened my e-mail one more time, cleared the inbox as well as I could and closed the application. I haven’t checked e-mail since. I think this is the longest I’ve gone without looking at email in about 10 years. Probably longer.
Nor have I been on Facebook. Or Twitter (which I don’t use nearly as much as Facebook anyway). Or LinkedIn or Pinterest. And I can’t really say now that I miss any of it.
I don’t miss the deluge of digital narcissism – including my own – or the constant comparison of my virtual existence to that of my friends and colleagues.
In the absence of these distractions, what I have discovered is a measure of continuity in my own thought processes that is both strange and exhilarating. I am now in the midst of a giant leap in the recovery of my own space and time.
And I might owe it all to kayaking…
* * *
Another dispatch from the Feudal Future
Look familiar?
Late last spring, as I was reveling in the final episodes of Season 4 of Game of Thrones (and re-watching seasons 1 thru 3 in between), I found myself pondering just why such a show, with it’s rather graphic and brutal portrayals of a medieva realm – with its feudal social, political, and economic structures – would find such a large audience in this day and age.
It seemed particularly perplexing since “this day and age” is defined largely by the emerging digital economy of the internet, mobile devices, and apps.
When the Internet first surfaced in the late 90s, it seemed to hold this great promise of a technologically induced egalitarian culture. Now it’s all about the “sharing economy” – in which we all share our resources with one another, and the ultimate wealth creation flows upwards.
Rather than an egalitarian culture of fairly distributed wealth and influence, the new reality seems much closer to the feudal constructs of the middle ages; Instead of a digitally induced restoration of egalitarian democracy, it seems the new reality works much more like a feudal oligarchy.
As much as I’d like the notion to be a bit of a stretch, others seem to be picking up on the idea, as in this piece that appeared recently in The Guardian:
…with the examples above, everyone profits from your work, except you. If you’ve contributed for years to Wikipedia you must now accept a new political economy: you have permanent lower-caste status, and have simply been working hard for other people to get rich…
…In short, you’ve been a mug.
And this seems to be the common thread. Strip away the language of “sharing” and “community” and you’ve got an economy that requires an endless supply of mug punters.
The author of this piece, Andrew Orlowski, echoes the sentiments expressed by Jaron Lanier:
Getting an “internet economy” that benefits the people who do the work, take the risk, or provide the resources – and gives us a modicum of self-respect – should be a start. Our media, MPs and policy wonks are still off dreaming of Unicorns, though. Maybe we need a new lot entirely.
Given the political realities of the day, I’m not holding my breath waiting for anything of that magnitude to happen. In the meantime, [tweetable alt=””]at least we have a plausible explanation for our fascination with “Game of Thrones.” #GOT[/tweetable]
I spent about two hours in a bank this morning.
I can’t remember the last time I spent two hours in a bank. Probably…. never. I mean, who spends two hours in a bank? You go in, your make your deposit / cash your check (which you probably did at the drive-up window or ATM – without ever actually going in the bank) and you leave. 5 minutes, tops, right?
On this occasion, I had good reason to be in the bank – the Planters Bank in Clarksville, TN – for two hours. I was hanging an installation of photos on a wall which the bank has graciously dedicated as an art gallery. One of the officers of the bank saw the very first “Portals of Stone” installation at the Franklin Jazz Fest back in September last year, and invited me to exhibit some of my work when there was an opening, which turned out to be this month.
So this morning I went up to Clarksville with a trunk full of framed and mounted photos, and hung then on the wall. The whole undertaking took about two hours:
“Portals of Stone” and other work at the Planters Bank in Clarsville
That gave me more than enough time to observe – albeit peripherally – what all takes place at a “bricks and mortar” bank during business hours.
Which is to say, not much.
In the two hours that I was in the bank, I’d say fewer than a dozen patrons came in to conduct any business. The rest of the time, the several tellers and a manager passed the time kibbitzing with each other. There was considerable discussion about who would leave when during the day tomorrow to vote in the state and local primary elections.
There was one person who was at her desk and on the phone almost the entire time I was there. I overheard most of her conversation while I was hanging pictures.
The side of the conversation that I overheard consisted entirely of snippets like “click there” and “open that” and “close that.”
In otherwords, as near as I could tell, the busiest person at the bank was the one who was telling whoever was on the phone how to work the bank’s website.
I guess the good news is: at least it’s not a phone bank in Bangalore…
God, grant me the serenity:
To be angry when the anger is justified;
To be sweet when sweet gets the job done;
And some capacity to recognize the difference in advance.