The speed with which people write on the net, on their blogs. David Berlind writing yesterday while listening to Sun Systems' Jonathan Schwartz speaking with Doc Searls.
The confidence with which people write on their blogs.
The way in which this confidence has an ease and excitement about it, as if a new tone were being added to personality - to human being - in the writing, an up, confident, speeding-along, tone. Does this - what I am writing here - have that tone? By osmosis, a degree of it, I think.
"To find one's own speed and own slowness, one's slow-speed, in an accelerating world". Gilles Deleuze must have written something like this somewhere. His face pops into my mind, centred on that large non-Parisian nose, rural. (Sorry, but I haven't read the Wikipedia entry on him to which I've just linked. My guess is it would not be that good. This is meant as a comment on Deleuze, not on Wikipedia. For some reason, he breeds in the main poor interpreters).
Is there something in this new human tone with its web origin that is careless and superfical? Yes and no, I think. It is defining the 'yes' that interests me.
The 'no' is pretty clear. There is an intimate, internal relation between the new human tone and the development and expansive creativity of the new medium. Software people - I.T. people generally -write like this, work together with one another like this, write the new code together. Language is being altered in tandem with the computer. Much of economy and society are being pulled along in the movement. The new human tone is neither careless nor superficial. It is the tone of the time, and now is moving, creatively, rapidly.
So what is it that is about the new tone that is careless and superficial? Is it not arrogant, ignorant, to even suggest this? Am I perhaps simply showing my old world humanist colours or the nostalgia that seems to come with being in one's forties?
That dimension of writing having to do with choosing one's words with a certain slowness and to do with interiority, the writer withdrawn in that gap of time between him or her and the reader, is it not disappearing? Clearly, such writing can go on - Faber & Faber (the pull of the local, I live in London) will go on publishing well-made poems - but as the world moves another way, what can good writing be about, can it have the object it would most often have, the human world?
Is this - what I am writing here - superficial, careless, written at speed? Yes and No, I hope. My interest is to try to think in the internet (born as a mass phenonenon about 1998) in the time of its growth, a moment that we are now in, of technological and cultural transformation. The moment before, in this epochal sense of 'moment', was probably that of photography and film, their invention and impact.
Is Walter Benjamin not trying to write about this earlier moment of transformation within the moment itself, as it is happening, in his essay 'Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit' (1936) and in an earlier essay 'Die kleine Geschichte der Photographie' (1931), both the fruit of many things including of a largely forgotten newspaper article by Siegfried Kracauer 'Die Photographie' (1927) reproduced in the book of essays Das Ornament der Masse. (My friend Philippe Despoix insists on this link, pointing to it in his Ethiques du désenchantement: Essais sur la modernité allemande au début du siècle.)
The invention of the printing-press was such a moment, the Industrial Revolution was such a moment.
To start to find one's way in this moment (1988- ) by writing well-badly, simply-complicatedly.
It is time to go to bed, so here is my post. To leave it, to leave go, to write not very well, to write in this moment. I am a minnow in his wake but Deleuze never wrote as badly as this. He could not - it was not a historical option - for he died a few years before 1998. A late pre-internet philosopher.
I got a comment here some weeks ago from the_tower, a student of Chinese, Psychology and Japanese at the University of California at Berkeley. It was in response to a previous post of mine on something that he had written. His comment marked an advance for me. So far, bar Bea who is family (my niece), I have not attracted readers to, or comments on, my blog! Admittedly, I had asked the_tower to comment, but even so ...
I paste the_tower's comment (I have added a few links to it). He wrote:
Hi, sorry for getting back so late.
I don't know what TrackBack is, so I doubt I got anything from you. I did read this post in response to your comment on my LJ [Live Journal].
To be honest I'm a little surprised you found that post, as most things I say on my blog go unnoticed by all save my friends (and flist).
The post in question was originally composed in a fit of annoyance at the number of spats that occur in the various fandoms between opinionated fans, not only because of how stubbornly they cling to their own beliefs and refuse to give any leeway to the opinions of others, but also because many of these spats could have been avoided if the writers had attempted to communicate their thoughts more clearly. A lot of these fandom wars are reported and mocked at a Journal Fen community called Fandom Wank . Thoughts about the immense popularity of Fandom Wank and of the frequency with which certain online communities get reported there led to thoughts about the pitfalls of communication online in general, which led to the post. Another thing that prompted the post was my personal experience with instant messaging through programs like AIM, where, if I don't know someone personally, it's slightly harder to establish some sort of connection, or rapport, with the person.
In my initial post which the_tower has read, I had written:
What most interests me in the_tower’s thoughts is the sense he gives of how the other person, or other people, are almost present. Online communication, blogging in particular, has the form of a conversation between two or more people, even if it is not, literally, a conversation. It is virtually (in the sense of 'almost' ) one. There is a desire for an immediate response, for the other’s, or others’, presence. Are you there?the_tower didn't comment on this in his response but re-reading these sentences of mine now, it seems to me that they had little to do with what he had written, that I was simply interpreting his post to say what I happened to want to say, as interpreters often do.
I am less confident than I was a few weeks ago of the truth of what I said i.e. that online communication, blogging in particular, has the form of a conversation between two or more people, even if it is not, literally, a conversation. But I think it is fair to say that my posts on Bea (beginning with 'Advice from Beatrix Joyce (my niece)' have the form of a conversation. I doubt now whether there is, as I wrotea desire [in blogging generally] for an immediate response, for the other’s, or others’, presence
But this is, I think, a good interpretation of my posts on Bea.
Interpretation is often self-understanding that does not know its name. I was not writing about the_tower's post at all but about myself.
Has it ever struck you, as it often does me, how, when someone complains about someone else, the complaint is more true of the person complaining than it is of the person who is being complained about?
I have just posted a comment on the_tower's blog:
Dear the_tower (Do you, by the way, have a more common-or-garden name that you would be prepared to reveal to me?),
thanks for posting a comment on my blog, and sorry to have been so very slow to acknowledge it. I hope that you get that essay done today.
By way of response to your comment, I've posted something on my blog again. I don't know if you'll make head or tail of it. I risk disappearing up my own bottom. But I feel that, sometimes, you have to take risks where you hope that, later on, you will understand why you took them.
I've been making some gentle progress on my blog, though I still don't know how TrackBack works exactly! I've been posting mainly on my niece Bea, and trying to get her to start a blog. The purpose is to try to get my writing going again after finishing a doctorate. I went into a kind of writer's depression after it. What I'm noticing in my posts on Bea is that there is some gentle humour in them, and that is a good sign for my writing endeavours, however tentative they are for now. I am entertaining myself, which is a start.
I am going to post this message as part of the post that I have just finished (bar pasting this into it). I hope that is O.K..
Best wishes and thanks again,
Conor
www.conorthoughts.net