There’s never been much love lost between literature and the marketplace. The consumer economy loves a product that sells at a preumium , wears out quickly or is susceptible to regular improvement, and offers with each improvement some marginal gain in usefulness. To an economy like this, news that stays news is not merely an inferior product; it’s an antithetical product. A classic work of literature is inexpensive, infintely reusable, and, worst of all, unimprovable….
How to design a craft that can float on history for as long as it takes to build it? The novelist has more and more to say to readers who have less and less time to read: Where to find the energy to engage with a culture in crisis when the crisis consists in the impossibility of engaging with culture?
-Jonathan Franzen
Are we in crisis? Do you fail to be engaged?
If you consider yourself a part of any “online community,” then the answer is yes.
The community will never be online. The community is very much off line, or behind the line, or under the line. I don’t care which preposition you choose as long as it suggests primacy, precendence or foundation.
Communities exist between people. They subsist in each individual’s need for other people. And they consist in people’s interactions. People don’t interact online. People interact in person, over the phone, by post card, gesture, flirtation, book recomendation, touch, promise, disavowel, commitment, dependancy, withholding, responsibility and gift; and yes, also, over the World Wide Web.
We are told we must make room in our lives for technology. We are threatened with being left behind if we don’t. If this concerns you, find someone to hold your hand. Breathe. Squeeze his or her hand. See? The world’s not all pixles and bits. On the other hand, the luddite’s position is sillier still. Why would we feel threatened by technology? Does the potter stand in fear of the clay?
I have both tendencies. The idea of watching the world sail away as I look on from the window of a web browser I no longer understand, or that is no longer fast enough, is exasperating. Worse, a world where everyone toils slavishly before glowing screens and never goes out for a drink. Sounds hellish.
Don’t let the Web rule you.
Don’t tell me what to do.
Why are you not handwriting this out with ink and paper and delivering this expose in person, like Paul the Apostle? See what large letters I use as I write to you with my own hand!
This has only a tangential relation to the topic at hand, but I was thinking the other day about how archaic technologies will always appeal to someone because of the novelty of the old. So while there is something convenient and familiar about walking along with the ipod plugged into my ears, there is still something magical about flipping a flat piece of vinyl and setting the needle down. If I could, I’d buy me an old Edison player with cylinders and all. The fact that I’ve never experienced such archaic technologies gives them just that novelty that sells.
Can’t say I feel the same way about VHS. I was born and raised on the scratchy picture of VHS. Too familiar, no magic. I gladly moved on to DVD. Will my grandchildren uncover boxes of old tapes in my dusty basement with the same anticipation I get when I step into a record store? Who knows. But I would place my bets on the positive side.