Thoughtful Americans are realizing that the pervasive IT-revolution devices upon which we are increasingly dependent are affecting our society and culture in significant but as yet uncertain ways. We are noticing more in part because, as Maryanne Wolf has pointed out, this technology is changing what, how, and why we read, and in turn what, how, and why we write and even think. Harold Innis noted in 1948, as television was on the cusp of revolutionizing American life, that "sudden extensions of communication are reflected in cultural disturbances," and it's clear we are stumbling through another such episode. Such disturbances today are manifold, and, as before, their most critical aspects may reside in alterations to both the scope and nature of literacy. As with any tangle between technology and culture, empirical evidence is elusive, but two things, at least, are clear.
For one, the new digital technology is democratizing written language and variously expanding the range of people who use and learn from it. It may also be diffusing culture; music and film of all kinds are cheaply and easily available to almost everyone. In some respects, new digital technologies are decreasing social isolation, even if in other respects they may be increasing it. Taken together, these technologies may also be creating novel neural pathways, especially in developing young brains, that promise greater if different kinds of cognitive capacities, albeit capacities we cannot predict or even imagine with confidence.
But it is also clear that something else has been lost. Nicholas Carr's 2010 book, The Shallows, begins with the author's irritation at his own truncated attention span for reading. Something neurophysiological is happening to us, he argued, and we don't know what it is. That must be the case, because if there is any law of neurophysiology, it is that the brain wires itself continuously in accordance with its every experience. A decade later, Carr's discomfort is shared by growing legions of frustrated, formerly serious readers.
In July 2016, poet Ross Gay “decided that it might feel nice, even useful, to write a daily essay about something delightful.” He gave himself “a handful of rules: write a delight every day for a year; begin and end on my birthday, August 1; draft them quickly; and write them by hand.” This practice of seeking delight became for him a way of cultivating delight; as Gay discovered, “the more you study delight, the more delight there is to study.” I believe it is also an ethical practice: to delight in things is to care about things, and only by caring can we cultivate what is good.
Gay himself might disagree with this claim. Essay 98 of The Book of Delights, which includes 102 of the essays he wrote from August 1, 2016, through August 1, 2017, begins with the statement: “That good and delightful have no requisite correlation ought to be evident.” As an example, Gay points to the work of Jamaica Kincaid, which he says is “good”—meaning fine, beloved, and important—but rarely delightful, except ironically. When I use the word good to describe the results of seeking delight, however, I mean something more like “virtuous” or “beneficial”; in other words, I am talking about an ethical value rather than an aesthetic one.
Silent reading parties have taken place for several years in a local hotel, but when gathering together became impossible, like so much of our public existence, the party went virtual. As a result there has been, besides an ever growing number of participants, an intensification — an experience, Christopher Frizzelle, an editor at The Stranger, tells me, that is “both more intimate and more public than the live event, which is such a confusing contradiction.”
I’ve noticed this paradox too. I’ve plunged into a world of online bookishness over the past few weeks, surprised by my own need for communion through reading. Craving dinner in a crowded restaurant, a random encounter in a subway car, the feeling of being swept up in laughter while watching a movie in a theater, I understand. But reading is so solitary. I hadn’t anticipated that I would miss doing it with other people.
To describe the passage of time has always been one of the favorite challenges of the writer or philosopher. “Where is it, this present?” William James wondered. “It has melted in our grasp, fled ere we could touch it, gone in the instant of becoming.” In Nabokov’s “Ada; Or Ardor,” the heroine declares: “We can never know Time. Our senses are simply not meant to perceive it.” The mysteries of time are bound up in the great unknowns of the body and universe, from consciousness to black holes. But we’ve always reached for it, attempted to fix time, in language or theory, to possess it, reclaim it from the white rabbit. In a moment of uncertainty, what else can we do but grasp at the time we have and can perceive, how beautifully ordinary is this desire, how reassuring even our failure, as it slips away.
Even with the many devices we possess, an essential loneliness remains. When the devices promise a look into someone else’s life, we can’t see it all, and maybe we wouldn’t want to. “Little Eyes” may function as a sci-fi story, but its central concern is the purpose of humanity. Do we live, in the words of E.M. Forster, to “only connect?” Or will we choose to shut the eyes of a plastic pet so we don’t have to see the truth?
Abandon all soap, ye who enter here; you won’t stay clean in “Endland.” A squalidly funny collection of short stories set in the ruined fairground of Brexit Britain, these “postcards from hell” present parochial filth as mock epic.
And then
the day
became fact
Burned
beyond
description.