technology is an infernal machine, technology is an infernal machine...

Yes, the times they are a-changin’. This is a mantra particularly in the publishing industry because we as writers, fiction or poetry writers in particular, are constantly made to deal with the changes in the industry, constantly chattered at about our own obsolescence, our own imminent death, and frankly, my brain is starting to get tired. When did all of this become one big product? Why are we as a society so obsessed with examining how we consume?

When I was in high school, my first job was at a market research firm based out of Grand Rapids, Michigan. Not your typical after school job, I know -- not exactly working at the local movie theatre (although I did that too, eventually). But it was an easy job which mostly consisted of sitting in a small, bleak cubicle and spending six hours waiting for my computer to dial the next random number, and then, whenever it picked up, the quick recitation of the script on my screen (verbatim, underlined) in the vain hope that the person on the other end wouldn’t hang up or tell me to go fuck myself in the first thirty seconds. My raises were determined by my success rate, you see. It was hour upon hour of automated deconstruction of consumer habits, questions in precisely repetitive language. Oddly enough, since the job was so stressful, the place was usually filled with high school students working short shifts to accommodate our schedules. All of my friends worked there at some time or another during the time I did.

This is what came to mind for me while reading Anderson’s summation of Ben, the lens through which he intends us to see this latest generation of tech-savvy teenagers. Indeed, this is how I viewed each of the pieces for this week: numerous examples of the ways in which we are meant to see that the advent of the internet and the expansion of media is somehow rendering old paradigms of media consumption -- specifically the archaic notion of going down to a bookstore and buying a book and then taking it home and reading it -- no longer useful to us. Out with the old, in with the new. The times, they are a-changing’.

But if there’s anything I learned from being a seventeen-year-old market researcher, it’s that people as groups follow arcs, but individuals never do. Yes, when the computer-recorded responses to the carefully worded questions were completed, some sort of discrete group of conclusions could be extrapolated, all of which could be clumped with other conclusions. Researcher analysts who never have any direct contact with individuals taking the surveys could derive mathematical conclusions based on data. But at seventeen, sitting in those ugly little cubicles and conversing from Michigan with strangers in Utah or wherever, I accrued a number of much more personal ridiculous stories from what little personality I managed to pick up from someone through the phone. And was the recipient of a lot of long distance anger, none of which contributed to the final numbers in those surveys. Even Anderson’s use of Ben, the sixteen-year-old who loves anime and watches The West Wing, can only give us so much. Given, he provides a good foil for Anderson himself given modern capabilities, but he also conveniently promotes Anderson’s argument that we as consumers consume differently as what’s available to us changes. So we’re not in front of the TV watching Gilligan’s Island anymore. But are we to believe that those teenagers no longer exist? Or for that matter, that that body of readers who buy books from bookstores have ceased to be? I remain unconvinced.

Oh, the options. Yes, I can get behind this. I can even embrace it, because I am equally intrigued by the options that, say, amateur filmmaking technology offers us. But I resist the idea that we as a culture only discard. Or that we are all like Heather Mash in the Bargain Book Hunting article, constantly tossing aside what we’ve already consumed. Although I will give Anderson one thing: we as media consumers are spreading ourselves out. And this, in my opinion, can only be a good thing.

P.S. My title is stolen from the Jonathan Franzen essay, Why Bother?, from his essay collection, How to Be Alone. This is the rant he says he is afraid of getting into as he is writing a social novel intended to criticize the very thing it's being made obselete by. Which I suppose is kind of what I resorted to here.

one person from another, endlessly

I feel like so much of my brain lately has been focused on print as something obsolete, something that’s past its prime in a way, and I have to say it’s pretty damn depressing.

I know that perhaps this is not what Stephanie Strickland was going for in her essay, Dali Clocks: The Time Dimensions of Hypermedia, but her continuous emphasis on this concept of “now,” her cadence on this attempt to capture an immediate present or to define it in various ways through digital media, points back again and again to the obsolescence of writing linearly, to experiencing text as an easily definable series of moments on the page.

But then that same sort of thing has been attempted in textual works. What comes to mind is Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves, a rather strange work that tries to debunk the concept of linear fiction as much as it can while remaining readable, although its methods become a little comical. For instance, when characters are walking down a spiral staircase at one point, the text appears in a spiral on the page, thereby forcing the reader to either crane or rotate the book to take it all in. But more importantly, the whole thing is in two separate narratives, one the actual story (with its own footnotes, mind you, because it’s billed as a semi-academic analysis of a non-existent film) and the other the story of a guy named Johnny Truant entirely in his own set of footnotes. It degenerates eventually to the point that there are numerous lists of things going on next to the actual narratives and the page just becomes a clusterfuck of text that largely confuses and infuriates. Which makes me wonder: can these intentional mis-directions and visual trees (as with the Rosenberg piece Strickland cites in her essay, the text piling up as the reader scrolls his/her mouse over it) and games with the concept of linearity become so cumbersome that they destroy meaning? At what point does meaning break down entirely, or is it fluid, so that meaning can always be drawn from a piece no matter the breakdown of clarity in it? I don’t have an answer to that question, but my instinct is usually to err on the conservative side and assume that there is such a thing as betraying the reader by being too self-indulgent. A little bit old-fashioned of me, perhaps.

Another moment of synchronicity for me: I just did a presentation for Marcia Douglas’ International Fiction class about the concept of writing fiction with a purpose, specifically a socio-political one, which was intended to ask a few questions. Most relevantly, I wanted to know if Purpose, capital P on that one, muddles the work, if trying to Do Something with your work ruins its accessibility and alienates the reader before it can get its point across. In doing so, I was reading Milan Kundera’s The Curtain, a long essay about the craft of fiction, and he said a few things that seemed to directly pertain to Strickland’s piece, particularly about how ephemeral art is and the artist’s constant fight to create a “now” that can be preserved as an accurate mirror of society. For instance,

“What should the novelist do in the face of that destructive forgetting? Snap
his fingers at it and build his novel as an indestructible castle of the
unforgettable, even though he knows that his reader will only ramble through it
distractedly, rapidly, forgetfully, and never inhabit it.”

So that “now” can never be captured, and novelists may be even more ill-equipped to capture it in their work than the digital artists that Strickland speaks of, particularly those who in that “now”-capturing play with the very idea of “now,” so what you’re experiencing in any given moment can’t necessarily be reconciled to the moments before and after.
I wanted to close with this fantastic video from a group called Blu that is made by stop-action animation through erasable chalk. This felt like a great example of the concept of the ephemeral in art.