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.