While writing about Flannery O’Connor the other day, I made the half-serious, half-sardonic observation that dedication like hers is probably impossible to imitate today because of all the noise, electronic and digital, distracting us. This type of sentiment could, understandably, be interpreted as iredeemably self-indulgent. Borderline delusional even, the sort that seems so pervasive amongst the more sanguine if solipsistic literary types on today’s scene. I’m not hating, but I would hope not to include myself amongst their ilk. Chalk me up as someone not prepared to shed any tears (for anyone else, certainly not for myself) about how difficult all these distractions are for writers. Perhaps it would be nice, in purely aesthetic terms, to contemplate a more austere, less busy world where the lack of outside stimulation forced one to focus on quaint things like books, letter writing and one’s own work, because, simply put, there was nothing else to do. But admittedly skewed and sentimental longing aside, is there even a question about then vs. now? Please.
Allen Ginsburg said: I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked…looking for an angry fix. If all it took was heroin to lay them that low, imagine what Google would have done to them. Pussies.
Let me put it this way. Do you think, given the choice, Flannery O’Connor (of all people!) wouldn’t have wanted to live in a world with this genius, fully prepared for a negligible but oh so necessary infringement on her (otherwise unfettered) artistic vision? Hell yes, she would have.
And information overload cuts both ways. Sure, it takes bandwidth away from the pursuit of more old-fashioned type activities like sleep, chopping wood, and contracting tuberculosis. You have to take the good with the bad; then, or now. And who says the saturation of stuff available to all of us, eight days a week, via the Internet, is inherently bad? All that’s required of the overstimulated individual is to unplug, look away or take care of the business at hand (the multi-taskers can take care of the business in hand as well; the Internet is the cup that forever overfloweth). If given the choice between being forcibly removed from the possibility of endless diversion and an internal engine enabling me to pick and choose when and how I’ll be amused, it’s a no-brainer. Plus, it’s always preferable to attain the best of both worlds: all of that enticement out there can tempt as much as it can teach, and being able to manage this embarrassment of riches is a simple matter of evolution. Or, as the curmudgeonly but clearheaded Neil Peart famously opined: I will choose a path that’s clear–I will choose free will.
Put another, less pretentiously longwinded way, if I lived in a simpler time without an Internet filled with electronic apples to taste, I could never find things like this:
Pretty cute, huh? Well get a load of this site. The awesomeness of Fuck You, Penguin, from concept to execution is possibly unparalleled. Who could ever have thought of this? They did. And I love them for it (so too do quite a few other folks, Democracy at work!) Personally, I’d rather have the best and brightest creating content for the masses than working in war rooms coming up with advanced ways to incinerate entire populations. As Descartes said, Cogito, ergo sum (Rough translation: I blog therefore I am).
The weird wide web is the face that launched a thousand ships. Also known as websites. It is, taking the long view, a big landfill holding the detritus of our over-educated, over-stimulated and under-engaged minds. But it’s all recylcable; better in these green days to kill minds than trees. Plus, how else could we find things like this?
Shudder to think, there was once a world without that image. The possibility of living in that world terrifies me (Perhaps that is what Kurtz despaired about as he drew his last, tortured breath: The horror, the horror). Been on an airplane lately? In the air less than ten minutes and you see that collective panic attack amongst the people who can’t plug something in. Then, the second tires hit the tarmac it quickly becomes a contest to see who can turn on their phone first. How did people exist in the world before cell phones? Before e-mail for that matter? Before computers? I lived in that world. Recently. And I have no idea. But I do know this: that ship set sail and it’s never coming back to shore. My advice for anyone (the creatively inclined and the ostensibly more productive members of society) who bemoans the bad old days when our minds weren’t turned to mush by radioactive x-rays emanating from the lap-tops scalding our crotches? Go to sleep and dream about them. After all, that’s what you are invariably doing, eyes wide shut, as you spend those awkward hours in between your next Internet fix. As Thoreau said: The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. At least before YouTube.
