10.24.14

I struggle with the motivation to create content in a context where I think it doesn't matter. This is not to say "woe, no one reads my blog", rather, I feel stifled by the constant barrage of media I am exposed to for work and for other, and the type of media it creates and how we consume it.

It's true, I find most of my content to share via other sites. I don't have every book I would like to have. I get poems-of-the-day via email. I think these are excellent compromises between type of content and method of access. The web is pretty magical that way, assuming you don't live in a country that restricts your access to information.

I get tired of the soundbite and headline culture. I go to read an article online and realize that they've only written one paragraph of actual information, and the rest is clickbait, nonsense, or non-existent, since no one reads an entire article. I get tired of bad grammar and straw-men in commercials, people who get upset with you when you attempt to correct their spelling, grammar, etc (god help you if you tried to correct their factual arguments), and the replacement of reporters and anchors with pundits.

I know good, meaty, decent content exists, and the web or non-traditional media doesn't cheapen it by making it accessible. I get tired of trying to create content in constant barrage of messages that state it isn't important, won't be read, isn't in meme-form, doesn't matter. I know these messages aren't explicit, nor are they universal, but they are really hard to avoid, and produce a lot of melancholy and anxiety for me.

I know movements exist for "slow" everything, from food to fashion. Is there such a thing as slow media? Can a person be connected and informed, but still reject this culture of fast and shallow information?

By Nicholas Carr, an interesting article from the Atlantic looks at how our brains react to information, systems, and changes in our type of work. Since it's from 2008 you've probably already seen it. His premise:

For more than a decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet. The Web has been a godsend to me as a writer. Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes. A few Google searches, some quick clicks on hyperlinks, and I’ve got the telltale fact or pithy quote I was after. Even when I’m not working, I’m as likely as not to be foraging in the Web’s info-thickets’reading and writing e-mails, scanning headlines and blog posts, watching videos and listening to podcasts, or just tripping from link to link to link. (Unlike footnotes, to which they’re sometimes likened, hyperlinks don’t merely point to related works; they propel you toward them.)

For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind. The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information are many, and they've been widely described and duly applauded. “The perfect recall of silicon memory,” Wired’s Clive Thompson has written, “can be an enormous boon to thinking.” But that boon comes at a price. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.

I can relate to this, as I imagine most people can in a way, and it's no surprise it affects how we consume content, what type, and how we synthesize it, if we do. This is obviously important for traditional learning environments like school, but its just as important for our private enjoyment and creative pursuits. Clearly it isn't all bad, media communication around the world aids in minority political groups getting their message out, getting help after a disaster, all that. But if we allow it to change how we take in and incorporate information, we may find ourselves feeling less creative, taking our pursuits to different depths than before, blah blah blah.


Some poetics happens on the border between these two extremes and takes advantage of the razor's effect. E-poetry can be interactive, allowing the reader to become "wreader" as they can add or change content, although I imagine that it would be hard to read at times if it as mobile and dynamic as the rest of the web. A friend of mine has an interactive poetry book, you can view it here if you like.


Of course, as the article states, every change in the way we learned or processed information changed the way we thought, a little. When books became a common way to store information, Plato railed against them, thinking men would no longer commit information to memory. Typewriters and computers had their part as well. So, in this vein, here is a poem by Yang Wanli, a Chinese poet from the 12th century (translated by Jonathan Chaves)





Don’t read books!
Don’t chant poems!
When you read books your eyeballs wither away
leaving the bare sockets.
When you chant poems your heart leaks out slowly
with each word.
People say reading books is enjoyable.
People say chanting poems is fun.
But if your lips constantly make a sound
like an insect chirping in autumn,
you will only turn into a haggard old man.
And even if you don’t turn into a haggard old man,
it’s annoying for others to have to hear you.

It’s so much better
to close your eyes, sit in your study,
lower the curtains, sweep the floor,
burn incense.
It’s beautiful to listen to the wind,
listen to the rain,
take a walk when you feel energetic,
and when you’re tired go to sleep.


I think Wanli has some good advice, in some respects. I will still read books though!