Online addiction to "the Discourse" has become it's own meta-text to be memed and passed over: "touch grass, terminally online, take the grill-pill, return to monke (invoking Ted and the primitivists)." It's impulsive to say these things before delving into a trending topic. Even alt-right appeals to "trad life" try to replace The Ornament - or, more accurately, The Spectacle - with the old way of living, pre-internet. Like Fischer's Capitalist-Realism, there is no alternative to online-Realism, unless you are literally a monk, hermit, or heretic.
It's a massive victory if I don't look at Reddit or Twitter for a day. Opening a book or going somewhere my built-GPS can't predict or just doing nothing - that's freedom, and it feels like freedom.
Good points. I agree that there are realities which being online structure, which we can't 'escape' or drop out from - but I also think it's possible for individuals to make some headway in their own lives, at the very least. Re: the right just making trad-spectacle, I think my favorite little example of that is Rod Dreher & his crunchy con lifestyle conservatism trying to build a movement out of the closing suggestion of Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue (which is itself a great book imho, but can't be coopted for a lewk!) ...
I dunno, I still feel that it's possible to tame the Internet. That does involve a lot of refusal, muting, etc. And there's still the issue of whether a helpful Internet is worth the time that it takes out of one's novel-reading budget...
Thanks for your thoughts, Dan! Obviously I spend plenty of time online so I wouldn't say it's all bad, all lost. But I do think the ways people behave and process information are changing and we don't always account for that. Or if we do, it's mainly through superficial moral panics or nostalgic laments. We'll lose some things, like in any historical transition, and we'll also lose some *perspectives* on those things, which can be so hard to recover--and that's what I'm interested in pushing back against. (People have pointed out that a literate person, once literate, can't really "imagine" not being able to read.)
As for time management and the novel-reading budget ... ha! Eternal question.
There does seem to be a temptation to perform for an online audience when writing. (I'm always surprised at how much meta-writing I see, about how well a post performed or will perform.) And of course one self-censors in front of a large, potentially punitive crowd, which means that some people will censor internally to avoid cognitive dissonance. Again, I feel that these problems are manageable - but, as you imply, I was formed pre-social media, and may not grasp what it's like to spend formative years on it.
Online addiction to "the Discourse" has become it's own meta-text to be memed and passed over: "touch grass, terminally online, take the grill-pill, return to monke (invoking Ted and the primitivists)." It's impulsive to say these things before delving into a trending topic. Even alt-right appeals to "trad life" try to replace The Ornament - or, more accurately, The Spectacle - with the old way of living, pre-internet. Like Fischer's Capitalist-Realism, there is no alternative to online-Realism, unless you are literally a monk, hermit, or heretic.
It's a massive victory if I don't look at Reddit or Twitter for a day. Opening a book or going somewhere my built-GPS can't predict or just doing nothing - that's freedom, and it feels like freedom.
Good points. I agree that there are realities which being online structure, which we can't 'escape' or drop out from - but I also think it's possible for individuals to make some headway in their own lives, at the very least. Re: the right just making trad-spectacle, I think my favorite little example of that is Rod Dreher & his crunchy con lifestyle conservatism trying to build a movement out of the closing suggestion of Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue (which is itself a great book imho, but can't be coopted for a lewk!) ...
I dunno, I still feel that it's possible to tame the Internet. That does involve a lot of refusal, muting, etc. And there's still the issue of whether a helpful Internet is worth the time that it takes out of one's novel-reading budget...
Thanks for your thoughts, Dan! Obviously I spend plenty of time online so I wouldn't say it's all bad, all lost. But I do think the ways people behave and process information are changing and we don't always account for that. Or if we do, it's mainly through superficial moral panics or nostalgic laments. We'll lose some things, like in any historical transition, and we'll also lose some *perspectives* on those things, which can be so hard to recover--and that's what I'm interested in pushing back against. (People have pointed out that a literate person, once literate, can't really "imagine" not being able to read.)
As for time management and the novel-reading budget ... ha! Eternal question.
There does seem to be a temptation to perform for an online audience when writing. (I'm always surprised at how much meta-writing I see, about how well a post performed or will perform.) And of course one self-censors in front of a large, potentially punitive crowd, which means that some people will censor internally to avoid cognitive dissonance. Again, I feel that these problems are manageable - but, as you imply, I was formed pre-social media, and may not grasp what it's like to spend formative years on it.