Article: 9625 of fa.future-culture Path: ifi.uio.no!internet-mailinglist From: tommyc <tommyc@KAIWAN.COM> Newsgroups: fa.future-culture Subject: Re: eclipse Date: 10 Jun 1994 03:04:33 +0200 Organization: Internet mailing list Lines: 129 Message-ID: <2t8e71$gv4@ifi.uio.no> Reply-To: Future Culture <FUTUREC@UAFSYSB.UARK.EDU> NNTP-Posting-Host: ifi.uio.no Return-Path: <<@UAFSYSB.UARK.EDU:owner-futurec@UAFSYSB.UARK.EDU>> Original-Message-Id: <199406100104.17372.ifi@ifi.uio.no> Original-Date: Thu, 9 Jun 1994 18:03:03 -0700 Comments: To: kata@Dartmouth.EDU Comments: cc: Multiple recipients of list FUTUREC <FUTUREC@UAFSYSB.UARK.EDU> To: Multiple recipients of list FUTUREC <FUTUREC@UAFSYSB.UARK.EDU> In-Reply-To: <199405252236.PAA24479@kaiwan.kaiwan.com> I'm sorry to say, she is no relation I know of, but I call your attention anyway to these words from last month. My mailbox got full when I was traveling for a week, and I still haven't dealt with it all. When I see something from FC to which I want to reply, I feel I should read the whole thread, and then there is no reply [muted cheering from afar]. But this was just too good, so I skipped the rest of the thread and am responding at once-- that is, immediately upon seeing this. On Wed, 25 May 1994, Jennifer M. Collins wrote: > --- CtG wrote: > I saw the eclipse today too, for a second. It wasn't the thrill I was hoping > for, and I guess I'm less easily thrilled these days. I can't remember the > last time I was excited by any kind of unusual event. Even cool astronomical > ones. I was in Brazilian Rainforest for a lunar eclipse once, and I looked > at it and thought "I think I saw a picture of that once." > > Is this good? Information is good, I think, but when we have so much that > everything else ceases to be exciting... In particular, whoever it was Who? Where?) who said trying to get information from Usenet newsgroups was like trying to get a drink from a firehose got it just right. The high volume, the pressure, the quantity to be seized *NOW* or be forever lost, the pollution... In Carne's delightful little film "Voyage Surprise," there is a moment when the travelers reach the water's edge. Once says, "It's the ocean. I recognized it at once." What do the semioticians call that phenomenon in which the simulation of reality becomes more real than the ding und sich? America as Disneyland. > I've started to get jaded, too... you see wars on tv every night on the > news... you see/hear about the terrible crimes being committed... things that > used to get full-front-page newspaper articles and huge headlines now are > stashed away near Dear Abby... Too much sensation deadens the sensing faciltity, so that only greater and greater excesses can be felt at all. We become inured to the world's pain, calloused to the suffering of others. It's a survival mechanism, yes. It's also like the way things we don't need to perceive fade into the background, to be actively "noticed" only when a change occurs. All that information becomes "White Noise" (cf Don DeLillo). It rises like water temperature around the insensible lobster until we are conducting our lives amid the din of a boiler factory, unable to hear ourselves thing and thus actually unable to think. (One of the virtues of acid-- it allows us to step outside the cultural trance.) More and more goes on automatic, gets relegated to the realm of that which is not actively sensed. We sleep, we dream... we sheep. > Everything is in soundbytes... everything is a blib. Blibverts... I'm just > waiting for those to show up amid the Sunday night Infomercials... and I can > feel/see it affect me... when I skim over long articles/e-mailings for what's > immediately interesting to me, rather than taking the time to read the whole > thing, for instance... skimming thru the cable channels at high rates of > speed, trusting my 'soundbyte'-adjusted eyes to pick out what will be > interesting, while certainly missing all kind of interesting stuff (that's > not really true ... there's not much on tv these days that's really > interesting at all ... not even good eye candy...) There is no time to read books. The firehose of periodicals is itself more than time allows. We read headlines, captions, subheads, pull-quotes, and proceed as if we had digested the meat. This is not dining, it's "grazing," and not on the world's literature, its thought and knowledge, but on the intellectual equivalent of tapas or dim sum; appetizers disguised as sustenance, irresistible in their variety, collectively a call to overeat, yet individually insubstantial. > Anyway, I suspect that this is common ... kids are growing up adjusting to > the soundbyte nature of our society (Is it this way outside of the US? It > occurs to me that this is probably terribly US-centric...). I think that has > to change... I find that I have to force myself to pay attention to the rest > of a news story after the initial summary has been given, or to read the rest > of an article after skimming the abstract... how is this going to help me > learn!? We'll be a nation/world of trivia buffs, knowing small bits about a > lot of subjects, and no one really being able to discuss these things in > depth... School, with its disciplined and systematic approach cannot compete with Short Attention Span Theater or the intenseive energy bursts of video games. Music and film reduce to MTV and even print media break apart into tiny islands of data. When Glaser and Chwast designed New York Magazine, with its bite-sized graphic elements (one nibbled at them as if they were so much popcorn) it was a revolution in design, widely copied (Playboy, for one, imitated its Best Bets feature). Then came Spy and Wired, stringing the popcorn, each piece hooking you deeper but also each splaying out, willy-nilly, into the surrounding ambience so that it didn't become harder to let go of a wandering thread but harder not to heed the siren call of something like greener grass just across the page in some other pasture, harder not to believe that somewhere just a flick of the eyes away was the REAL content, the REAL action, the REAL words that it was essential to know, to inhale, the textual equivalent of white powder. And Americans do surely lead the world in shortness of focus, instant gratification, and failure to connect realistically with the past, those giants whose shoulders we mount, or the future, where already the newest generation of college students abhors the last oblivious of how they will be viewed in turn two decades on. Some quality of technology itself encourages this instantaneousness, some bult-in quality of mice and joysticks and cursor movement, something about the excitement of phosphors on a screen than fragments our awareness like the images in a housefly's eye. Attention deficit disorder is our national curse. What I notice is that there's a kind of Gresham's law of intellectual currency, in which flash drives out substance. One cannot go from Neuromancer to Middlemarch. In the attempt, gears grind until they will no longer shift without a grace period or some kind of transition. It seems almost as if there isn't time for such a sensual indulgence or surrender into such a fully realized world. Such hedonism is too costly now, with the email box filling with frivolity to be purged, and the news spool spinning yesterday's announcements into the bitbucket even before yesterday's gone. As much as their content reveals, the very existence of works of art in large and complex forms betrays the changes that have occurred and are occuring in our psyches. I dearly love Somerset Maugham, but not even the magnificenly cadenced sentences of Cakes and Ale or The Moon and Sixpence could be written or published today, much less be used as building blocks for those incredible plots, with their carefully arrayed depth charges, their carefully constructed pyrotechnics of events and character revelation. It is to weep, but as impossible to remedy as to create another Watteau or Fragonard. That world is gone and this one rapidly converges upon some omega point, some singularity cranked by ever-higher rpms, ever-faster rates of change, ever-higher levels of "white noise," and more and more by the bejewelled flashing blazing froth from Indra's ever-wider casting of her electronic net. ...Never mind, this just set me to musing... Just another posting from tommyc@kaiwan.com, to be ignored as usual.