So many great points and observations here. Is it adagio or allegro today? Where’s the motif, the ebb and flow of a pace that used to be relatable where anyone could afford to enjoy the music. Now days everything seems frenetic and plastic, too convenient and complicated to enjoy the little simplistic moments in time where each breath had a memorable moment. Arghh!
I truly believe what we're experiencing is like the slow-moving glacier that created the East River: one massive zeitgeist crashing into another massive zeitgeist. Only the end result with not be a river; rather, an apocalypse--one we fail to recognize.
Excellent essay and take on this quite sad and isolated contemporary existence. For me as a 59 summers young chap, I find solace in reading, sketching of late, and nature - the latter of which I like to photograph .. and then post, in hope of a dopamine hit! A weekend without social media, without the phone but rather in sorting the garage, gardening or engaging in some manual task can equate, richly to a weekend at a mediation retreat. I’ll be sure to take the East River ferry next time I’m in NY.. thank you for an elegant and very real look at what happening in our world. JBP
techno feudalism, bliss point, the audacity to speak of the fact that you are not living your 'best life,' yes yes yes / crafty weave around / photos are marvelous - grammable hahaha. your essay is a reminder or answer to the question I often ask myself, why am I so tired? thx stacey.
reflective, observational reminders. are they sad? or are we sad. didn’t boomers’ parents bemoan the advent of outdoor activity-robbing…..television. or the abandonment of symphonies for….heavy metal, home brew for starbucks, burgers on briquets for tofu, kale or seitan, and microwaves? and god forbid, oil painting for…photography—such heresy. perhaps every group over fifty feels the penetration of marginalization in some form. comes aging. and evolution, and we can’t control it. yet.
I ask myself that ouroboros question all the time: am I just being old and cranky? I ask it of others, too. But no, the analogy of television and smartphones will not hold. For one, we left the television behind the minute we set foot outside the house. The television did not follow us around in our purses and hip pockets. Two, television was merely "programmed" to be entertaining. No more. There weren't any proprietary algorithms designed to addict us.
This truly is a new age, and I am dreading how it ends.
Your discussion, and especially your use of the word "place," made me flash back to a book by Edward Casey, "The Fate of Place." Casey's argument (and this was from the early '80's at the latest) was that in modernity we've lost all sense of place and substituted space for it instead. Space is geometrical, with emphasis on the "metrical" part, whereas place is more about the sense of "thereness." The idea of place is an easy enough notion to grasp -- to "feel," if you prefer -- especially if one has even a little poetry in their soul, but it is tricky to properly articulate. (Took Casey an entire, and rather dense, book to do so.)
With the above in mind, I'd be inclined to say that the people glued to their screens are then the ones who have been most completely "dis-placed," because for them even space is no longer real, it has become entirely virtual.
I still only have a flip phone. I want my devices to be more or less single-purpose. I want my phone to be a phone, my eReader to be an eReader, my computer to be my computer, etc.
I think it's really interesting what you say here about displacement. When I compare it to the sensations I experience while driving a car--the state of being nowhere and everywhere simultaneously--I realize that there is a far scarier form of displacement happening when we look up from our screens. Where are we? Which world is the "real" one?
Driving a car -- if you are driving it with anything even remotely akin to responsibility -- is a good example of why consciousness is not located in the brain. As a driver, your consciousness is actually filling a rather large volume of ... space.
Because of conversations elsewhere, I'm watching the old barn-burner WWII movie, "The Battle of Britain," which evidently stars every major British actor younger than (and including) Sir Laurence Olivier. But the aerial scenes invite musement on the much greater (and now 3-dimensional) space occupied by a flier.
And now, park your car, land your aircraft, step away from the road or airfield, and read a poem by Mary Oliver. What, now, is the *place* that your mind occupies?
John Gillespie Magee Jr. tried both at once, and did not survive the experience:
It is for these very reasons I resisted for years, the purchase of a smart phone...I clung to my old-school flip phone with everything in me, until Thanksgiving weekend of 2020 when I caved and purchased one. While traveling in Italy for a couple of months in 2019, for the first time, I felt untethered with only a flip phone, unable to use train apps and other travel tools that would have made my life easier. For that reason alone, international travel, I caved.
I had lofty ambitions of using the phone only for travel, or to speak (or text) with someone not standing next to me. Alas, that ambition failed, as the phone has now become an extension of myself, due mainly to calendar use: my whole life (tasks, appointments, notations) is in Google calendar, and I must refer to it dozens of times per day. The only social media I use is Facebook so at least there's that. But I resent the hell out of my dependence on this thing...until my next overseas trip, of course...then I'll be grateful for its existence.
RIGHT. Using the smart, life-improving functions of a smartphone is like a starter drug. I totally feel you.
The first few years I was in Italy, I had an ancient iPhone that would only work when connected to Wi-Fi. Without GPS, I would get hideously lost, and poor John would have to come looking for me. Frankly, I don't know how anyone managed before Google Maps.
Welcome to the ant hill, Stacey. With 8 billion and counting people to feed, clothe, house and entertain, the will to survive (see DNA) on a species-wide basis requires docility. We (humans) have invented the technology that is precisely designed to keep us from murdering one another on too large a scale. Also from keeping us from loving one another. Isolated individuals can't do that very well if at all.
It's the old argument, isn't it? Will we be swallowed alive by totalitarianism (Orwell's prediction) or by amusing ourselves to death (Postman's and Huxley's prediction).
The capitalist rounders of the world know there's no money to be made under a Totalian regime so I'm going with amusing ourselves to death but not the funny kind of amusement but the pedestrian version.
firstly, i had to look up oroboros. great word! cells do represent economy of scale, bringing quick and mobile access to news, entertainment, communication, education, direction, and information out of the house. it has changed our access and the immediacy of response. we moved the tv and land lines into pockets…a modern industrial revolution evolution. from horses to streetcars, then cars to the internet. seamstresses to industrial weavers; gardens and kitchens to restaurants and freezers and microwaves.
in the 1800s etchings were replaced by photographs. but then photographs became manipulated creating questions of vericity. welcome to AI. right now, i am more concerned about ai in that regard. maybe people will tire of and abandon passive observaton a engage in active participation and…face to face engagement? i am hopeful the new age will evolve like those before it.
So many great points and observations here. Is it adagio or allegro today? Where’s the motif, the ebb and flow of a pace that used to be relatable where anyone could afford to enjoy the music. Now days everything seems frenetic and plastic, too convenient and complicated to enjoy the little simplistic moments in time where each breath had a memorable moment. Arghh!
I truly believe what we're experiencing is like the slow-moving glacier that created the East River: one massive zeitgeist crashing into another massive zeitgeist. Only the end result with not be a river; rather, an apocalypse--one we fail to recognize.
Excellent essay and take on this quite sad and isolated contemporary existence. For me as a 59 summers young chap, I find solace in reading, sketching of late, and nature - the latter of which I like to photograph .. and then post, in hope of a dopamine hit! A weekend without social media, without the phone but rather in sorting the garage, gardening or engaging in some manual task can equate, richly to a weekend at a mediation retreat. I’ll be sure to take the East River ferry next time I’m in NY.. thank you for an elegant and very real look at what happening in our world. JBP
Oh, I like your world and the way you describe it! You had me at "solace in reading, sketching, and nature."
techno feudalism, bliss point, the audacity to speak of the fact that you are not living your 'best life,' yes yes yes / crafty weave around / photos are marvelous - grammable hahaha. your essay is a reminder or answer to the question I often ask myself, why am I so tired? thx stacey.
High praise, coming from the goddess of my ethnographic idolatry and author of my favorite book on the subject of art monsterage: https://www.amazon.com/Art-Monster-Impossibility-New-York-ebook/dp/B0CQRZFM4Z
I highly recommend this book to anyone reading down the thread.
reflective, observational reminders. are they sad? or are we sad. didn’t boomers’ parents bemoan the advent of outdoor activity-robbing…..television. or the abandonment of symphonies for….heavy metal, home brew for starbucks, burgers on briquets for tofu, kale or seitan, and microwaves? and god forbid, oil painting for…photography—such heresy. perhaps every group over fifty feels the penetration of marginalization in some form. comes aging. and evolution, and we can’t control it. yet.
I ask myself that ouroboros question all the time: am I just being old and cranky? I ask it of others, too. But no, the analogy of television and smartphones will not hold. For one, we left the television behind the minute we set foot outside the house. The television did not follow us around in our purses and hip pockets. Two, television was merely "programmed" to be entertaining. No more. There weren't any proprietary algorithms designed to addict us.
This truly is a new age, and I am dreading how it ends.
Your discussion, and especially your use of the word "place," made me flash back to a book by Edward Casey, "The Fate of Place." Casey's argument (and this was from the early '80's at the latest) was that in modernity we've lost all sense of place and substituted space for it instead. Space is geometrical, with emphasis on the "metrical" part, whereas place is more about the sense of "thereness." The idea of place is an easy enough notion to grasp -- to "feel," if you prefer -- especially if one has even a little poetry in their soul, but it is tricky to properly articulate. (Took Casey an entire, and rather dense, book to do so.)
With the above in mind, I'd be inclined to say that the people glued to their screens are then the ones who have been most completely "dis-placed," because for them even space is no longer real, it has become entirely virtual.
I still only have a flip phone. I want my devices to be more or less single-purpose. I want my phone to be a phone, my eReader to be an eReader, my computer to be my computer, etc.
I think it's really interesting what you say here about displacement. When I compare it to the sensations I experience while driving a car--the state of being nowhere and everywhere simultaneously--I realize that there is a far scarier form of displacement happening when we look up from our screens. Where are we? Which world is the "real" one?
Driving a car -- if you are driving it with anything even remotely akin to responsibility -- is a good example of why consciousness is not located in the brain. As a driver, your consciousness is actually filling a rather large volume of ... space.
Because of conversations elsewhere, I'm watching the old barn-burner WWII movie, "The Battle of Britain," which evidently stars every major British actor younger than (and including) Sir Laurence Olivier. But the aerial scenes invite musement on the much greater (and now 3-dimensional) space occupied by a flier.
And now, park your car, land your aircraft, step away from the road or airfield, and read a poem by Mary Oliver. What, now, is the *place* that your mind occupies?
John Gillespie Magee Jr. tried both at once, and did not survive the experience:
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/157986/high-flight-627d3cfb1e9b7
Yeats young friend fared no better:
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57311/an-irish-airman-foresees-his-death
It is for these very reasons I resisted for years, the purchase of a smart phone...I clung to my old-school flip phone with everything in me, until Thanksgiving weekend of 2020 when I caved and purchased one. While traveling in Italy for a couple of months in 2019, for the first time, I felt untethered with only a flip phone, unable to use train apps and other travel tools that would have made my life easier. For that reason alone, international travel, I caved.
I had lofty ambitions of using the phone only for travel, or to speak (or text) with someone not standing next to me. Alas, that ambition failed, as the phone has now become an extension of myself, due mainly to calendar use: my whole life (tasks, appointments, notations) is in Google calendar, and I must refer to it dozens of times per day. The only social media I use is Facebook so at least there's that. But I resent the hell out of my dependence on this thing...until my next overseas trip, of course...then I'll be grateful for its existence.
RIGHT. Using the smart, life-improving functions of a smartphone is like a starter drug. I totally feel you.
The first few years I was in Italy, I had an ancient iPhone that would only work when connected to Wi-Fi. Without GPS, I would get hideously lost, and poor John would have to come looking for me. Frankly, I don't know how anyone managed before Google Maps.
Keep your smartphone.
Welcome to the ant hill, Stacey. With 8 billion and counting people to feed, clothe, house and entertain, the will to survive (see DNA) on a species-wide basis requires docility. We (humans) have invented the technology that is precisely designed to keep us from murdering one another on too large a scale. Also from keeping us from loving one another. Isolated individuals can't do that very well if at all.
It's the old argument, isn't it? Will we be swallowed alive by totalitarianism (Orwell's prediction) or by amusing ourselves to death (Postman's and Huxley's prediction).
At this point, I'd say it's both.
The capitalist rounders of the world know there's no money to be made under a Totalian regime so I'm going with amusing ourselves to death but not the funny kind of amusement but the pedestrian version.
firstly, i had to look up oroboros. great word! cells do represent economy of scale, bringing quick and mobile access to news, entertainment, communication, education, direction, and information out of the house. it has changed our access and the immediacy of response. we moved the tv and land lines into pockets…a modern industrial revolution evolution. from horses to streetcars, then cars to the internet. seamstresses to industrial weavers; gardens and kitchens to restaurants and freezers and microwaves.
in the 1800s etchings were replaced by photographs. but then photographs became manipulated creating questions of vericity. welcome to AI. right now, i am more concerned about ai in that regard. maybe people will tire of and abandon passive observaton a engage in active participation and…face to face engagement? i am hopeful the new age will evolve like those before it.