Why worry about what’s covered in newspapers and television when it’s possible to read firsthand accounts from Syria or Sierra Leone? Research suggests that we rarely read such accounts. My studies of online news consumption show that 95 percent of the news consumed by American Internet users is published in the United States. By this metric, the United States is less parochial than many other nations, which consume even less news published in other countries. This locality effect crosses into social media as well. A recent study of Twitter, a tool used by 400 million people around the world, showed that we’re far more likely to follow people who are physically close to us than to follow someone outside our home country’s borders, or even a few states or provinces away. Thirty-nine percent of the relationships on Twitter involve someone following the tweets of a person in the same metropolitan area. In the Twitter hotbed of São Paulo, Brazil, more than 78 percent of the relationships are local. So much for the death of distance.
From what I’ve witnessed—in the Bible, in my own life, and in the lives of those around me—an encounter with God elicits a desire to share the good news, not to say sorry for it. This is something Miller himself seems to understand, or at least he did, at one point. Blue Like Jazz the book does not end with an apology. It ends with an exhortation. “I want you to know Jesus too,” Miller writes. That’s what knowing Jesus does—it makes you want other people to know him, as well. It’s a truth as old as the Bible itself, but it’s entirely absent from Blue Like Jazz the movie. Instead of “I want you to know Jesus,” we hear, “I want you to apologize for Jesus.” It’s a message that Hollywood itself could have delivered.
The magnification of minor fluctuations and amplification of sub-acoustic distortions is what the media does best these days. It uses many new tools. The most sensitive—and most ridiculous—are those dials they put in the hands of focus-group members that allow them to register their feelings about individual words in candidates’ speeches. This results in bottom-of-the-TV-screen graph lines that continually slope up and down in a way that’s deemed crucial simply because it’s visible. Before these tiny twitches could be measured, our democratic system functioned just fine; voters’ minds were on their conscious thoughts, not on their helpless synaptic microbursts. Daily tracking polls have the same effect: they dignify static, treating it as a symphony. Break down those polls by gender, age, religion, and a hundred other categories which suggest that human beings aren’t really fit to rule themselves at all because in fact they have no selves, just bundles of circumstance-determined reflexes manipulable by precision marketing tactics (and someday direct electronic stimulation), and patterns can be discerned almost at will. Given an endless supply of evidence and a boundless desire for conclusions, the narratives can branch out to infinity.
E-books and poetry just don’t get along as well as e-books and prose. It’s those line breaks, poetry’s defining feature. The problem is a simple sounding one, but really tough to solve. Because the same e-book has to work on many different screens and devices on which readers can change the font and size of the text, it’s impossible to guarantee the line will display as the poet intended.Of course, poetry publishers have the same problem with print books—sometimes poets’ lines are wider than a book’s trim size (take Walt Whitman or Allen Ginsberg), but there’s a convention to solve this: when a poetic line continues over the edge of a printed page, it’s indented on the next line. It’s been surprisingly hard to reliably recreate this indenting in an e-book, to make sure poems keep the integrity of their lines when they appear on screen.
We are a traditional department in most ways, and I want to continue to be so, but it is vital to remember Jaroslav Pelikan’s aphorism: ‘Tradition is the living faith of the dead; traditionalism is the dead faith of the living.’ To try to freeze a curriculum and a program of study at any given period in the (short) history of academic literary study is an exercise in traditionalism, not an expression of living tradition. We still want to celebrate the best that has been thought and said, we still want to teach close and careful reading, we still want to teach the skills of discerning research and clear, cogent writing. But our institutional context is changing; our discipline is developing; new literatures have arisen powerfully around the world, especially in the global South; our students’ intellectual preparation and educational expectations are very different than what they were twenty years ago; the technologies that we employ in reading, writing, and research have been utterly transformed. All these changes require us to think in new ways about how to express the traditions we value. Not everyone will take up this task in the same way, but if we are going to be successful in helping our students to be lifelong readers and writers, we have to give our faculty room to explore and experiment, and trust them to carry our their calling responsibly.
The first thing I didn’t write about quitting Facebook was a status update to my friends saying, I’m quitting Facebook.I also did not write a proposal for the nonfiction book I imagined, which was about quitting Facebook. In the book, I would indulge the conceit that my Facebook friends are, actually, my good friends, and that the social network comprises a sort of community when taken as a whole. Then, as one does with one’s friends, I would call each person up or visit them and tell them I was leaving Facebook, which would create an opportunity to talk about Facebook and this whole social media thing, but mainly it would be to get to know something about who they actually were and why we were linked in the first place and what it all might have meant… .
In the standard Social Media Exile essay, one doesn’t mention or announce when one returns to blogging or Twitter. For each platform or network one leaves, there’s another one to return to. Sometimes they’re the same. So I’m going to close this piece by breaking that convention and mentioning how easy it turns out to be to reactivate Facebook. When you sign back in, all your stuff is there, as if you’d never left. It’s like coming back to your country after a month in a foreign land, and it makes one feel that the whole reason for leaving is to make the place seem strange again. Being away from Facebook was certainly that. But I had to come back. That’s where all the people are. I’ve got a book coming out, and I need to let my friends know. Anyway, you know where to find me and what to talk about when you do. I’ll have some cookies baked.
The real issue, it seems to me, is not whether Facebook makes us lonely, but whether Facebook is reconfiguring our notions of loneliness, sociability, and relationships. These are after all not exactly static concepts. Here is where I think Marche raises some substantial concerns that are unfortunately lost when the debate goes down the path of determining causality.What Facebook offers is the dream of managing the social and curating the self, and we seem to obsessively take to the task. The asynchronicity of Facebook is rather safe, after all, when compared to the messy and risky dynamics of face-to-face interactions and we naturally gravitate toward this sort of safety. I suspect this is in part also why we would sometimes rather text than call and, if we do call, why we hope to get sent to voicemail. It seems reasonable to ask whether we will be tempted to take the efficiency and smoothness of our social media interactions as the norm for all forms of social interaction.
Facebook has created presumptive, default closeness among casual acquaintances where we once had presumptive, default formality, and I don’t know that it’s such a bad thing. I’m a social media agnostic. I’m also wary of sounding like, say, a middle-aged crank, nostalgic for a prelapsarian face-to-face social life that she most likely found strange when she was actually living through it as a young person. New forms of connection get invented, and an Elegy for the Private Man in the Privacy-Loathing Age told in dismayed rumblings doesn’t preoccupy me.But what do we call this chimera of being closer—in each other’s business—yet not at all intimate? On Facebook we call it being friends. It’s harmless enough. We all know that there are gradations of intimacy and that there is a friendship deeper than a Facebook friend. The lucky ones among us have people with whom we are genuinely close: those who will help us in an emergency, whom we could call at midnight with a problem, with whom we feel mutual obligations, who provide us with social identity and place, and without whom our lives would be tangibly compromised. Facebook and the like promote intimacy lite.
Lite intimacies in social media create a background din of disclosure, confession, closeness, and familiarity. It isn’t inherently fake or objectionable, and if it were only a semantic problem, I wouldn’t be concerned. But there is danger, it seems to me, of losing our coordinates. There’s a danger that the lite intimacies of the sentimental culture might deplete the resources of our true intimacies. If the intimate building blocks that once belonged mostly to a domestic partner or family—the sharing of a million little details about our moods, and what we ate for breakfast, and our daily rituals and secret gripes—now belong to everyone on Facebook in the world of lite intimacy, then how much deeper do we need to go to find the everyday material out of which to recognize, solidify, and build that deeper intimacy? Do we have to scream emotions louder to be heard over the cacophony of the lite intimacy? A mild hypothesis for the new social life of our age: the easier it is to be close but not intimate in public, the easier it is to be close but not intimate in private.
Since the 1980s, quantum computing has given a practical technological arena in which computation and quantum physics interact excitingly, but it has not yet changed Turing’s picture of what is computable. There are also many thought-experiment models that explore what it would mean to go beyond the limits of the computable. Some rather trivially require that machine components could operate with boundless speed or allow unlimited accuracy of measurement. Others probe more deeply into the nature of the physical world. Perhaps the best-known body of ideas is that of Roger Penrose (7). These draw strongly on the very thing that motivated Turing’s early work—the relationship of mental operations to the physical brain. They imply that uncomputable physics is actually fundamental to physical law and oblige a radical reformulation of quantum mechanics.Superficially, any such theory contradicts the line that Turing put forward after 1945. But more deeply, anything that brings together the fundamentals of logical and physical description is part of Turing’s legacy. He was most unusual in disregarding lines between mathematics, physics, biology, technology, and philosophy. In 1945, it was of immediate practical concern to him that physical media could be found to embody the 0-or-1 logical states needed for the practical construction of a computer. But his work always pointed to the more abstract problem of how those discrete states are embodied in the continuous world. The problem remains: Does computation with discrete symbols give a complete account of the physical world? If it does, how can we make this connection manifest? If it does not, where does computation fail, and what would this tell us about fundamental science?
So what makes a tool “convivial?” For Illich, “tools foster conviviality to the extent to which they can be easily used, by anybody, as often or as seldom as desired, for the accomplishment of a purpose chosen by the user.” That is, convivial technologies are accessible, flexible, and noncoercive. Many tools are neutral, but some promote conviviality and some choke it off. Hand tools, for Illich, are neutral. Illich offers the telephone as an example of a tool that is “structurally convivial” (remember, this is in the days of the ubiquitous public pay phone): anyone who can afford a coin can use it to say whatever they want. “The telephone lets anybody say what he wants to the person of his choice; he can conduct business, express love, or pick a quarrel. It is impossible for bureaucrats to define what people say to each other on the phone, even though they can interfere with — or protect — the privacy of their exchange.”
A “manipulatory” tool, on the other hand, blocks off other choices. The automobile and the highway system it spawned are, for Illich, prime examples of this process. Licensure systems that devalue people who have not received them, such as compulsory schooling, are another example. But these kinds of tools, that is, large-scale industrial production, would not be prohibited in a convivial society. “What is fundamental to a convivial society is not the total absence of manipulative institutions and addictive goods and services, but the balance between those tools which create the specific demands they are specialized to satisfy and those complementary, enabling tools which foster self-realization.”
— Why the Landline Telephone Was the Perfect Tool - Suzanne Fischer