16 - technologic

We'll need to rethink a few things: copyright, authorship, identity, ethics, aesthetics, rhetorics, governance, privacy, commerce, love, family, ourselves.

         —Michael Wesch, The Machine is Us/ing Us

~~~

I had been on Facebook for a while and a comment on a wall post of a “friend” announced she’d finally relented, giving up and joining the crowd on the Internet. A close friend to her (not just a Facebook friend) came in and replied straight on and sardonically, “Yes, well done! Bravo! Welcome to the most pervasive and all-encompassing time suck of your entire life.”

I came in behind, “LOL! Hear, hear! Lifting a snifter of Tawny. It’s all a time suck, right? WTF, enjoy.”

Haven’t googled it, but I can imagine there are already support groups out there for those who can’t resist, those who can’t stop. Like the first drink for an alcoholic, you login thinking just a sip, just a peek. And before you know it an hour has passed, maybe two.

Critics of FB, condemning a perceived mainstream superficiality, need to take a longer look. We’re in new territory, a new mediascape, new ways to connect and communicate. Clay Shirky, Interactive Media professor at NYU has said, "…the moment our historical generation is living through is the largest increase in expressive capability in human history."

Ivy League student geniuses, now gazillionaires, imagined an online locale for their comrades on campus and all of a sudden we’re studying and reading about the transformative ways in which we make connection with one another.

Facebook? Another window into, another lens for understanding who we are and how we live. I have a few FB friends, folks I’ve never met (in person), who have become a lively and engaging presence in my life. Swear to Christ, these folks have given me such pleasure; it’s like an approved and sanctioned voyeurism. We’re granted access, and we’re able to glimpse the back and forths of people who know each other, people who dig, care about, poke, make fun of, slap each other around, make each other laugh. And you find yourself wanting to enter the fray, and then you stop, realizing the access that has been given is a kind of privilege. You have your particular connection to this person, but not their in-group, and so you begin to appreciate how large your world has become.

Private worlds rarely shared with or seen by others, now online and accessible; no need to buy a ticket to these real-life events—theatre set pieces, farces, comedies, dramas played out in wall posts, comments and likes. Each of us with an in-group where we’re comfortable making it up, jerking people around, getting rowdy and playful. I think the trick is to take none of it seriously. Did you see Betty White’s monologue on Saturday Night Live? Just crazed and hilarious. There was a flipping Facebook movement to have her host. You have to laugh, you have to have a sense of humor.

But of course this is serious. Our world has changed, in profound and intimate ways. Just login and cruise. Nexus and varying contexts, so diverse and riotous. Music, film, art, stand-up comedy, needed information, political action, all instantaneously shared with a link. Widespread blogging, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter; we’re all right in the middle of Shirky’s historical moment and I’m not sure we fully appreciate how grand, glorious and groundbreaking it is.

~~~

I leave you with this. Have been traveling with Samuel Beckett of late. I began with an out of print, boxed set of short works that include Texts for Nothing. Am in the middle of it, and now am about to complete a reading of 19 plays presented in Beckett on Film. Stirring to say the least. Three novels, Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable are on the horizon.

I’ve wanted to journey with him before but we never hooked up; it’s like he invites me to accompany him by train, given me a time to meet him at the station, and I never make it on time. A recurring dream/nightmare, I’m always running on the platform and the train’s slowly moving away, and I can see him gazing out the window as the train gains speed, he’s got that disaffected, downward looking glance working, as if he’s in the dining car with a window seat, and the downward looking I see as a turning away, an expression of disappointment.

The day comes where I make the station on time. I am excited and people are getting on the train, a morning mist gently falls, and I can’t find him. He’s not at the flower stand where we’ve arranged to meet. Shit, shit, shit. I get on the train and walk up and down, no Beckett. I get to the dinning car ask the barista, and wordlessly he points to the newspaper, sitting on an empty table. In big, bold letters, the headline reads: BECKETT DEAD….

~~~

I recently found his essay/book on Proust at the UCSD Library and damn, TIME, MEMORY and HABIT. I can see him, resurrected he is, sitting at the café and I hear him speaking, I stop and turn, it’s an aside, he’s speaking to no one in particular, and yet he’s looking, straight on with those piercing eyes, at me.

Prompt and punctual. Must. Routines and habits. Time. Unavoidable and undermining. Cancerous. No sleep.

Awakened to the rhythms, and right now we’re technologic, and we have to get in there, learn the language, the steps, get on with it, dance.

I remember.