This
Journal

November
1999

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October 1999

September 1999

August 1999

July 1999

I had started to redesign this page for a new month when I realized that I was not yet very tired of it. And so there is only a tiny change this month. No frantic quest for a sensational new thing. No turkeys. No pilgrims. I'll leave the great seasonal designs to Chris.

I can't seem to let go of Sven Birkerts. I just read him quoting Sherry Turkle: "The Internet has become a significant social laboratory for experimenting with the constructions and reconstructions of self that characterize postmodern life. In its virtual reality we consciously construct ourselves."

Well, I knew that. But Birkerts doesn't seem to like the notion that in the not-so-distant future the individual person that each of us is will have been transformed into "a kind of federation of personae." He sees reading as a "counterrevolutionary" activity that pulls us, through the text, into our own depths, away from these briliant surfaces fit only for grazing. I like to think that it's possible to read online (at least these entries) in an old-fashioned way (though I don't do it myself). I'm just one guy writing about my days. I try to keep it short because I know you are a busy person, but Birkerts thinks this is the point: our busyness, our flashing from one thing to another, our "multi-tasking", has changed us, moved us from a deeply-focused attention to a wide-ranging but much more superficial kind of knowing.

Of course, the quick shift is intrinsic to internet life. For example, you've probably stopped reading this by now. You're out there buying something or checking your e-mail, bouncing merrily from one nifty site to another, knowing what? thinking what? remembering what? For all its vaunted powers of storing and transferring Information, electricity is probably most widely used for the media of Forgetfulness. We flee from our emptiness by clinging to these screens, these windows. Am I getting too dramatic? Sure I am. So what? If you've read this far, you're probably in the mood for a little drama. But if you've stopped reading, maybe you had something better to do. Maybe you went outside; maybe you're talking to a friend; maybe you're reading a book. Good. Very good. That's okay. I know you'll be back...or someone very much like you, whoever you are.

(I am conscious of the weird disjuncture between my fascination with and adherence to Birkerts' major premises and the fact that I am at this very moment using the technology that he so abhors. This runs parallel to other dissonances in my life: I contradict myself in my deepest parts. I do not do what I know I should do. There's a certain lack of integrity. Do you know what I mean? Do you ever feel this in your own life?)

The true art of memory is the art of attention.
Samuel Johnson