Nov 4, 2014 01:18 AM
Review - Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness, by Rebecca Solnit
Review by Sven Birkerts
http://lareviewofbooks.org/review/danger
EXCERPT: [...] In these essays, developing the subplot of cultural transformation at the hands of techno-visionaries, Solnit gives impassioned opposition to the flourishing digital ethos. Her 2013 essay “We’re Breaking Up,” in particular, lays out a chilling portrait of a culture gone rudderless on a sea of signals. She begins by observing how close we are, in calendar time, to the divide. “On or around June 1995,” she writes (echoing Virginia Woolf, who marked December 1910 as a watershed moment in the history of the modern era), “human character changed again.” Before that, we lived in the old familiar world of the daily newspaper, the housebound phone, the writing and receiving of letters, the evening newscast … After, arriving in a cataract of innovation that has not yet abated — well, we all know the litany. We know it because we are in its toils, caught up on every side: with email, texts, newsfeeds, on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube — do I need to go on?
Solnit grants that the changes have brought their benefits: giving people more chance at uncensored expression, helping organizers to coordinate movements of resistance, allowing us to reconnect with old friends. But she also draws lines and distinctions. “Previous technologies have expanded communication,” she affirms. “But the last round may be contracting it. The eloquence of letters has turned into the unnuanced spareness of texts; the intimacy of phone conversations has turned into the missed signals of mobile phone chat.” Formerly we lived moving back and forth between two poles, solitude and communion, privacy and public interaction. “The new chatter puts us somewhere in between, assuaging fears of being alone without risking real connection.”
There is always the danger, in these kinds of discussions, of sounding like a scold — to harken back is to indulge in nostalgia, and to question the momentum of new technologies is to declare yourself old-school. But Solnit steps up unapologetic, speaking for what David Foster Wallace in another context called “single-entendre values,” and what here might be thought of as a former understanding of the proportions and values of things. Here she is on Google glasses:
I tried on a pair that a skinny Asian guy was wearing in the line at the post office. (Curious that someone with state-of-the-art technology also needs postal services.) A tiny screen above my field of vision had clear white type on it. I could have asked it to do something, but I didn’t need data at that juncture, and I’m not in the habit of talking to my glasses. Also, the glasses make any wearer loom like, yes, a geek. Google may soon be trying to convince you that life without them is impossible.
Not unexpectedly, Solnit brings the essay around to what she hopes will be the emergent countering momentum, some push toward slowness and reengagement with material process. She sees some confirmation in the slow food movement, and in a return in certain quarters to gardening and handcrafting. She fantasizes that “the young” will set up “rebel camps where they will lead the lives of 1957, if not 1857, when it comes to quality of time and technology.” Of course she knows the unlikeliness of this, but she knows, too, what the consequences will be if we continue on our track of relentless digital mediation of all parts of life. They will be grim, but “with a grimness that would be hard to explain to someone who’s distracted.”
And so here we find ourselves, coming to the end of this gathering — in a world besieged by natural and political disasters; living in an almost capsized imbalance of haves and have-nots created by unrelenting corporate greed; threatened on all sides by environmental calamity; in need as never before of real democratic solidarity, of cooperative action, even as we fixate on our mini-screens, cocoon ourselves in signals. That last metaphor suggests the eventual emergence of some surprise of bright beauty, the likelihood of which is pretty slim....
Review by Sven Birkerts
http://lareviewofbooks.org/review/danger
EXCERPT: [...] In these essays, developing the subplot of cultural transformation at the hands of techno-visionaries, Solnit gives impassioned opposition to the flourishing digital ethos. Her 2013 essay “We’re Breaking Up,” in particular, lays out a chilling portrait of a culture gone rudderless on a sea of signals. She begins by observing how close we are, in calendar time, to the divide. “On or around June 1995,” she writes (echoing Virginia Woolf, who marked December 1910 as a watershed moment in the history of the modern era), “human character changed again.” Before that, we lived in the old familiar world of the daily newspaper, the housebound phone, the writing and receiving of letters, the evening newscast … After, arriving in a cataract of innovation that has not yet abated — well, we all know the litany. We know it because we are in its toils, caught up on every side: with email, texts, newsfeeds, on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube — do I need to go on?
Solnit grants that the changes have brought their benefits: giving people more chance at uncensored expression, helping organizers to coordinate movements of resistance, allowing us to reconnect with old friends. But she also draws lines and distinctions. “Previous technologies have expanded communication,” she affirms. “But the last round may be contracting it. The eloquence of letters has turned into the unnuanced spareness of texts; the intimacy of phone conversations has turned into the missed signals of mobile phone chat.” Formerly we lived moving back and forth between two poles, solitude and communion, privacy and public interaction. “The new chatter puts us somewhere in between, assuaging fears of being alone without risking real connection.”
There is always the danger, in these kinds of discussions, of sounding like a scold — to harken back is to indulge in nostalgia, and to question the momentum of new technologies is to declare yourself old-school. But Solnit steps up unapologetic, speaking for what David Foster Wallace in another context called “single-entendre values,” and what here might be thought of as a former understanding of the proportions and values of things. Here she is on Google glasses:
I tried on a pair that a skinny Asian guy was wearing in the line at the post office. (Curious that someone with state-of-the-art technology also needs postal services.) A tiny screen above my field of vision had clear white type on it. I could have asked it to do something, but I didn’t need data at that juncture, and I’m not in the habit of talking to my glasses. Also, the glasses make any wearer loom like, yes, a geek. Google may soon be trying to convince you that life without them is impossible.
Not unexpectedly, Solnit brings the essay around to what she hopes will be the emergent countering momentum, some push toward slowness and reengagement with material process. She sees some confirmation in the slow food movement, and in a return in certain quarters to gardening and handcrafting. She fantasizes that “the young” will set up “rebel camps where they will lead the lives of 1957, if not 1857, when it comes to quality of time and technology.” Of course she knows the unlikeliness of this, but she knows, too, what the consequences will be if we continue on our track of relentless digital mediation of all parts of life. They will be grim, but “with a grimness that would be hard to explain to someone who’s distracted.”
And so here we find ourselves, coming to the end of this gathering — in a world besieged by natural and political disasters; living in an almost capsized imbalance of haves and have-nots created by unrelenting corporate greed; threatened on all sides by environmental calamity; in need as never before of real democratic solidarity, of cooperative action, even as we fixate on our mini-screens, cocoon ourselves in signals. That last metaphor suggests the eventual emergence of some surprise of bright beauty, the likelihood of which is pretty slim....