Rubber Band Pistol

For the longest time I’ve had this feeling that the digital age is not the age in which I belong. I’ve had this feeling I belong to an age where people write each other letters, read newspapers, and ride in carriages or some bullshit. Think Gil Pender in Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris. Goddamn, can I identify with that man…

But what Woody Allen reminds us of so well in that film is the dangers of Golden Age thinking: every single person from every point in time has always romanticized the past. And Michel De Montaigne reminds us that:

“The thing of it is, we must live with the living.” 

These points are not lost on me. Knowledge is a habit of seeing, and I’ve always just seen that the past was full of more meaningful experiences than the present.  But I’ve been considering these points:

1.) Our digital worlds are very inclusive and accepting whereas the real world is very exclusive and isolating.

2.) The natural state of the digital world is to accommodate for fragmented thinking patterns which let creativity flourish while the real world is much too mechanistic and linear for that sort of thing.

3.) The digital world is inherently participatory and celebrates acknowledgment whereas the real world is often caught up in self-importance and taking credit where credit isn’t due.

These might not be the best, but are these examples of online experiences that are more meaningful than their real world counterparts? Instead of experiencing Golden Age thinking, should we be experiencing some form of Digital Age thinking; where we don’t romanticize about the past, but rather the present? 

I’m starting to think, to some extent, that it might be the case. 

You’re not much of a sports fan but you find yourself at a baseball game. Watching a player swing his heavy bat, you think to yourself about how hopelessly bored you are. You bust out your iPhone’s camera app and decide to capture the experience before idly returning to watch the game. The pitch was a strike and the team whose hats you liked ended up losing, but you go ahead and share the experience anyway. (It was a cool photo.) So, you open up Instagram, throw a filter over the picture, tilt-shift the hell out of it, geo-tag the baseball diamond, add a candid comment, and post it for the world to see. Some friends like it, you comment on the team’s loss, and they respond to your comment.

Speaking broadly, there’s four things at play here:

1.) The digitization of your real experiences to share with others.

2.) The consumption of your digitized experiences by others. 

3.) The consumption of your real experience in it’s digitized form.

4.) Your response to the reaction of your digitized experience by others.

This is true of all social networking. We live life and we digitize it for others to consume and vice versa. People comment on our digitized experiences and we comment on theirs. We visit our own webpages and re-experience our lives again but in their digitized form. We successfully conflate the digital world with our real world.

Then we find ourselves at less baseball games and at our desks more often; if we do find ourselves at a baseball game, we dig our noses into our phones. This is the problem, right? The problem is that  we prefer and are dependent on social networks for the validation of our real world experiences, right?

I don’t know. I don’t think rampant social networking use is the problem as much as the symptom; the symptom of a generation who craves meaningful experiences but knows how much easier it is to portray them than to have them. We conflate our real and digital worlds because we can’t rely on one or the other to produce meaningful experiences in their own right. Do we rely on the synthesis of the two worlds to produce meaningful experiences? I think so. And that’s a bad thing, right?

I think it’s a shame if it’s easier to portray beauty than to experience it firsthand in the digital era, but to some extent, if the conflation of the two worlds brings us a little closer to meaning on both ends, is it really such a bad thing? I don’t know. More on that to come…

“Tim, you sap! You only posted like three times! You were supposed to post what you’ve been doing online everyday! What happened?”

If you want to gain some perspective on just how meaningless your online life is, ruthlessly chronicle everything you do on a noncommittal web blog. I can assure you that in about 4 days you’ll find yourself uttering “Why the fuck am I about to read this right now?” pretty frequently.

Here’s what I’ve taken away from this:

We go online to talk to and agree with one another; to foster our identity; to find our herd. We shape our blog rolls and twitter feeds, and then they shape us. We withdraw into our interest-specific niches and pass the time by navigating the cacophony of links to tenuously related things on our carefully curated webpages. Free association runs rampant. Next thing we know we find ourselves wondering what tragedy of errors lead us to this question: “How the fuck am I watching a YouTube video about the hair stylings of adult black men right now?”

Making myself chronicle what I was doing online made me realize how meaningless and unrelated it all was, and kept reminding me that time spent online is time spent away from doing more meaningful things out in the real world. Now, I don’t really buy into this whole “real world” thing, as if being online issome substitute for reality as opposed to our immediate one, but the point remains. And I’m actually pretty satisfied with the result of that short-lived experiment. It made me really question whether what I was about to read was worth my time. Turns out about 90% of the stuff online isn’t.

But, this has led to a new question: Can we have meaningful experiences online? Or is the internet just a distracting, isolating place? More thoughts to come on that.

7:56 am What Wikipedia Won’t Tell You, written by an RIAA Chief Executive. “That’s partly because “old media” draws a line between “news” and “editorial.” Apparently, Wikipedia and Google don’t recognize the ethical boundary between the neutral reporting of information and the presentation of editorial opinion as fact.” Someone needs to break this woman’s keyboard. 

7:59 am Fountain.io “Fountain is a simple markup syntax for writing, editing and sharing screenplays in plain, human-readable text. Fountain allows you to work on your screenplay anywhere, on any computer or tablet, using any software that edits text files.”

10:38 am The Barista’s Curse. “I realize that no matter where I go in life, how much money I make, or how much fun I have making it, I will always be a barista to somebody.”

10:39 am Josh Melnick and Walter Murch in Conversation. “If you have a light bulb attached to a strobe machine, it goes blink blink blink blink. If you increase the rate of it, there comes a point where you no longer see the blinks. You just see a continuous stream of light. Whether an object coming toward us is a blur or not, or whether or not a rotating propeller is seen as a shimmering disc, it has to do with whether flicker fusion has kicked in. It’s a balance point between our need to function in the world and the brain’s ability to process and store information. In a life-threatening situation, apparently the brain says, You’re going to die if you don’t catch that rope that’s hanging there, because you’re about to fall. In life-threatening situations, everything slows down. Which is to say, the flicker fusion point increases tremendously. We’re working at the same rate as the rope. Yet an objective person on the sidelines sees something impossible, and wonders, How did that person see the rope? Well, he saw it because vast areas of the brain are mobilized. That’s why people have amnesia about what happened. Whole areas of the brain that are not normally engaged tune in to process this information, at thirteen hundred frames per second, or whatever the rate is.

5:38 pm Listened to Tanline’s Settings

11:03 am Listened to Justice’s On’n’On EP. Not impressed one bit. 

11:17 am On the Shelf.

11:19 am Neil Young on the Quality of MP3’s. “It’s not that digital is bad or inferior, it’s that the way it’s being used isn’t doing justice to the art,” Young said. “The MP3 only has 5 percent of the data present in the original recording. … The convenience of the digital age has forced people to choose between quality and convenience, but they shouldn’t have to make that choice.”

11:21 am Google’s Solve for X Project.

11:27 am Werner Herzog eats his shoe. 

11:56 pm Tim Schaefer is Kickstarting a New Adventure Game. “Crowd-sourced fundraising sites like Kickstarter have been an incredible boon to the independent development community.  They democratize the process by allowing consumers to support the games they want to see developed and give the developers the freedom to experiment, take risks, and design without anyone else compromising their vision.  It’s the kind of creative luxury that most major, established studios simply can’t afford.  At least, not until now.”

11:59 pm Hey ma’, I’m on the radio! Something new from Salt & Fat.

12:00 am Path Makes Things Right.

12:01 am Inside Instagram: How Slowing Its Roll Put the Little Startup in the Fast Lane. “Instagram isn’t just small; it’s tiny. It’s miniscule. It is famously located in Twitter’s old digs in San Francisco’s South Park neighborhood. But here’s the thing: Instagram subleases its space from another company. Instagram isn’t in Twitter’s old office, it’s in Twitter’s old conference room. The entire company is nothing more than a collection of desks arranged bullpen-style in a room that is smaller than most two-car garages.”

9:31 am Koyaanisqatsi (1982) at 1552% speed.

9:37 am Listened to Wire’s 154.

11: 23 am Otto Sander and Monika Hanses - Actors in their Apartment.

11:28 am Stock Photos of Women Looking Remorseful after Sexual Encounters.

11:31 am Listened to Field Music’s Plumb. Looking for a certain riff I can’t get out of my head. 

11:41 am House GOP Memo: “Abortion Is the Leading Cause of Death in the Black. Community”: “[A House GOP memo] argues for a controversial “prenatal discrimination bill” by referring to “black abortions” as distinct from abortions in general and claiming that “abortion is the leading cause of death in the black community.” Despicable. 

12:05 pm ”Oh, yes, I did,” he said. “You know an awful lot, but you don’t know how much I needed to do that.”, said Richard Gordon in Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not

9:04 pm Olympus OM-D E-M5 hands-on Review.

10:00 pm Path uploads your entire iPhone address book to its servers.

10:01 pm Gartner Says Western European PC Shipments Fell 16 Percent in Fourth Quarter of 2011.

10: 04 pm Chrome for Android won’t support Flash, Adobe confirms.

10:05 pm Chrome For Android: The Browser For The 1%.

10:06 pm Galaxy Note next to the iPhone 4S. ”Is that a pen?!”

10:07 pm Hit Record - Open Salon.“We’ve also — completely against the trend — slowed down our process. We’ve tried to work longer on stories for greater impact, and publish fewer quick-takes that we know you can consume elsewhere. We’re actually publishing, on average, roughly one-third fewer posts on Salon than we were a year ago (from 848 to 572 in December; 943 to 602 in January). So: 33 percent fewer posts; 40 percent greater traffic.”

10:14 pm Hollywood by the Numbers. “The conclusion from this data might be that Hollywood does not change all that much in terms of who makes the money. But that itself is a symptom of a deeper reality: that there is little that changes at all. We can even perhaps hypothesize that there is no business model innovation taking place. Any such innovation is usually manifested in a reversal of fortunes for incumbents.”

10:16 pm Crafting Azeroth.

7:10 am Listened to Gustav Mahler: 150 Minutes celebrating Mahler.  After a cup of coffee at Cafecito, I needed something devastating to get my day started. 

7:40 am Harry Morgan was just shot in the gut by the Cuban on Freddie’s boat in To Have and Have Not, a Hemingway novel I never actually finished. 

8:25 am Xi Chuan, a view from his apartment in Beijing. A generally boring article, but I really love pen and ink drawings so I trudged through it anyways. 

8:27 am Writers I Read: An interview with Marco Arment. “Text is an amazingly versatile medium. Relative to other media, text has very low production costs, both in authorship and distribution. One person can produce a great essay or even a complete book. It’s much harder to be a one-person filmmaker. And since text as a medium does not have a fixed timescale like audio and video, it can be easily skimmed or read at any desired speed.” 

10:43 am Listened to Gabriel Faure’s Valse-Caprice in G-Flat Major. You’ll notice I listen to a lot of classical music in the morning.

2:28 pm Listened to Charles Mingus’ Mingus Plays Piano. And jazz in the afternoon.

2:39 pm ‘We the People’ Loses Appeal With People Around the World “The turn of the twenty-first century, however, saw the beginning of a steep plunge that continues through the most recent years for which we have data, to the point that the constitutions of the world’s democracies are, on average, less similar to the U.S. Constitution now than they were at the end of World War II.”

2:43 pm Spinoza’s Version of Freedom, and Ours. “Well before John Stuart Mill, Spinoza had the acuity to recognize that the unfettered freedom of expression is in the state’s own best interest. In this post-9/11 world, there is a temptation to believe that “homeland security” is better secured by the suppression of certain liberties than their free exercise. This includes a tendency by justices to interpret existing laws in restrictive ways and efforts by lawmakers to create new limitations, as well as a willingness among the populace, “for the sake of peace and security,” to acquiesce in this. We seem ready not only to engage in a higher degree of self-censorship, but also to accept a loosening of legal protections against prior restraint (whether in print publications or the dissemination of information via the Internet), unwarranted surveillance, unreasonable search and seizure, and other intrusive measures. [2] Spinoza, long ago, recognized the danger in such thinking, both for individuals and for the polity at large. He saw that there was no need to make a trade-off between political and social well-being and the freedom of expression; on the contrary, the former depends on the latter.

2:48 pm Paul Krugman, Things are Not O.K. “So here’s what needs to be said about the latest numbers: yes, we’re doing a bit better, but no, things are not O.K. — not remotely O.K. This is still a terrible economy, and policy makers should be doing much more than they are to make it better.”

2:53 pm Steal This Column.“In the journalistic equivalent of taking a bullet for you, I read all 78 staggeringly dull pages of the House version, called SOPA.”

2:55 pm Do Unpaid Internships Exploit College Students? Short answer: Yes.

6:06 pm Listened to Charles Mingus’ Mingus Plays Piano. Again.

6:09 pm In Memoriam, Wisława Szymborska ”You give the impression of a ghost, who attempts to summon the living.”

6:12 pm Greg Wooten at Home in New York | The Selby 

6:13 pm Truffaut interviews Hitchcock. Read the article, didn’t listen to the interview. 

6:17 pm Tom Waits fishing with John Lurie ”Like ‘Waiting for Godot’ on water”

6:22 pm What’s Happening in Syria Now (Updated) Terrifying. 

6:33 pm BTJunkie, 2005-2012 Oh nooooo!

6:35 pm Listened to Field Music’s Plumb. Really great listen all the way through. Lovably carefree. 

6:42 pm American Cinema Editors Honor Alexander Payne as Filmmaker of the Year. Bullshit.

7:30 pm Listened to Field Music’s Plumb. One more spin. 

8:13 pm Continued watching Robert Altman’s “3 Women”  from last night. Sissy Spacek x Shelley Duvall = all sorts of creep going on.

9:15 pm What Does Moby Know about Silver Lake Real Estate?

9:15 pm Listened to Tanlines’ Settings

9:50 pm Listened to Charles Mingus’ Mingus Plays Piano  for a third time. 

This blog is going to be a chronicle of everything thing I read, watch, and see throughout out the day. Every article, book, album, film, or piece of art I look at, shamelessly shared with no alteration or filter. 

Sound dumb? Fine. But there’s a few honest reasons why I’m doing this.

1.) One of my favorite things to ask people about are what blogs they read. Or what they listen to throughout the day. Or what their online habits are. And not what they want me to think they are, but what they actually are. If you’re anything like me you’re typically pretty fascinated with the results, and at the very least, stumble upon something you’d never seen before or gain a better insight in to that person’s tastes. Sometimes you even stumble upon something you like as well and that thing adds value to your life. Any one of those outcomes is fine with me.

2.) I’m curious about my own online habits. I’m never honest with myself about how I behave online, and I think having a log of what I do will be interesting and intrinsically valuable to me in ways I can’t predict now. I imagine that Vonnegut quote, “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.” will come into play down the line, and with this blog keeping me accountable, I might unconsciously start visiting websites and journals that are more in line with the ones I want to see myself visiting.

3.) I’m constantly oscillating between these two points of view. The first is that I’m missing out on everything while online. “Life is what happens while you’re [online reading blogs].” This commonly held view that everything important is happening outside of your computer screen constantly haunts me. But the second point of view, that data aggregation allows you to consume so much more content than ever before, giving you a vastly more complex and well-rounded world view/personality than ever thought possible, is also appealing. I don’t necessarily think these points of view are incompatible, but I think having this blog might shed some light for me on how to find balance between the two. 

4.) It seems like a fun pet project that might keep me a bit occupied. 

If you think it’s stupid, or that my tastes are stupid or snobbish, that’s fine. But hopefully I’ll gain some personal perspective, and maybe you’ll get some good links out of the whole thing. 

What’s more likely is that you all will start to assume I’ve lost my job and do nothing but power browse the internet all day. But, that’s a risk I’m willing to take.