Despite the mythological associations to the contrary, summer has always been a time of renewal, rebirth and personal development. The theme for this summer seems to be “Know Thyself,” as more and more of who I thought I was comes unraveled.
The first thing to admit: maybe Internet culture is not that good.
I’ve been part of this “information revolution” since even before the Internet. When I was young I caught the tail end of BBSing. I can remember when the bulliten boards began offering the option to connect to the graphical world wide web. After that I signed up for my local Freenet, and here I am.
In that time I have seen hundreds and thousands of cool webpages. Some of them artistic, hip, kitschy, nostalgic, historical. Some of them I can remember, although I don’t visit them at all anymore. Like the great flash essays with jazz soundtracks from Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries. And Postsecret is very nice, and I liked Exploding Dog when I first discovered it. These are only ones off the top of my head. I must have viewed tens of thousands of webpages which I thought were original, thought provoking or just plain fun. Part of the reason why I cannot list them all is the motivation behind this post.
I read boingboing religiously. Could I name one thing the editors have discovered this week without browsing to the website? No, although there are some generally cool things, and some things that are very original and artistic. I have a del.icio.us account. However, things tend to go in and never come out again. Why is that? Lack of appropriate tagging, or lack of a desire to every look at things twice? To be honest, I think people spend more time deciding on tags then the average amount of time they look at entries twice.
So let’s just have it out: Internet culture is just not up to snuff. Take all these webpages I have experienced–are any of them worthy comparisons with human creations of the “real world”? I am not even making comparisons to Homer, Dante or Shakespeare here. I like re-reading Stephen King much more often then revisiting the majority of “static” webpages (i.e. not social networking sites or message boards, which work on a paradigm of dialogue and not publishing. And not sites like Wikipedia, which are works of reference.)
I debate this within myself because I do not want to be a snob. I really think mash-ups should be considered art. I do think that the Internet allows everyone (with access to a computer) a voice to create, and presents a platform for creations which would not be possible in real space.
And yet, why would I feel the need to re-read a book, but I feel no need to check in on You’re the man now dog after that original 30 mins of hilarity. How many hundreds of YouTube videos have I watched once and never again?
Anticipated counter-argument: the paradigm of the Internet is different. It is ephemeral in its very nature. It is more akin to the unrecorded oral culture of the past and is not suited to the static paradigm of manuscript and print.
I don’t know about that, because while the creations of oral cultures were lost with each retelling, through their repetition and transmission they gained novelty and were slowly improved. Stories were told over and over, and people religiously listened to them because each telling was a new experience, either through additions to the story, or reinterpretations, or just the skill of the teller. Musical pieces were constantly worked over, passed on and blended with other styles.
I believe that essays (if that is what I can call this) should never hold definitive answers. I could change my mind tomorrow if I wrote this again. But right now I would much rather reread any one of my books, listen intently to a nice jazz or classical album, or study intently some great paintings over re-loading some website. The Internet may be great for inherently dialogue oriented applications, but we have to question its importance in many respects.
Why do spend endless time on here then? Because it is easy and it makes me lazy.
