A philosopher once wrote of that threshold place of the unreality of existence like this,
Then the Nausea seized me, I dropped to a seat, I no longer knew where I was; I saw the colours spin slowly around me, I wanted to vomit. And since that time, the Nausea has not left me, it holds me.
Their crisis was a product of the many decaying and deracinating effects of modern culture. Chief among them was the displacement of narrative as a teleological center.
The world seems to have lost its rhythm.
Nothing happens when you live. The scenery changes, people come in and go out, that’s all. There are no beginnings. Days are tacked on to days without rhyme or reason, as interminable, monotonous addition.
Life had meaning and lost it. Culture had depth and sent it out the door. Purpose has been replaced by a schedule of hyper-production, social performance, and pseudo-events all converging around the new center of culture, technique.
Out of this state, our philosopher-narrator made an epiphanic decision:
A book. Naturally, at first it would only be a troublesome, tiring work, it wouldn’t stop me from existing or feeling that I exist. But a time would come when the book would be written, when it would be behind me, and I think that a little of its clarity might fall over my past. Then, perhaps, I could remember my life without repugnance.
Writing and story-telling are technologies with distinctly human capabilities.
In a way unlike any modern device, they grow and flourish our self-understanding. They give us a context from which to see. They stave off the inexorable deracination of culture. They unpack the mess of life and order it in a way that is, if not complete, comprehensible.
...So here's the turn.
Do technologies that "empower" writing and storytelling only do it damage? Is the manipulation of these gifts by the use of these tools an incoherent translation method? Have we sacrificed the most powerful capacities of narrative-creating tools at the altar of our technique?
More personally and practically, does the writing I do here, on a computer, to the internet, dilute the storytelling capacity of the art form?
A full-grown body of evidence from researchers like Patricia Greenfield and journalists like Nicholas Carr confirm that “every medium develops some cognitive skills at the expense of others.” This is true for the ways we both consume and create within these mediums. Is the skill we trade away within digital mediums our narrative-creating ability?
Online narratives operate with greater degrees of story-selling then story-telling. Information transfer, idea propagation, brand diffusion.
Digital storytelling is less about the yarn it weaves and more about two things,
1) its provocation,
2) and agenda.
Philosopher and artist, J.F. Martel, writes about cultural artifacts on a continuum from advertising to rhetoric. True art, true narrative, lives in a space ethereally between. Artifice, his term for that which is not art, always contains its own "pre-determined reaction" that is trackable, measurable, and under the observation of a market's agenda.
This is the space within which online stories live.
They have no narrative power to change a person, they lack true cultural cachet in their ephemerality, and they carry the virus of more, better, and newer into their storytelling.
Personally, I struggle with this conclusion.
...And therein lies the second turn.
Does the writing I do here amount to anything beyond provocation? Maybe not, but maybe that's not a bad thing.
I write to find out what I'm thinking. So said an idol of mine, Joan Didion, and her posture is my practice in this space. Digital mediums will always hold a secondary place in my work as a writer. What I do on this site matters, of course, but only as far as it supports my work offline: book writing, zine-making, talks, the movement of ethical tech and radical attention through households and classrooms to church groups and restaurants and parks.
I'm well aware of the contradictions of writing about getting offline online.
That joke is worn and tired as the soul (like my own) still online.
The philosopher in our story didn't think his diary would save him. He thought the book might. The book for which his notes were merely the rehearsal. The notes that were the medium, however compromised, that could still be used as a threshold rather than a destination.
That distinction is the one I'm trying to keep. This site, these regular provocations, aren't the books. They're the necessary work that might, on a good day not too far off, make more books possible.
Year by year, drip by drip.