Proust, digital whateverism, loss of focus and proliferation of content (2009)

This essay made me think – I watched a movie the other day, and like all movies set before the ~late nineties, the characters relied on landline phones and didn’t have texting or any immediate forms of communication available. You had to make a phone call and if no one answered, that was it. You had to just wait around until they called you back.

It made me wonder if we will ever not live in a world in which instantaneous communication is the default — and subsequently what is expected by everyone. I think it’s possible, but only as a deliberate stepping back, away from the expectations of instant replies, as a social movement. It would need to be a mass social movement in the 60s sense.

Interesting (and long) post. I believe no one will deny that modern "popular" internet culture has a very shallow side and that a lot of people will brainlessly waste away their days and nights browsing social media. But I will also not through the baby with the bathwater and negate the whole cultural and technical progress that the internet has brought to us. Shallowness was already present in society well before the internet, and even before TV. To me reading and writing books, even novels and poetry, are as interesting now as they were before 1995 ... the year I got in contact with the internet.

@maydup-nem: This reads a bit like one of those black or white arguments and reductions you exceedingly read online... It also reads like comments people make after reading the title or perhaps the first paragraph to a more complicated discussion. The article doesn't make the life of someone famous as a way to live, it opens up the discussion and poses a few questions about the nature of our experience, how it is drowned in an endless feed or visual or mental stimuli with little to no depth.

I also found it interesting that you felt the need to comment on it to be honest. But that's another thing entirely.

@bambax - I spent time trying to reduce my mobile usage as much as possible, but I find it that anyone with even moderate technical requirements, cannot live "phone-less". 2FA is the main thing that comes to mind. I can live without a browser, instant messaging or youtube, but accessing some of my own resources requires 2FA through an application and at that point, as VariableStar says it, I don't think I want to dismiss any of the advances and advantages we have just for the sheer sake of renouncing technology and the malaise it brings with it...

I think the main goal is to exercise control over our online activities, to be a bit more aware of what it is we do and what it is we get from it. Of course, not everything needs to have a net positive outcome, but when it comes to technology, I do think we should use it more as a tool, which we aren't as far as I can tell.

I agree that shallowness was present and will continue to persist, because, let's face it, I don't think we want to spend all of our waking time in constant thought, gravely agonizing about the minutiae of existence, it's meaning (or lack thereof). That doesn't change the fact that we shouldn't gravitate towards the other extreme with reckless abandon. Balance and moderation are words and types of behavior that are becoming extinct though in today's society and I keep feeling technology is largely to blame for it. It is just an opinion though, so highly subjective as such.

This is from 2009 (hence references to the Blackberry). One has to wonder if the author still doesn't have a mobile phone today.