Wasting Time on the Internet (3 page)

The article concludes with a quote from a psychology professor at the University of Kansas, who disparagingly says, “Smartphones are a potent delivery mechanism for two fundamental human impulses: our quest to find new and interesting distractions, and our desire to feel that we have checked off a task.” But I find that to be positive. That quote sums up the complex balancing act we perform with our devices. We're productive—we're checking off tasks—and we're distracted in new and interesting ways. (Since when are
new
and
interesting
pejorative?) It's that frisson of opposites—bacon-infused chocolate or salted caramel ice cream—that makes it zing. The professor goes on to bemoan the fact that “with these devices you can get that sense of accomplishment multiple times a minute. The brain gets literally rewired to switch—to constantly seek out novelty, which makes putting the phone down difficult.” It sounds great to me. Novelty
and
accomplishment. They work together.

When I used to watch TV, “likes” weren't really part of the game. Sure, I liked one show better than another, but I was
forced to choose from a tiny set of options, seven channels, to be specific. Today, “like” has come to mean something very different. We can support something, expressing ourselves by clicking Like or we can download something we like. In this way, we build a rich ecosystem of artifacts around us based on our proclivities and desires. What sits in my download folder—piles of books to be read, dozens of movies to be watched, and hundreds of albums to be heard—constitutes a sort of self-portrait of both who I am in this particular point in time, and who I was in earlier parts of my life. In fact, you'll find nestled among the Truffaut films several episodes of
The Brady Bunch
, a show I really “liked” back in the day. Sometimes I'm in the mood to watch Truffaut; other times I'm in the mood to watch
The Brady Bunch
. Somehow those impulses don't contradict one another; instead, they illuminate the complexities of being me. I'm rarely just one way: I like high art sometimes and crap others.

While I could discuss any number of musical epiphanies I've personally experienced over the past half century, all of them would pale in comparison to the epiphany of seeing Napster for the first time in 1999. Although prior to Napster I had been a member of several file-sharing communities, the sheer scope, variety, and seeming endlessness of Napster was mind-boggling: you never knew what you were going to find and how much of it was going to be there. It was as if every record store, flea market, and thrift shop in the world had been connected by a searchable database and flung their doors open, begging you to walk away with as much as you
could carry for free. But it was even better because the supply never exhausted; the coolest record you've ever dug up could now be shared with all your friends. Of course this has been exacerbated many times over with the advent of torrents and MP3 blogs.

But the most eye-opening thing about Napster was the idea that you could browse other people's shared files. It was as if a little private corner of everyone's world was now publicly available for all to see. It was fascinating—perhaps even a bit voyeuristic—to see what music other people had in their folders and how they organized it. One of the first things that struck me about Napster was how impure and eclectic people's tastes were. Whilst browsing another user's files, I was stunned to find John Cage MP3s alphabetically snuggled up next to, say, Mariah Carey files in the same directory. It boggled the mind: how could a fan of thorny avant-garde music also like the sugary pop of Mariah Carey? And yet it's true. Everyone has guilty pleasures. But never before have they been so exposed—and celebrated—this publicly. To me, this was a great relief. It showed that online—and by extension in real life—we never have been just one way, all the time. That's too simple. Instead, we're a complex mix, full of contradictions.

The web is what Stanford professor Sianne Ngai calls “
stuplime
,” a combination of the stupid and the sublime. That cat
video on BuzzFeed is so stupid, but its delivery mechanism—Facebook—is so mind-bogglingly sublime. Inversely, that dashboard cam of the meteor striking Russia is so cosmically sublime, but its delivery mechanism—Facebook—is so mind-bogglingly stupid. It's this tension that keeps us glued to the web. Were it entirely stupid or were it entirely sublime, we would've gotten bored long ago. A befuddling mix of logic and nonsense, the web by its nature is surrealist: a shattered, contradictory, and fragmented medium. What if, instead of furiously trying to stitch together these various shards into something unified and coherent—something many have been desperately trying to do—we explore the opposite: embracing the disjunctive as a more organic way of framing what is, in essence, a medium that defies singularity?

Shattered by technology, modernism embraced the jagged twentieth-century media landscape and the fragmentation it brought, claiming it to be emblematic of its time. Not to overstretch the analogy—it's a new century with new technologies—but there are bits and pieces salvageable from the smoldering wreckage of modernism from which we might extract clues on how to proceed in the digital age. In retrospect, the modernist experiment was akin to a number of planes barreling down runways—cubist planes, surrealist planes, abstract expressionist planes, and so forth—each taking off, and then crashing immediately, only to be followed by another aborted takeoff, one after another. What if, instead, we imagine that these planes
didn't crash at all, but sailed into the twenty-first century, and found full flight in the digital age? What if the cubist airplane gave us the tools to theorize the shattered surfaces of our interfaces or the surrealist airplane gave us the framework through which to theorize our distraction and waking dream states or the abstract expressionist airplane provided us with a metaphor for our all-over, skein-like networks? Our twenty-first-century aesthetics are fueled by the blazing speed of the networks, just as futurist poems a century ago were founded on the pounding of industry and the sirens of war.

Literary modernism provides insights as well. Could we theorize our furious file sharing through Freud's ideas about the archive, our ROM and RAM through his perception-consciousness system? Could we imagine the web as the actualization of Jorge Luis Borges's infinite library of Babel, as described in his famous 1941 short story of the same name? Could we envision Twitter's 140-character constraint as being a direct descendent of Hemingway's brilliant one-line novel: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” Are Joseph Cornell's boxes palm-sized, handheld pre-Internet devices, replete with icons and navigational systems? Is
Finnegans Wake
a wellspring of hashtags? Postmodernism's sampling and remixing—so predominant in mainstream culture from karaoke to gaming to hip-hop—are also foundational to the mechanics of the web. If the Internet is one big replication device, then every artifact flowing through it is subject to its bouncy reverberatory gestures (the retweet, for example), a
situation where an artifact's primary characteristic, to quote Roland Barthes, is “a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centers of culture,” while at the same time remaining a container of content.

When futurist poet F. T. Marinetti famously wrote in a 1909 manifesto that “we will destroy the museums, libraries, academies of every kind,” he could not have foreseen the double-edged sword of web-based structures. On one hand, artists are embracing the meme's infinitesimal life span as a new metric (think: short attention span as a new avant-garde), constructing works not for eternity but only for long enough to ripple across the networks, vanishing as quickly as they appear, replaced by new ones tomorrow. On the other hand, our every gesture is archived by search engines and cemented into eternally recallable databases. Unlike Marinetti's call to erase history, on the web everything is forever. The Internet itself is a giant museum, library, and academy all in one, comprised of everything from wispy status updates to repositories of dense classical texts. And every moment you spend wasting time on the Internet contributes to the pile—even your clicks, favorites, and likes. Read through a literary lens, could we think of our web sojourns as epic tales effortlessly and unconsciously written, etched into our browser histories as a sort of new memoir? Beyond that, in all its glory and hideousness, Facebook is the greatest collective autobiography that a culture has ever produced, a boon to future sociologists, historians, and artists.

This accretion of data is turning us into curators, librar
ians, and amateur archivists, custodians of our own vast collections. The web's complex ecosystem of economies—both paid and pirated—offer us more cultural artifacts than we can consume: There are more movies on Netflix than I will ever be able to see, not to mention all the movies I've simultaneously downloaded from file-sharing which languish unwatched on my hard drive. The fruits of what's known as “free culture”—the idea that the web should be a place for an open exchange of ideas and intellectual materials, bereft of over-restrictive copyright laws—create a double-edged sword. Abundance is a lovely problem to have, but it produces a condition whereby the management of my cultural artifacts—their acquisition, filing, redundancy, archiving, and redistribution—is overwhelming their actual content. I tend to shift my artifacts around more than I tend to use them. And all of those artifacts—jaggy AVIs, fuzzy PDFs, lossy MP3s—are decidedly lo-res. I've happily swapped quality for quantity, uniqueness for reproduction, strength for weakness, and high resolution for super compression in order to participate in the global cornucopia of file sharing and social media. And what of consumption? I've outsourced much of it. While I might only be able to read a fraction of what I've downloaded, web spiders—indexing automatons—have read it all. While part of me laments this, another part is thrilled at the rare opportunity to live in one's own time, able to reimagine the status of the cultural object in the twenty-first century where context is the new content.

The web ecology runs on quantity. Quantity is what
drove the vast data leaks of Julian Assange, Aaron Swartz, Chelsea Manning, and Edward Snowden, leaks so absurdly large they could never be read in their entirety, only parsed, leaks so frighteningly huge they were derided by the mainstream media as “information vandalism,” a critique that mistook the leak's form for function—or malfunction—as if to say the gesture of liberating information is as important as what's actually being moved. To Assange, Swartz, Manning, and Snowden, what was being moved
was
important—a matter of life and death. But then again to many of us, our devices are a matter of life and death. The ubiquity of smartphones and dashboard and body cams, combined with the ability to distribute these images virally, have shed light on injustices that previously went unnoticed. When critics insist we put down our devices because they are making us less connected to one another, I have to wonder how the families of Tamir Rice or Laquan McDonald might react to that.

This book attempts to reconcile these contradictions and embrace these multiplicities as a means of reenriching, reenlivening, recuperating, and reclaiming the time we spend in front of screens—time that is almost always dismissed as being wasted. Scrawled across the walls of Paris in May 1968, the slogan “live without dead time” became a rallying cry for a way of reclaiming spaces and bureaucracies that suck the life from you. I'd like to think our web experience can be nearly bereft of dead time if only we had the lens through which to see it that way. I don't mean to paint too rosy a picture. The downsides of the web are well known: trolling,
hate, flame wars, spam, and rampant stupidity. Still, there's something perverse about how well we use the web yet how poorly we theorize our time spent on it. I'm hearing a lot of complaints, but I'm not getting too many answers, which makes me think perhaps our one-dimensional approach has been wrongheaded. Befitting a complex medium, one that is resistant to singularities, let's consider a panoply of ideas, methods, and inspirations. The word “rhizomatic” has been used to describe the web to the point of cliché, but I still find it useful. The rhizome, a root form that grows unpredictably in all directions, offers many paths rather than one. The genie will not be put back in the bottle. Walking away is not an option. We are not unplugging anytime soon. Digital detoxes last as long as grapefruit diets do; transitional objects are just that. I'm convinced that learning, interaction, conversation, and engagement continues as it always has, but it's taking new and different forms. I think it's time to drop the simplistic guilt about wasting time on the Internet and instead begin to explore—and perhaps even celebrate—the complex possibilities that lay before us.