Wasting Time on the Internet (8 page)

Many lament the passing of the book's physicality. They are nostalgic for its smell, the sound of flipping pages, or the habit of dog-earing a page. But reading the web has a dif
ferent type of physicality than reading on the printed page. When I click on a link, I literally press down on language, something that never happens when I'm reading a book. I find that when I read a web page, I tend to nervously mouse over the words I'm reading, highlighting them, pawing and dragging them around as I read. Sometimes when I read a book, if I'm reading really carefully, I'll run a finger over the words I'm reading; it's a surface engagement, which never actually transforms the words I'm reading, unlike when I highlight those same words with a yellow highlighter pen, physically altering them. Yet now when I highlight words on my iPad, I do so with the tip of my index finger. Same when I sign a tablet for a credit card charge with my finger. Relieving the need for an intermediary utensil, my flesh directly creates or alters words. In what way is this not physical? Even the resizing of images, which I do with my forefinger and thumb, physicalizes the way I interact with visual media, bringing to mind a popular YouTube video of a young child crying with frustration as she tries to enlarge a photograph in a print magazine by frantically moving her fingers back and forth.

We create the digital world in our own image. In this way, we can think of the web as a body double. With every click, we penetrate its flesh; with every bit of text we “cut,” we incise its corpus. Page views are, after all, sometimes referred to as “impressions” or “hits” marking this body. The data trails we leave on it are inscribed, marked, and tracked, engraved in browser histories, clouds, and databases, like tattoos on that body. Attempts to cleanse that body range
from plastic surgery for surface blemishes to invasive surgery to root out virally spreading cancers by companies such as reputation.com, whose slogan is: “We believe individuals and businesses have the right to control how they look online.” In the European Union, one may exercise one's right to be forgotten, which allows you to have documents, recordings, or images of yourself scrubbed from the web so search engines don't index you, making you physically present and virtually absent, in essence, rendering you
infrathin
.

This sense of being in-between—being at once digital and physical—has spawned a reassessment of the relationship of our bodies to meatspace, the earthbound equivalent of cyberspace. There was a time when the divide between being online and off was clear. It used to be that when I was online, I was sitting at my desk, tied to a computer. During that time, I was clearly online. When I was done, I'd shut down my computer and take a walk around the block, being clearly offline. Today, I don't leave my house without a device; I'm still online when I take my walk around the block, smartphone in hand, at once straddling the physical and the virtual. In those days, the future appeared to be either/or. Either you were going to be spending time in sealed-off worlds like Second Life or Virtual Reality
*
or you'd be offline. Now
wearable computing, mobile media, and augmented reality have reinscribed our bodies back into our physical settings, while we remain, at the same time, online. This intersection of the digital world and the physical has been driving the new aesthetic, a catchphrase cum art movement that was coined by the British designer James Bridle in 2011. No longer content to live exclusively on the screen, memes, images, and ideas born of digital culture are infiltrating and expressing themselves in meatspace. Think of digital pixelated camouflage as an example or a T-shirt with the dancing baby meme printed on it. This slight warping of reality, at once familiar and disconcerting, represents a shift in the ways we might process aesthetics much the same way Warhol's soup cans did, prompting author Bruce Sterling to comment: “Look at those images objectively. Scarcely one of the real things in there would have made any sense to anyone in 1982, or even in 1992. People of those times would not have known what they were seeing with those New Aesthetic images.”

With technologies like augmented reality, geography itself has become unhinged from any singular verifiable, stable state, instead subjected to remixes and whimsical interpretations, overwashed with data-hazed layers of subjectivity, proposing the landscape itself as a series of collage elements to be repurposed and reconfigured. Standing in front of my apartment building on West Twenty-Sixth Street in New York City and looking at it through an AR app, I view not only the history of the building, a biography of the architect who built it, and the city records attached to it, but also a
wealth of unofficial crowdsourced data lobbed on top of it: personal stories of births, deaths, breakups, love affairs, and memories. I can view photographs of these ghostly protagonists as readily as I can call up old pictures of the building. On top of this—if I'm using the unpaid version of the app—I'm seeing a stream of geogenerated advertising associated with my neighborhood: “Hill Country at 30 West Twenty-Sixth Street serves the best Texas-style ribs in the city” and “Duane Reade at Sixth Avenue and Twenty-Seventh Street is having a sale on shaving supplies today.”

In this way, the twenty-first century itself feels both visible and invisible; the surface of things alone might be the wrong place to look. Instead, the physical mixed with the unseen—the
infrathin
—as expressed by those tiny devices in our hands or the thick data haze that permeates the air we breathe, is what locates us in the present. And in this way, the collapse of online and physical space functions as a marker, a moment that informs us that culture—along with its means of production and reception—has radically shifted beneath our feet while we were looking elsewhere.

The city streets, with their complex interplay of wakefulness and sleep, are rife with surrealism. Sometimes we barrel down the sidewalks apace, clinging to our devices; other times we meander slowly weaving in and out of the traf
fic flow as we stare down at our screens in a waking dream state. And yet, in the midst of the hustle and bustle, there are people actually sleeping in the teeming urban landscape around us. It's late at night, I'm walking down Broadway, and there, in a huge plateglass window facing the street, is a night watchman sound asleep. I stand directly in front of him—there's literally only a few millimeters of glass separating us—which is making my wife very uncomfortable. I ask her why and she responds, “You might wake him.” I reply, “But he's sleeping, on display in public.” Encased in glass, and looking very peaceful, he feels unwakable. It strikes me that the proportions of the glass, similar to a computer screen, have rendered him two-dimensional. Backlit, he looks like he's been flattened into a JPEG. The reflective surface of the glass and the flatness of the guard is creating a buzzy cognitive dissonance, making me feel as if I'm in the stylized world of
Grand Theft Auto
rather than on the gritty streets of New York. I snap a photo of him on my device. Gazing at the JPEG I just took, I see that he is now literally flattened into an image. I walk away from the scene with him in my pocket.

My wife's anxiety arises from the delicate play of public and private that happens on the streets of a crowded city. Walking down Fifth Avenue with a friend, we speak openly and loudly as if we were ambling down an isolated country lane. Yet many of us love to eavesdrop on these conversations, walking two steps in front or behind listening to these strangers' narratives unwind block after block. We do the
same with people shouting into hands-free headsets. Once, the only people who spoke to themselves were drunks; today, armies of people spout great soliloquies whilst traversing the sidewalks.

Sleeping in public is an odd gesture. “Odd gestures of any kind are automatically taken as a threat,” writes Paul Auster of urban life. “Talking out loud to yourself, scratching your body, looking someone directly in the eye: these deviations can trigger off hostile and sometimes violent reactions from those around you. You must not swagger or swoon, you must not clutch the walls, you must not sing, for all forms of spontaneous or involuntary behavior are sure to elicit stares, caustic remarks, and even an occasional shove or kick in the shins.” Or else they're met with indifference, marking a person as crazy and dangerous; any interaction with them is potentially unpredictable. Our sprawling homeless population exudes a mixture of passivity and aggression: they sleep, sprawled out on curbs, in our midst; yet they panhandle those same corners. With the combination of these gestures, they pose a double threat, causing us to walk by them as if they're invisible. Addressing a packed house at Madison Square Garden, Pope Francis said, “In big cities, beneath the roar of traffic, beneath the rapid pace of change, so many faces pass by unnoticed because they have no ‘right' to be there, no right to be part of the city . . . These people stand at the edges of our great avenues, in our streets in deafening anonymity.” The oxymoronic term “deafening anonymity” has echoes of Eno's ambient music (unheard music) and Du
champ's
infrathin
(unnoticed phenomena), which accurately describes the homeless as flickering between two states, at once painfully visible and conveniently invisible.

I enter a subway car and see a man who is sound asleep. He's not laying down, but is sprawled across a few seats. He is emitting no odor and is dressed in reasonably clean clothes. He's neither sleep talking nor mumbling; he's just laying perfectly still, with the exception of his head, which sways in tandem with the jerks of the subway car. This is not a dangerous man; it is a sleeping man. Although the car is crowded, nobody will get near him. Oddly enough, almost everyone is huddled in the opposite end of the car, glued to their devices, replete with earbuds, in a state Breton would certify as being properly asleep (surrealistically speaking). While there are many seats available next to where the guy who is actually sleeping, the walking dead appear to have no desire to be anywhere near the authentic sleeper. I look at both parties and feel that in their own ways they each dreamily navigate the city in “deafening anonymity.”

Sometimes I go to a big Korean spa in Queens. It's a wonderful lively place, filled with various pools and saunas. On weekends, it's particularly crowded, packed with families: noisy children shriek with joy as they run from one water feature to another. Amid the noise and chaos is a public sleeping area that is separated from the cafeteria only by a low sheetrock barrier. It's a large area, strewn with dozens of bodies of all sexes and ages, mostly clad in shorts, T-shirts, and bathing suits, all sound asleep. It's always very crowded,
with sleepers cheek to jowl, lying perfectly still. In the midst of life, it's always surreal and lovely to see those lost in dream space among the waking.

It's past midnight, on our way home after seeing the sleeping guard in the window display, when I decide to invade someone's personal space. A woman is standing outside a bar texting. The street is empty and I slowly approach, staring down at my phone. I zombie walk lethargically toward her. I can feel her spying me out of her peripheral vision but she doesn't budge. I move closer. She stays where she is until I'm almost literally shoulder to shoulder with this total stranger. In times past, she might've been scared, or moved away, or called the cops. But now, with our devices in hand, she senses that I am no threat; zombies don't fear other zombies. She knows I am one of her own, much more interested in consuming my device than I am in consuming her.

The surrealists had a technique of constructing literature that they called “automatic writing,” in which the poet or novelist sat down and, without conscious thought, put pen to paper and just started writing. The hand wrote, with the writer unaware of the meaning of what was being written. The hand continued to write on its own. Soon enough, if the writer were truly able to let go, the words would flow from deep within the subconscious to the page. Words always have meaning, the surrealists reasoned, so if you could give up intention, meaning would remain, but perhaps differently than you intended.

Could we think of our web browsing as another type of automatic writing? As we drift from site to site, our peregrinations are literally inscribed in our browser history. This is purely automatic writing, writing that writes itself. Let's say, I'm doing research for an article I've been writing for
the past week or so. It's been a struggle to find just the right bits and pieces that will make the article really fly. Suddenly, I remember a line from something I read on the web a few days ago that just might be the thing I'm looking for. I try to google it, but the idea is rather germane and the words used to describe it are ordinary. The search gives me pages of results that aren't getting me anywhere. Suddenly, I have an idea: check my browser history. I crack it open, and after much scrolling, I locate exactly the page I was looking for. But as I'm scrolling through my history, I'm seeing my entire week flash before my eyes. It's a little bit embarrassing but there's my entire life—everything I was thinking about, curious about, angry about, desiring of—laid out before me. I had forgotten about most of this stuff—recipes for dinners that were never made, a pair of shoes that turned out to be too expensive, and a subsequent search to try to find them cheaper. I see the people who I stalked on Facebook, the videos I watched on Vimeo, and was embarrassed by how many times over the course of a week I self-googled. Since I spend so much of my time online, I was able to reconstruct pretty much my entire week in the most granular way. Can we think of our browser history as the new memoir, one that is being written automatically, effortlessly, unconsciously? If you want to know anything about me, what I was thinking, what I was interested in, exactly what I did or was going to do, check out my browser history: my passions, my hatreds, my crushes, my hopes—my intellectual and emotional life—all there before me, going back years and years, in all its embarrassment and all its riches.

My search history is astonishingly detailed: last Friday, between 11:00
A.M.
and noon, for instance, it shows that I looked at forty-two different pages. And if I strung them together, I could literally reconstruct exactly what I was doing, what I was thinking about, and the associative patterns that my thoughts took during that hour. And that's just the time I was at my laptop. Chrome shows me my mobile browsing history from my phone and iPad as well, so not a click is missing. Gmail keeps an exact record of every correspondence I've had and social media tracks everything I've said, liked, or commented on. If I add the dozens of SMS messages I sent during that hour, then taken as a whole, I could reconstruct a fairly accurate self-portrait. And even if there were gaps, just glancing at a web page inscribed in my history can spark a chain of memories, enabling me to recollect thought patterns and reconstruct memories.

Buddhist meditators use a technique that they call mental noting. As each emotion arises, they give it a name: fear, excitement, sadness. They also assign names to sensations: coolness, warmth, pressure. They feel that naming things anchors the emotions, keeping the meditator in the present. It also helps distance themselves from the pull of those emotions so that they don't take on too much power, overwhelming the placidness of meditation. Noting is a way of making visible what is normally invisible, making something ephemeral concrete. Our browser history is doing exactly that and going further by not only naming, but also time-stamping and archiving these fleeting traces of data.

Our browser history could also be seen as a scrapbook,
a textual and visual travelogue. Fifty years ago, William S. Burroughs began using scrapbooks as mnemonic devices for his writing. When he read something in the newspaper that reminded him of something he'd written, he'd clip it and paste it into a scrapbook alongside the words from his book. Sometimes, when he'd be walking down the street and see a scene that reminded him of something he wrote, he'd take a picture of it, scrapbooking the photo alongside his text. He said, “I do a lot of exercises in what I call time travel, in taking coordinates, such as what I photographed on the train, what I was thinking about at the time, what I was reading and what I wrote; all of this to see how completely I can project myself back to that one point in time.” Like surrealist techniques, the juxtaposition of related but disparate items were enough to kick off chains of richly associative thoughts and memories in Burroughs's mind.

Echoes of these ideas—digital and analog—can be found in two famous books written between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that are, in form and content, uncannily reminiscent of obsessive blogs or on active social media streams. One is the
Diary of Samuel Pepys
which was composed while Pepys was living in London, where he spent nine years—from 1660 to 1669—writing down every detail of his life and times. The diary totaled more than a million words and it's the best account of what it was like to live day to day in the seventeenth century; reading it can transport you back three centuries. While it gives firsthand accounts of historical events such as the Great Plague and the
Great Fire of London, it's also rife with juicy illicit personal details—many of which were enciphered using a shorthand mashup of several foreign languages—such as gossiping about friends and chasing women. The other book that gives us similarly granular details of the life and times in which he lived is James Boswell's biography,
The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D.
, a massive tome that is an accumulation of bits and pieces of the quotidian ephemera: letters, observations, patches of dialogue, and descriptions of daily life. Begun in 1763, when Johnson was fifty-four years old, it's not really a complete life of Johnson, but rather an intimate portrait of him over his final twenty-one years.

During that period, Johnson became great friends with a woman named Hester Thrale, who was half his age and had an intelligence to match his own. Though their relationship stayed platonic, Boswell became jealous of their friendship. Seven years after Johnson died, Boswell published his massive biography—my edition is more than 1,500 pages long—and when Thrale got her hands on the book, she was shocked by just how wrong Boswell got it. In her copy of the book, she started scribbling corrections and comments in the margins, such as [
absurd!
] or [
I don't recollect that
] and [
Johnson would not have liked to hear this of himself
]. By the time it was over, there were thousands of comments and annotations by Thrale in her copies of the book, which she turned into a small handmade edition, by obsessively scribbling marginal notes in one copy of the book after another, never changing her annotations from one copy to
the next. Upon her death, her many copies were disbursed. One of them made its way to Boston and into the hands of poet Amy Lowell who, along with her pals, would spend nights howling with laughter at Thrale's bitchy comments. Thrale's trolling of Boswell is reminiscent, both in tone and combativeness, of the flame wars that erupt in web comment streams, and her self-publishing of her annotated editions was analog print on demand.

Can you imagine, were it possible, seeing Johnson's or Pepys's browser history? The weaving of small details into an account of a life was based on selective memory and subjective bias—as was pointed out by Mrs. Thrale—yet it's these exact qualities that give these works their eccentric literary charm. I excitedly think of the potential of a modern-day Boswell or Pepys scraping browser histories into a literary biography or memoir. Similarly, might we imagine Facebook as a grand experiment in collective cultural autobiography? For future sociologists, historians, and artists, social networking provides in detail a portrait of a civilization at a moment in time on a scale previously unimaginable in all its glory, and, truth be told, in all its ugliness.

In the early days of the Internet before social media, one of my students e-mailed himself things he wanted to remember. It could've been anything as mundane as a pair of sneakers he liked to a profound philosophical insight. Over the years, he never looked at these e-mails but he kept sending them to himself nonetheless. For his final project in my class, he went back to the first year he had done this and scraped
all those e-mails, laid them out in a page-design program, and had a print-on-demand book made of them. He called it
Notes to Myself
after the best-selling self-help book from the 1970s by Hugh Prather. While the book wasn't interesting to anyone but himself, he cherished it as a diary, a physical embodiment of a time gone by, created with little effort or intention. His plan is to print out every year of those e-mails and collect them into a master set, one volume per year, a massive work of automatic autobiography. This furious accumulation of detail and data, from a creative point of view, is reason to celebrate. The vast amount of the web's language is perfect raw material for literature. Disjunctive, compressed, decontextualized, cut and pastable, and, most important, archivable, it's easily reassembled into works of art.

It's a beautiful early summer evening and a group of us are sipping wine on a terrace with a dramatic view overlooking the Adriatic Sea on the Dalmatian coast. It's dark and I can see the outline of the town below us hugging the rocky coastline, articulated by strings of streetlights. In the distance I can make out the dark shapes of mountains that melt into the sea as thousands of stars dot the ink-black sky. The various members of our group are chatting, drinking, and texting when suddenly, a giant peachy-yellow moon crests over the mountains in the distance. It's stunning and the
group goes silent as the moon quickly starts to rise—except for one guy, who is glued to his phone, deep in a text conversation with his girlfriend. Our eyes keep moving from the moon and then back to this guy. We can't believe he's absorbed in his phone instead of being absorbed in the spectacular scene unfolding before our eyes. We're taking the ancient poet Basho's stance: “A haiku is like a finger pointing to the moon / If the finger is bejeweled, we no longer see the moon.” And he's taking Marinetti's stance: “Let's murder the moonshine.” Finally, someone calls him out on it, to which he responds, “I can see the moon anytime, but this is the only time I can be having this conversation.”

His remark gives me pause. He's right. Why is looking at the moon somehow perceived to be more “present” than looking at your phone? A specific text conversation happens only once, whereas natural phenomena, while they don't always happen in such an extraordinary way as that moon, are recurrent; wait around long enough and you'll see another spectacular moonrise. It struck me that as much as we were in the moment, so was he. Our moment wasn't better because it was natural; it was simply different. It brings to mind an article I read about the practice of mindfulness, which stated, “Mindfulness in its original Buddhist tradition is not about being able to stare comfortably at your computer for hours on end, or get ‘in the zone' . . . it's about gaining insight into the human condition.” But don't programmers get in the “flow state” all the time, spending hours in the hyperpresent? One stray thought can lead to a wrong keystroke, botching a pro
gram. I know typesetters, graphic designers, painters, musicians, and illustrators who are similarly mindful. In fact, it's hard to think of anyone deeply involved in work in front of a computer who isn't staring at a screen and completely in the moment. In regard to our texting friend, how is using a piece of technology to have a deep conversation with someone you love not insightful to the human condition?

Being fully present in the moment is what happens every time you load a web page. Web pages don't exist: they are spontaneously assembled at a split second's notice upon a click. They appear for a moment, then dissipate once that window is closed until called on again. A web page is comprised of a series of disparate codes from various places—sometimes on the same server, other times pulled from distant geographic locations—which pull images, RSS feeds, CSS, style sheets, and other bits of code to form a temporary constellation, which appears in your browser as a unified page. On dynamic sites—such as social media or news sites—those constellations are refreshed often, becoming fully new sometimes within seconds. The idea of a “dialectical constellation” comes from Walter Benjamin, who theorized that in order to study history we've got to be able to freeze a complex and dynamic stream of systems into a still moment. When this happens, he calls it a “
constellation”
: “It's not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on what is past; rather what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation”—which is a pretty good description of what happens when
you click on a link, causing a web page to be spontaneously assembled. Similarly the Dada poet Raoul Hausmann wrote in his 1920 “Manifesto of PREsentism”: “To compress all the possibilities, all the givens of every second into a tangible energy. Wisdom. Eternity is nothing. Let's seize each second today!”