From the lovely depths of that spaghetti pile I affectionately refer to as “my brain” came my analogy of the Internet as experience. I sometimes find the seemingly-infinite accessibility and archivability of digital things to be highly misleading. Things on the Internet only age in relation to new things that appear. Their wisdom does not grow through aging and persistance; their wisdom only gets carried on through reinterpretation in newer things. Not a uniquely Internet phenomenon, but especially applicable.
What Benjamin might call “the age of mechnical reproduction” has gone even more nuts with digitization. Things persist–but in actuality, it’s only its appearance, which can be preserved regardless of whether it is re-appropriated, re-interpreted, re-imagined. Originals and copies live side-by-side, indistinguishible.
Anyway, back to the orignal idea: Internet as an analogy of experience. Unfortunately, I was knocked off my train of thought the first time I thought of it, but I think I have it again. The fact of this infinite duplicability, and the emotional fidelity of its reproductions, and the ease of recalling, redisplaying and resurrecting those reproductions makes it very tempting to get into a cherishing mode: by establishing objects that serve as emotional stagnant points. Why bother looking for new songs, new movies, new things from which to make meaning from, if you’ve already got the song, the movie, the thing that makes your world sparklier than it was before? So we develop our appetites to keep from stagnancy.
And to think, this was all started by my own comment on hard drive space. I swear, my drive space is always shrinking, even as my brain never stores noticeably more knowledge than it did last month. Computers don’t forget; I guess we made them with our weaknesses in mind. However, this strength needs to be considered carefully. Digital media need zero interpretation compared to even writing things down; I find that half of remembering things that I’ve written is having gone through the process of articulation. It’s nothing like the incredibly rich sense memories that come with having conversations. Also, blogging falls somewhere in between, since the writing act becomes more of a streaming, speaking act, though it remains much more retractable than IMs.
Anyhow, I’m just basically dancing around one of the lessons that I’m often surprised that I actually seem to have internalized, which is that new experiences can and often are just as joyous as the ones you think you want to hold on to, the ones you think don’t come around all that often. There are two ways to interpret that: one, that the ones you hold on to are moments you are holding in much too high a regard compared to your every day experience, or two, (the one I’m most interested in) one’s everyday experiences, given enough, ahem, attention, contain the same constituent parts that cause “special events” to be special.
The great thing about the Internet, of course, is that you can find those experiences again, and being secure in that knowledge, maybe people actually let things go better than they used to.
My primary bone-picking happens when I don’t see this happening in physical life. Some people see those experiences as things to be dodged, to be ignored in favor of something that suites their tastes better. It’s why I tend to prefer to sing in transit rather than listening to MP3s on my ancient MP3-CD player. In that way that the Internet makes it very easy to avoid things that you don’t want to have to deal with (anybody read about homelessness, extreme poverty or rape on a daily basis in their spare time?), the mindset that one should have the choice to do so in the process of their embodied life, I notice, is being exercised more and more in the physical realm.
I dare the universe to show me something I haven’t noticed before, in something I’ve seen a billion times. I don’t think it expects anything less of me.
