“Nothing in the world is permanent, and we’re foolish when we ask anything to last, but surely we’re still more foolish not to take delight in it while we have it. If change is of the essence of existence one would have thought it only sensible to make it the premise of our philosophy.”
– W. Somerset Maugham, “The Razor’s Edge”
We know that social media often distorts our view of the present – pulling us away from the moment at hand, inviting us instead to compare our lives to those of others or to align our thoughts and priorities with theirs. But it also has the power to seriously affect the way we relate to the past and to the passage of time, including the way in which we relate to the natural quality of evanescence inherent in the events and moments that make up our lives.
I was first introduced to the technology and culture writer Nicholas Carr several years back when a friend handed me a copy of Carr’s cover story for the July/August 2008 issue of The Atlantic, titled “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” (you may have heard of the book that later grew out of that article, Carr’s “The Shallows,” which was a Pulitzer Prize nonfiction finalist in 2011). The article’s primary area of inquiry – nicely encapsulated in its subtitle, “What the Internet is doing to our brains” – is just as much worth considering today as it was ten years ago. More so, probably, even if recent news stories make it seem like more and more people are waking up to the potentially coercive and often corrosive power of the contemporary social internet.
The reality is that we’re all – at least collectively speaking – in pretty deep at this point. People might get angry at what they perceive as a misuse of online platforms or a misappropriation of their personal data for political, private, or potentially nefarious ends, but most of those same people are so deeply enmeshed in the social web that it’s already got a hold on them and on their way of thinking and interacting with the world. I’m not trying to vilify the whole online milieu (after all, here we are, on a website), but this does seem like one of those cases where you can’t just attack the message (or the messenger) without also questioning the medium.
We really want these online platforms and social media technologies to be morally benign, to be pure tools that we can then choose to use according to our needs and circumstances. But the reality isn’t always so simple.
Fighting evanescence: ‘A record of loss and decay’
One of the clearest examples of the impact of the social web on how we now live is in the ways that online networks allow and encourage us to save and process the stuff of our world, including all the experiences that make up our daily lives. We post “moments” and memories and tweets and status updates, and collectively these add up to create a kind of digital footprint, an online map or representation of who we are and where we’ve been. Of course, as noted here previously, the map is not the territory. And we know, on some level, that our lives add up to more than the information we post on our social media feeds. But it’s easy to develop a kind of internet-induced tunnel-vision – a reductionist viewpoint that ends up mistaking our digital footprint for our actual one, in part precisely because of the way the internet catches and holds these passing moments, enshrining the minutiae of our daily lives in eternal snippets of color and code.
On his website Rough Type, Carr has a great piece celebrating what he refers to as “disposable experience.” In it, he writes:
“The evanescence of experience is joy. Beauty is pied and fleeting, fickle and freckled. Vitality is motion. But in that unceasing cycle of disposal and replenishment lies melancholy, too, a foretaste of our final leave-taking. There’s a part of the mind that rebels, that wants to save everything, to pile up experience’s goods as a kind of barricade against mortality. It doesn’t work. The record of experience becomes a record of loss and of decay. Every memento turns into a memento mori. Around the hoarder sadness thickens.”
On the one hand, impermanence is unsettling, and every small reminder that things don’t last is, in its own way, a nod to that ultimate looming truth: that we, too, shall pass away, along with everyone and everything we love. On the other hand, all our efforts to hold on to what we have and what we’ve been – to “pile up experience’s goods as a … barricade against mortality” – are not only doomed to failure, but end up becoming a reminder of that same impermanence, “a record of loss and decay.”
The joy of evanescence
One way to come to terms with our own impermanence, then, might be to accept the flow and force of that impermanence in everything we see and do and are. By letting go of the weight of the past – and even, on some level, of the psychological pull of the future – we free ourselves up to be here now, to exist in the only moment and in the only place we really have and to act from that place. The result of this re-centering might be a more balanced way of living and being. As Carr writes, “The cup must be emptied to be refilled.” As he explains:
“Most of us are happy that experience is disposable. We want the next experience, not the last one. Even for those who are always pulling out their phones to snap pictures or shoot videos, to text or tweet or tumble or otherwise share the moments of their being, the pleasure lies mainly in the recording, not in the record.”
But there’s a disconnect between this necessary evanescence and our desire to create some kind of tangible record of our experience. Furthermore, there’s a disconnect between the “joy” of this evanescence and the basic design behind the various online mediums we’re using to interact with and catalogue our world. Again, we might wish the platforms were “just tools” to be used according to the skill and intentions of the user. But Carr calls that interpretation into question, noting that those behind online tools like Facebook and Twitter often have other motivations that go beyond simple utility.
“This is a problem for those who operate social networks or otherwise have a financial stake in our record-keeping. They want nothing more than to turn us all into sad hoarders, to have us care as much about the record of the experience as about the experience itself.”
He argues that, in the end, such joyless schemes are doomed to fail. I think he’s right, but I also think that the battle is still being waged over how, both as individuals and as a society, we’re going to understand our use of these platforms. The internet isn’t going anywhere any time soon, which means we each have to make choices, every time we go online, about how we want to use it. We have to consider how much we want to give ourselves over to its peculiar way of framing and processing the world, and where we want it to take us.
Evanescence and AP Style: Internet grammar 2.0
In putting this post together, I was reminded of an interesting fact that might help illustrate how the slow creep of language and culture really does impact our way of thinking. A decade ago, when Carr’s piece was first published in The Atlantic, the Associated Press style guidelines dictated that “Internet” be capitalized as a proper noun. But, in 2016, that changed, with both “internet” and “web” now being treated as lower-case in most instances.
The Verge announced the AP Stylebook revision as one more nail in the coffin of “the grammatical tyranny of the internet as a proper noun.” And there were, of course, logical reasons for the change. But it’s worth noting that part of what made the style change possible – maybe even inevitable – was the fact that the internet was becoming increasingly ubiquitous in people’s lives.
After all, in 2008, many of us still had to log on to computers to check our email and surf the web. Facebook, originally marketed to North American college students, had only been widely available to the general public for a couple of years. Apple’s iPhone was just a year old, and the modern smartphone in its current form – as a kind of quasi-sentient external hard drive and communications hub for the human brain – was still in its infancy.
Evanescence, acceptance, and common sense: ‘Do not go gentle’ into that blue light
A lot has changed in the land of technology since 2008 – and certainly not all of it for the worse – but it’s hard to argue that we haven’t, both individually and collectively, become increasingly threaded into the very fabric of the internet itself. We’re “plugged in” in ways that might have been hard for many of us to imagine even a few years ago. The internet has come, for many of us, to take up a large percentage of our waking and working hours and to represent a large portion of the world in which we exist on a daily basis. A lot of us – myself included, I’m sure – would be hard-pressed to extricate ourselves from it entirely, or to know quite what to do with ourselves if it was suddenly gone forever. We’re mired in it.
The lines between our “real” and “virtual” worlds will probably only get more blurred in the coming years and decades. But that doesn’t mean we have to “go gentle” into that blue (LED) light, or that we have to accept every new technology development without reflection or careful consideration of how we want to actually use it in our lives.
The “evanescence of experience,” as Carr puts it, is a gift. It frees us from the past and lets us live in the present. It’s part of the poetry of our being in the world, and we fight against that evanescence at the risk of losing our balance, losing our perspective, and losing our way.
It’s easier than ever to become prisoners to the past, “sad hoarders,” or latter-day ghosts in the machine. Luckily, it’s not inevitable.