Supercapacity
Posted on | July 7, 2009 | 11 Comments
In the back of my mind it registers that my stomach is hurting. It feels a little like listening to muzak, something invasive but distant, not quite distracting enough to justify attention, but enough pervasive enough to give me a vague sensation of angst. Everything is not as peachy as it could be maybe. So what. So this is Tuesday. I grab my laptop, pull up Mozilla and the day bifurcates: me here on the couch, and somewhere else, where information is an entity, enormous and endless.
Outside the sky is stippled with small clouds that are becoming larger ones, the blue rapidly disappearing, and rain will fall again, inevitably, as it has fallen every single day for the entire summer. The streams are fat. The ground is gorged with water and the garden paths are squishy with mud. The trees and ferns and meadow grasses almost lamentably green.
The weather has been flitting back and forth between almost seasonably warm, and a little too cold. I’m wearing jeans this morning, but am wishing already that I weren’t.
This is what I am like today: indecisive, distracted. Like a badminton birdy zipping back and forth, in one instant determined, in the next caught by an eddying breeze, and away I go, off track, especially online, where one thing leads to the next, and before you know it you’re down a rabbit warren of information and opportunity.
I’m like the hummocky meadows now: all puddles in the low places from the rain. I’ve reached maximum saturation. There is too much information, everything too available, relevant, pertinent, immediate, insistent, necessary, superficial.
Right this very second there are a hundred and one ideas out there being shared that are all probably brilliant and insightful: reviews, awards, news, stories, and I am missing all of them because I am no longer capable of processing the information. My delicious account is burgeoning. I bookmark like a fiend, but it doesn’t help.
Who do I think I am? Even as I click “Bookmark” I know the inevitable mathematics of that action in this moment: 24 hours divided into innumerable slivers.
The sun is shining for a handful of fleeting seconds. In the garden, a newly turned bed awaits carrot seeds. Worms creep. Without eyes they are attune only to the deep thrumming of the earth. On a trellis of branches, the peas need picking, and their tattered white blossoms flutter in the breeze. In my head, and sparsely on the page, words, chapters even. In this very minute Sprout is bouncing on my lap. He’s been stricken with a new phase of indigestion and projectile vomit. Growing pains. It’s made nights less sleep filled and when morning happens everything is at once blurry and sharp.
Truthfully, I’m feeling up to the gills with social media. I love the idea of networking (I want to belong just as much as the next person) but when it comes down to it I find I feel invariably submerged and nearly drowning when I jump into the stream of information rushing past.
Twitter. Facebook. BookGlutton. GoodReads. Flickr. So many ways to connect and yet I the end it’s all about distraction and dilution. I cannot help but wonder if all this social networking iterated infinitesimally down to 140 characters, nonstop, from iPhones and computers and Blackberries, while everyone is busily going about the business of their day doing other things at the very same time, is because we are a a nation of ADD adults raised on a diet of media. Hungry for connection and addicted to distraction. Maybe?
I know hours die this way. Bang! On the imaginary sidewalk of our lives, sixty minutes splattered in a puddle of sticky information.
Hours go other ways too.
But an hour outdoors on the dock down by the neighbor’s pond, my skin all goosebumpy, and the water rippling in green semicircles away from my moving limbs is a different way to use this precious life. Surely, an hour among the unwashed sheets, rubbing noses, fingers feeling heat, sharing breath while the boys nap is an hour well spent. Or saying grace, sharing food, hands turning dough, passing forks, eating strawberries by the pint full, spitting watermelon seeds.
And then there is also this tricky fact: every minute I spend devouring information, connecting, skimming, flitting online, I am not writing. I imagine Hemmingway or O’Connor today and giggle. But then I love every word that Paulo Coelho brings the world on his blog, thoughtfully, in many languages, as he goes about his days in Paris.
There is something so alluring about knowing everything is out there for the knowing.
I am a consumer. Information is the product. Tempting, distracting, necessary. It is all about division. Long division, endless division, division of the same small scraps of time. I won’t find my chapters here, spent the way I’ve spent them today, networking, synthesizing, learning, and becoming utterly inundated.
And yet likely I won’t stop.
***
How do you balance connecting with friends, networking and staying abreast of news within your field, with the daily reality of your life’s work and art?
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July 7th, 2009 @ 10:39 am
A brilliant reminder. I am going to make a commitment to myself this week… no more internet after work. Each time i feel the need to check facebook or email, I will instead open the word document for the story draft I’ve been working on. Thanks for so eloquently reminding me of what’s important, for reminding me to take a breath and take in this moment rather than trying to take in more and more and more information. Thanks for reminding me to get back to my writing. And thanks for continuing to be an inspiration.
July 7th, 2009 @ 11:03 am
i have to talk myself down every month or so, reconnect with myself and remember what it is that the internet is providing. how am i feeling?
it’s a time and joy vaccuum if i let it and when it begins to become that, i take a giant step back.
i also relish the times like these, when i have a lot brimming and no desire to be online. i try to remember that i’ve got tendencies to become unbalanced very quickly if i let my online interactions consume.
July 7th, 2009 @ 11:17 am
I recently quit Facebook and MySpace. MySpace was a lingering byproduct of the past few years and I had left it dangling. Facebook, though, was a time suck and I just cut the cord. I tried Twitter for about 2.2 seconds and realized it was even worse and got rid of it. I feel slightly lost not ‘talking’ to people daily, or knowing what is going on, but I’m ok with that.
I do stick with Flickr since I take photos all the time. But, I can’t keep up with the groups. Just put it up and see how it goes.
July 7th, 2009 @ 11:25 am
It is so weird that this is your topic for today. I have been thinking about my own internet use, in fact I was on Facebook right before I came here thinking about how much work it is to “keep up” with all of it. Comment on all the junk, send things back to friends, keep up with all of the blogs that I love, and so on…. It can steal away so much precious time. I have been letting it for the past couple of days. But I feel the depression setting in. Nothing is getting done around my house. I am feeling like a bum. No sense of accomplishment. I know there is a balance, but I have let it get out of balance. I need to make a list and stay off the computer for a while. But, like you, I know I will be back. I just need to keep it from eating me alive.
July 7th, 2009 @ 11:57 am
Balance is an art. It’s important to keep yourself nourished and fed (physically, mentally) in order to feed and nourish others. At the same time, binges and starvation leave me a wreck – so, I try to balance.
July 7th, 2009 @ 6:47 pm
juggling daily. i have recently just given up on facebook. it is so much work right now to keep up. we returned from a 2 week trip to my mother’s in FL a week and a half ago and the suitcases are still sitting out in the bedroom with clothes in them.
i also have a need to KNOW. i “quest”, as my husband calls it. i get an idea in my head and i search and read until i exhaust google. it is nice to have that information, but sometimes i miss the card catalog and a good book or encyclopedia. sometimes i miss paper mail … and long phone calls. but there is so much to do and so many distractions. and before you know it, it is time to end the day, and i am left wishing i called my friend and not let the kids get in the way, or the dishes, or laundry. yes, too much stimulation too much of the time.
July 8th, 2009 @ 12:16 pm
I stay out of the social networking sites all together. I read personal emails when I feel like it and work emails only when I am at work. I read blogs while unwinding, but if I would rather read a book I do. And I’m not afraid of ‘unsubscribe’ or ‘mark all as read’ when it suits me either. I read news from sources that focus on my field, and I mostly get the rest from NPR while driving or cooking. When I start feeling down because of ‘the state of the world,’ I take a news hiatus. Nothing terrible has ever happened because I did. And, I find that with all that I am still more networked and better informed than many of my peers who feel they ‘have to’ do so much of what I don’t. Because, I’m focused and paying attention when I am part of it. And yet, I live as if the technology is here to serve me, and I am clearly not here to serve it.
July 8th, 2009 @ 1:40 pm
I understand!!!
I am not always successful at this, but I try to Limit facebook to 10 minutes, once a day;
Sit down and answer important email 2x a day;
Unsubscribe from email lists or blogs that are not relevant to me anymore;
Periodically go through bookmarks and delete if not relevant anymore; save important ones by subject matter
Set a time limit on reading blogs, too, otherwise it can go on for hours, and I haven’t read a book or taken a walk or experimented in the kitchen.
I think it’s a little formula of what will work for you.
July 9th, 2009 @ 4:52 am
“addicted to distraction”
Absolutely – I can totally relate to this. I don’t even crave the ‘connection’ per se. I’m a private person and don’t like to share myself but I am totally addicted to distraction and to moving my attention around to avoid the inevitable.
July 9th, 2009 @ 9:27 pm
Thank you for putting (so eloquently) into words what I often feel about our hopped up, caffienated, wired culture. I am so very much included in this group, as well. I often try to explain to my techy husband why I long for a world of a hundred years ago, chopping wood for heat, growing food, writing long letters on paper… I am rarely successful in this.
I see it in my students and in myself: this culture of instant gratification and vastly accessible information, which is more than one person could absorb or comprehend in a lifetime. On one hand, it’s so wonderful, and on the other, it makes me wonder what we are becoming as a society.
(…she replies in the handy web comment-box…)
July 10th, 2009 @ 4:40 am
Balance, schmalance.