Photography is about capturing light and its reflections. The digital camera, because of its ease of use, has become a repository for our memories. Because most users of digital cameras simply point and shoot, never changing the defaults, they deface their memories at the moment of capture. The subtle play of light across a scene is obliterated by a blinding flash. All light, all reflection is mechanically equalized. Our shadows are banished. When we view the past through the proxy of digital imagery, the scene, the real moment as it entered our eyes, is flooded with illumination– and then, we blink, spots dancing in front of our eyes, the world around us slowly returns to its normal shadowy state. It’s that microsecond, the one that didn’t exist, that is captured for eternity.
This morning MSNBC aired a minimally edited replay of their broadcast from the morning of September 11, 2001. I remember watching those images on that morning. I remember worrying about my colleagues who would be arriving at our New York office in the World Trade Center. I’d visited them a few months before, spending all day in the building– from early morning to early evening.
At the time, on that morning seven years ago, I viewed the images with disbelief, as in a dream. Now as I view them again, the emotions are still strong, but I see them with clear eyes. On the day of the actual event, I didn’t think we lived in a world where such a thing could happen; today I know such a thing has happened.
Prometheus, in eternal punishment, is chained to a rock, where his liver is eaten daily by a vulture, only to be regenerated, due to his immortality, by night.
But my topic is not the possibility of terrorist acts, but rather the replaying of memories and something Nietzsche called ressentiment, or the spirit of revenge. When we act out of the spirit of revenge, filled with the pain of the moment, we act out of weakness. In our digital age, if everything is recorded, can we ever forget the past? Will we be like Prometheus bound to a rock, our wounds forever raw? Will all human motivation be reduced to acting from the spirit of revenge, as no perceived slight or hurt ever fades from memory? The digital doesn’t fade, it’s on or off. The challenge to overcome the spirit of revenge grows larger as memory is displaced into our digital systems and networks. The digital is immortal and can be replayed endlessly at the click of a mouse.
I think perhaps we forget the meaning and power of forgetting. Manu Bazzano in his book “Buddha is Dead” discusses the modes of forgetting:
“There is forgetting and forgetting. We subconsciously remove from our memory unpleasant experiences, and we tend to ‘forget’ by sheer inertia. On a super-conscious level, however, we keep our consciousness fresh and vibrant by actively ‘forgetting.’ The noble person knows how to forget, not solely out of compassion (‘forgive and forget’), but also because there can be no happiness, no cheerfulness, no hope, no pride, no present without forgetfulness. Life would drag on, forever unresolved, a life that ‘cannot have done with anything,’ a life of ressentiment, a sick life.”
In our digital age, with perfect replays, can we learn to digest and properly metabolize events and turn them into experience? When we act and create from experience, we’ve listened, reflected and responded. We’ve created something new to fill the present moment. To truly embrace change, we must not look back in anger, but walk purposefully into the future.
At the limits of my world there are the boundaries of time and my capacity for attention.
As the marketplace for attention has filled up with an almost infinite number candidates for my finite attention, the idea of multitasking has taken hold.
If there are 24 hours in a day, and I must be asleep for some percentage of them, and I must earn my living during some percentage of them, there are a limited number of remaining hours to be filled with what the technologist like to call “content.”
Distracted from distraction by distraction
Filled with fancies and empty of meaning
Tumid apathy with no concentration
Men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind
If multitasking were a reality, it would increase the number of available hours for the consumption of content. Potentially, they are doubled.
The trait of multitasking is most often applied to “young people” and “Type A personalities.”
Applying the trait of multi-tasking to young people gives it the appearance of an evolutionary adaptation of the capacity for attention. We like to believe that young people are different from the rest of us in this regard.
Before you cross the street,
Take my hand,
Life is just what happens to you,
While you’re busy making other plans
As mortals, we strain against our limitations. As mortals, time defines us.
While there is such a thing as background tasking, like listening to music while knitting; this is not what we think of when we think of multitasking.
We can rapidly switch between tasks, but it’s near impossible bring deep attention to anything in that context. This is sometimes described as continuous partial attention. In addition, we rarely take the switching cost into account as we bounce between this and that.
Who would benefit from keeping the idea and expectation of multitasking alive?
While you’re doing whatever you’re doing, why not also do the thing that I’d like you to do. You’re hip to the multitasking thing aren’t you? All the kids are doing it.
Here is the third section of T.S. Eliot’s poem Burnt Norton, a meditation on time and mortality. Can you read it while you watch television?
Here is a place of disaffection
Time before and time after
In a dim light: neither daylight
Investing form with lucid stillness
Turning shadow into transient beauty
With slow rotation suggesting permanence
Nor darkness to purify the soul
Emptying the sensual with deprivation
Cleansing affection from the temporal.
Neither plenitude nor vacancy. Only a flicker
Over the strained time-ridden faces
Distracted from distraction by distraction
Filled with fancies and empty of meaning
Tumid apathy with no concentration
Men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind
That blows before and after time,
Wind in and out of unwholesome lungs
Time before and time after.
Eructation of unhealthy souls
Into the faded air, the torpid
Driven on the wind that sweeps the gloomy hills of London,
Hampstead and Clerkenwell, Campden and Putney,
Highgate, Primrose and Ludgate. Not here
Not here the darkness, in this twittering world.
Finishing up a few things before leaving the office on a Friday, I gathered some notes and papers together and stuck them in my briefcase. I hurried toward the elevator, the office was mostly deserted– I was running a little late. I pressed the down button to call the elevator, after a short wait the elevator arrived and I stepped in. My mind was racing, filled with the events of the day, planning the weekend, thinking about next week’s business trip to Austin. Slowly I became aware of a voice speaking out of nowhere. I was in the elevator by myself.
I recognized the voice, both the words and the sound. It was a junk phone call I’d received on my Google Grand Central account. Suddenly I realized that the elevator’s emergency phone system was getting a junk phone call from a robot. The robot was telling the elevator that it “should act now to renew the extended warranty on its car.” We now live in a world where machines are spamming each other. As the machines of the network gain more and more capabilities, I can only imagine that this kind of machine-to-machine behavior will escalate.
As I stepped out of the elevator, I turned and suggested that it get on the national “no call” list for machines, and that extended warranties aren’t worth the money.
