In Praise of High-Speed Overload
Recent talk of the phenomenon of preemptive irritation has made me more aware of the various sources of everyday rage, dismay and unease. But just one of these irritants is responsible for my accelerating descent into permanent anxiety. It’s the intellectual overload brought on by excessive exposure to the Internets.
Why I am so enslaved to the Internet, I do not know. Nor do I care, in the habitual manner of addicts—at least not until the consequences begin to rear their hydra heads, as they are rather doing right now. My first instinct is to say that it’s because learning stuff provides the communion with other minds that is the best defense against existential loneliness and ennui. The more you learn, the less alone you will feel. And by now the Internet must contain knowledge enough to cure all six or seven billion of us of that loneliness.
I often fantasize about that thing in The Matrix where you can just plug your brain into a network (rather like the Internet) through a socket at the base of your skull, and then information is downloaded right into you at lightning speed. (“Can you fly that thing?” “Not yet.”) The druglike nature of that injection-straight-into-the-brain imagery is no accident; it’s apt. What an attractive, gluttonous fantasy! The subject twitches a little as knowledge floods in. As I can quite imagine one would. I almost do that at my desk sometimes, after a little too much enlightenment has caused the brains to bulge. Perhaps your eyeballs will roll back into your head in ecstasy when, at last and instantaneously, you understand quantum mechanics… I’m longing to try it. Of all the inventions in all the fantasies I've ever read or seen, I love this one most.
At my desk there is, sadly, no such device, so I am reduced to a very plodding rate of intoxication. And I do, I spend enormous, unjustifiable amounts of time simply gorging on information. The worst of it is that I seem to need more and more, but the equipment I am using is too slow, it’s positively lumbering. No way can my head handle the rate at which I am trying to shove stuff in; the evidence of that is conclusive. I can never remember how to spell Aung San Suu Kyi. A Canadian friend ribs me for knowing so little about the Harper government. I still haven’t read today’s newsletters from Salon, japantoday.com, or The New Yorker. The books in this house are evidently multiplying on their own. It takes me forever to read even a newspaper article in Spanish, let alone Roberto Bolaño like I’m supposed to be doing. [1] I harbor a growing fear that I’m trying to pile more and more into an already-full bowl. What crucial contents might not already have spilled out of there, and long ago?
This chick Sue Halpern, who was panicking along the same lines I am (fear of bowl-leakage) wrote in Slate last month about these memory-enhancement devices she’d tried out; she is more or less a believer, and also she claims this stuff helped her beat her husband at ping-pong. I must say I perked up a bit at that news, because my husband is a perfect fiend at ping-pong. Nevertheless, I can’t quite see shelling out 350 clams for whatever mnemonic light-show goggle thing, or really believe it could do much for my own “2.8 pounds of electrified pâté.”
Sherlock Holmes had his own scheme for dealing with this problem. He said (in The Five Orange Pips) that "a man should keep his little brain attic stocked with all the furniture that he is likely to use, and the rest he can put away in the lumber-room of his library, where he can get it if he wants it.” Like RAM storage, I guess, versus a hard drive. I despair of ever achieving anything like that kind of order. The condition of my own storage facilities is more like something out of one of those ghastly reality TV shows about hoarders.
What I should really do here is come clean and admit the truth, which is that I am a stone liar. Who am I kidding? I love this kind of crazy. I wouldn’t trade it away for anything and I only want more. I love the time in which we are living with a startling lack of reservation, despite everything.
A friend told me that there is a “Slow Media” movement brewing out there, somewhere or other. The Internet confirms. NO. I only want food to go slow! The growing advance of knowledge, the tantalizing proximity of answers to all our questions, the new ability to share and synthesize our knowledge, almost instantly—we’re so lucky to be experiencing all this. If the price is more anxiety, then let me wind up like the Tasmanian Devil, just a blur of anxiety. Of unbelieveably knowledgeable, totally undeceived anxiety. So what if the Internet has turned each day into a panic-ridden informational hot-dog-eating contest? So what if with the incomparable gift of access to limitless knowledge comes also a little melancholy, and anxiety that waxes sometimes into an Ernest-Beckerish sense of impending doom?
Allen Ginsberg's My Sad Self is all about this very sense of simultaneous gratitude and loss, but it was another phrase of his that I meant to quote: “Misery and happiness are one taste.” This, from an extraordinary interview in the Times. I couldn’t quite remember, though, the exact words of Ginsberg’s memorable phrase. I had to look it up.
1 For the group read of 2666, which is really fun.
Maria Bustillos is the author of Dorkismo: The Macho of the Dork and Act Like a Gentleman, Think Like a Woman.
"best defense against existential loneliness and ennui" Au contraire, mon frere. http://is.gd/7HXfU
"existential loneliness and ennui"
Thanks for using my favorite string of words!
"(A) man should keep his little brain attic stocked with all the furniture that he is likely to use, and the rest he can put away in the lumber-room of his library, where he can get it if he wants it"
Damn, that is an actual quote. More like the Case of the Mangled Metaphor, my dear Watson. Musta been the nose candy.
does that mean that when i dream of a virgin african knife birth passing communist health care legislation from alaska on the back of a retard killer bear that gets hate mail from moms against calling our kids retards that i'll be better in the morning?
yes?
Mmmm, this, which bears out my own experience, though I have no better answer to the chicken-egg question than the researchers do.
Talking out of my ass, though, I think the issue with Internet addiction is that while the Internet is ostensibly about connecting with other people, practically speaking it's really me-centered. Sure, it's great for maintaining friendships and even cultivating them! But it's also very much about the responses to whatever you put out there, the reward you get every time someone else notices you in the ocean of electrons. Ultimately, it can be fun, but it gets hollow.
And then there's just the fact that there's so much information that it both overwhelms you and paralyzes you. If a book is a closed medium that generates a single point of view, the Internet is so many points of view that your frustration goes beyond not being able to sort them out; you feel like it's not even worth trying, because there will always be another dumbass who won't get it.
I think this will eventually be good for people, because I think the Internet gives us a much better idea of what's really going on in each other's heads (as appalling as that is, sometimes). But I sorta miss the days when everything looked more simple, too.
We need the mental equivalent of SPAM filters, methinks.
I know what you mean, but I am reluctant to agree, because I'm pretty sure the particular content we absorb has a lot less to do with it than just the absorbing itself. TMITFMP.
I wrote a paper on memory prosthetics, wherein the user wears a heads-up display and has a context aware software continuosely feeding him or her bits of information that they might be trying to remember at any given time based on the context they were in. After a lot of practice with the device, the users eventually would be unable to tell the difference between information in their own memory and information provided by the system.
Their media experience was very self-centered, but the delineation of that self identity got pretty shaky the more engaged they were. the motto for this is: "machines become us", and it's something I think about aaallllll the time.
CREEPY.
Nicely said on a lot of points. Your thoughts, and Maria's post, resonate with me, because that so much you speak of- well, my head spins, I can't sleep well because of the thousand things I read that day. The body rests but the mind still clicks and whirrs. Our Net habits are a lot like craving hits of novelty, it lights something up in the brain, and one wants more.
And I get your point too about the social aspect too- so many opinions, so many cretins with something to say (and that's just youTube commenters!). But ultimately, you learn to like certain people, see them as individuals, with their own voices, and on the very positive side of all this, it's been a delight to see an awful lot of craft and humor and superb writers out there.
It's no real substitute for actual friends, but there's something immensely positive in relating to people of like minds, solace and cheer.
But yes, my attention span is shot- a 2 hour movie is forevah! I miss the simplicity of ..not so galactically many choices, sometimes. Getting deeply into that novel, immersively, without the peripheral gremlin impulses of what I'm missing that's new online. Hm.
WHOA.
Furthermore, for god's sake: memory prosthetics. Yikes.
@Baroness: Yes! It's that sense, when you're not online, of missing something that makes you anxious. And then when you are online, the long, dull periods between interesting content appearing that makes you wonder why you were so worked up.
I just know when I take a week off from the computer, I feel better mentally and physically.
Sad but true. I can remember living in the country, where it was not uncommon to lose access to the net for long periods. At first, the anxiety would overwhelm you, then gradually, you would slip into acceptance, but then still further into perfect stability and adjustment. Just as I would be realizing how much happier I was, bam, they'd resolve the problem, and pull me back in.
Thank you for adding some relish to my " panic-ridden informational hot-dog-eating contest" of a day!
I am absolutely certain that the internet is making me stupider every day.
and i wasn't smart to begin with.
me and the potatoes, fighting for intellectual supremacy.
But what does one do with the anxiety?? And where is the external hard drive to store all of the plots of all of the John Grisham novels I read in middle school because they were "adult" books?
You oughtn't say "slow media." Say "retarded media."
racist.
Seems like, the internet makes the mental storage of information less valuable, with the ability to connect things – particularly the disparate – increasingly valuable.
This makes me less concerned about forgetting info and concentrate more on the associations, close and distant, that something i'm interweb-consuming either stimulates or i'm able to tenuously make myself.
Yes, so true! Also knowing how to find the things to connect becomes so much more important.
Agreed! When you find a juicy node you HOLD ON FOR DEAR LIFE.
Sorry, I zoned out after the third paragraph. Can you cut this down to bullet points for me?
–The Internet is beautiful.
–The Internet is sad.
–The Internet is beautiful and sad.
MY BOY BARNHOUSE STEPPIN UP?? good guy
ER
MY GIRL
thats on me
I found your comments very insightful.
Thank you; the hope is that you got more out of the first than the rest of the SPAM- but if the case be the opposite, at least…[something positive]
Lady-person, I just amazon'd your book "Dorkismo" straight up to my fancy parisian home because this article got me OUTRAGED that there is a book out there called "Dorkismo" that I have not yet read.
Love this. Yes, it's an addiction, and I suffer from it, too. And I share the same defiant surrender to it–a perfect union of happiness and misery.
My own strategy lately: figure out what I'm doing it for and everything organizes itself around that. Of course, if you're doing it for the sheer pleasure of it, forgetting is pretty enjoyable, and when it's enjoyable, you'll find it happens a lot less often.
One last thing: "Slow media." This depresses me. Everything can be scanned and mainlining knowledge a la the Matrix would be my ultimate and blissful surrender (I'm not sure where the misery would come into play, though).
Loved this piece!
Excellent piece. But once we can know everything, what will be the fun in finding something new to know about? Like Stains the dog?
Started breaking into homes for internet access. You see, the fuzz confiscated my wi-fi equipped laptop. I would quit, but I don't know how to live without it. I guess it all started at 14, when someone introduced me to Prodigy. Things were different back then. Safer. Slower. Stale…er?
Have to go, seems this family has a dog.