TriQuarterly Blog

PEN American posted an email exchange between Jonathan Lethem and David Gates last week in which Lethem says he has a second computer with its internet functionality stripped out that he uses for fiction writing. Otherwise, he says, the temptation to fool around online is too great. Gates later calls this getting a computer "spayed." Lethem also talks about the nuisance of widespread WiFi in general:

I’ve been guessing that being offline will soon be the new luxury. Expensive safe zones in remote locales, coffee shops bragging of “No WiFi,” etc. I tried to persuade Yaddo that they ought to get ahead of this curve, and reinstate a Cone of Silence approach to art colony life, but no cigar. I appear to be alone in this.

Actually, he's not alone. A couple months ago, Seth Fischer from the Rumpus talked to the owner of a cafe in San Francisco that markets itself on the strength of not having WiFi, and there is software built to temporarily block internet access on a computer (an internet condom, to use Gates' analogy). A few years ago, author and former Harper's web editor Paul Ford wrote about what he called "Amish computing," or using an old battery-powered word processor for writing that is nothing but a keyboard and tiny screen.

I'm thinking this is a great niche market Apple is missing with the iPad. All the iPad models have some kind of internet access of course, but they could be marketing their WiFi-only models (the ones that can't connect over a 3G cellular network) to writers looking for less distraction. You can always carry it somewhere that doesn't have a free internet signal. Of course, this doesn't do a lot of good when you can also use it to watch The Wire and play pinball in HD.

It's not a surprise when you think about it, but Americans' main leisure activity is participating in experiences that we know are not real, i.e. TV, movies, video games, books. Paul Bloom on "The Pleasures of Imagination," from the Chronicle of Higher Education:

This is a strange way for an animal to spend its days. Surely we would be better off pursuing more adaptive activities—eating and drinking and fornicating, establishing relationships, building shelter, and teaching our children. Instead, 2-year-olds pretend to be lions, graduate students stay up all night playing video games, young parents hide from their offspring to read novels, and many men spend more time viewing Internet pornography than interacting with real women. One psychologist gets the puzzle exactly right when she states on her Web site: "I am interested in when and why individuals might choose to watch the television show Friends rather than spending time with actual friends."

Why is this exactly? Mainly, Bloom says, because imagining experiences is a lot less work. But the fictional life is more interesting too:

... fictional people tend to be wittier and more clever than friends and family, and their adventures are usually much more interesting. I have contact with the lives of people around me, but this is a small slice of humanity, and perhaps not the most interesting slice. My real world doesn't include an emotionally wounded cop tracking down a serial killer, a hooker with a heart of gold, or a wisecracking vampire. As best I know, none of my friends has killed his father and married his mother. But I can meet all of those people in imaginary worlds.

Designer Frank Chimero says books now have to earn their right to be printed on paper:

I want to see things earn the privilege to be objects. If we have the option of things being “real” and “not real,” I want the real stuff to be really good. I want the times when ink hits paper to always be beautiful, useful, and desirable. It seems like such a shame to cut down a tree to print this Land’s End catalog, with the thin model coyly smiling at me on the back in her awkward swimsuit. I bet it bunches up in the wrong spots. It seems silly to give permanence to a thing that was meant to be ephemeral to begin with. This goes for junk mail, beach-books, handouts for students, whatever. If your shelf-life is shorter than forever and ever amen, I think we need to think about whether or not it needs to be printed.

I don't necessarily like the implication that something published digitally is less worthy, but he makes a good point later about content. The paper copy serves one purpose as an art object, the content serves another as information:

If I’m thinking as a normal consumer, I don’t really care terribly much about what the future of ink on paper is going to be. I care about what the future of content is going to be. I want fuller, more thoughtful, more substantial, more enriching, more nourishing content. I want good stuff. I want stuff that doesn’t feel like a chew toy. I’d suppose that the only people who care about the future of ink on paper are the people who make their money (or not) selling the paper that has the ink on it. (Or if your magazine is named PRINT.) Those of us who consume the content, I’d suppose, don’t give much of a rat’s ass. We want convenience and access, and then after that quality.

(via @R_Nash)

This article by Nicholas Carr from Wired, an adaptation from his book, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, caused quite a stir online late last week, namely because it suggested that the internet may not be all that great for our brains. Carr cites research by a UCLA professor that shows how web surfing rewires neural pathways in the brain to encourage faster but more shallow thinking:

When we go online, we enter an environment that promotes cursory reading, hurried and distracted thinking, and superficial learning. Even as the Internet grants us easy access to vast amounts of information, it is turning us into shallower thinkers, literally changing the structure of our brain.

As Carr wrote in another piece for the Atlantic, Google is indeed making us stupid. What he is saying is that it's not so much the length of content online that encourages skimming, it's the sheer volume of possibilities. We don't feel like we have enough time to linger over any blog post or tweet, not to mention 2,500-word articles on psychology, because we have to move on to the next one. We're overwhelmed by choice. Rogert Ebert calls this the quest for frisson, moments of intense reaction. In the real world this is often accompanied by a physical reaction. Online it's usually expressed as "OMG" or "LOL." The problem for Ebert is that whatever the charge he gets from them, finding them is a compulsion:

A frisson can be quite a delight. The problem is, I seem to be spending way too much time these days in search of them. In an ideal world, I would sit down at my computer, do my work, and that would be that. In this world, I get entangled in surfing and an hour disappears.

The effects on work is obvious, especially the solitary concentration required by writing. "Multitasking" has always been a problem, if not outright myth. It seems like our brain can switch back and forth between many tasks, but it's still focusing on one at a time and the costs of switching are dear. AJ Jacobs has taken to tying himself to a chair to force himself to stay put and concentrate. But now the distractions of the internet are bleeding into pleasure reading. If we read more and more on the same devices where we work and look at videos of cats playing the piano, how can we be expected to concentrate? An e-book takes so long to read, and there are just so many cat videos you haven't seen yet.