Life Filter

The Age of Efficiency is over. This is the Age of Immediacy, faster than the speed of thought. A week is an eternity; four hundred words is too many; yesterday is ancient. Stories aren't only sorted by category; they're ranked by popularity.

-Jill Lepore, “Untimely”

Too much information running through my brain
Too much information driving me insane

-The Police

I.

How do you filter your life? Narrowing the focus of one’s cultural intake is something we all do, simply out of necessity. I don’t know anyone capable of indiscriminately watching every show on television, or every movie that appears in theaters, or reading every book on the New York Times Best Seller list, or listening to every album on the Billboard charts—much less anyone who would want to. Not only would it require every hour of every day, it would be exhausting—and not very much fun. And having “fun” is why we indulge in our cultural products of choice.

Lately, I’ve discovered that I don’t find the Internet as “fun” as it used to be. In fact, a few years back I realized that the Internet was driving me crazy. Not in an “Ooo! You’re driving me crazy!” way but in a literal, “I now have access to such an endless amount of information, and I’m perpetually absorbing so much of it, I think my brain may be losing its grip on its mental parameters” kind of way. This was different from what I expect the mind-expanding experiences described by Aldous Huxley in The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell would be like, so no—it wasn’t very fun.

A typical instance of this mental slippage would begin with me visiting a random webpage, clicking on a link within that webpage, following a few more links from that page, trying to backtrack to the original webpage, but instead stumbling upon another interesting link to click on, following that link (and the inevitable chain of links from that page), generally spending several hours reading pages that have little to do with what I’d originally started reading about, and finally stopping (without even remembering where I’d begun) only because I’ve given myself eyestrain and need to go stare at some trees and flowers for a while. But while I’m staring at those trees and flowers I’ll reflect on what I’ve “learned” from my most recent foray into the ’net--and decide it isn’t much. So I have, in effect, wasted my time.

I’m not alone, clearly. Some people react to this loss of time by deciding to go cold turkey and swear off the Internet completely (though often only for a while, as in the case of James Sturm). I’m not nearly that radical. I see the Internet as a valuable resource and acknowledge that it has enriched my life these past fifteen years. I just want some order in my life so I don’t spend too much of my time reading shit I don’t actually care about.

Besides, the problem is more than just time wasted. Every time I fall into the trap of clicking from link to link like a madman, spending hours at a time reading about the Domesday Book and William the Conqueror and the coats of arms of the English monarchy and the House of Hanover, or looking at funny pictures of lol cats and photos of 74 unusual giant trees, and on and on, I feel afterwards like I’d been wading around in a shallow puddle of information that stretches as far as the eye could see, without said information ever achieving a depth of more than a few inches. True, I now know that William died from injuries he sustained while falling off his horse (not the first iron-fisted ruler to die in an anticlimactic way), and that Prince Albert had stupid-looking sideburns, but I hardly have a deeper understanding of the Battle of Hastings or what effect, if any, the role of “king consort” has on England’s contemporary monarchy. Which, since I’m not even British, has very little impact on my life anyway.

The result of standing around in this shallow puddle is that my brain begins to operate on that same level. When it comes to subjects I’m not previously familiar with, I know a little about “everything” but not a lot about anything. (And of course by “everything” I mean lots of things, because in this Age of Immediacy it’s impossible to know something about truly everything.) After all, what’s the point of committing a deep well of knowledge to memory if a lot of that knowledge is readily available in bits and pieces online? But the problem with this approach is that ultimately one ends up knowing nothing. The seeker becomes a receptacle of trivia instead of someone with a profound understanding of whatever it is he or she is passionate about. As Richard Foreman wrote in “The Pancake People, or, ‘The Gods Are Pounding My Head,’”

I come from a tradition of Western culture, in which the ideal (my ideal) was the complex, dense and “cathedral-like” structure of the highly educated and articulate personality—a man or woman who carried inside themselves a personally constructed and unique version of the entire heritage of the West.

And such multi-faceted evolved personalities did not hesitate—especially during the final period of “Romanticism-Modernism”—to cut down, like lumberjacks, large forests of previous achievement in order to heroically stake new claim to the ancient inherited land— this was the ploy of the avant-garde.

But today, I see within us all (myself included) the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self—evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the “instantly available.” A new self that needs to contain less and less of an inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance—as we all become “pancake people”—spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.
In my junior year of high school, circa 1989, I took a class called “World History” taught by Mr. Beaver. Mr. Beaver was an old-school, Don Draper type (if Don Draper were in his fifties, pudgy, and bald). He referred to all women as “chicks,” had no problem calling a student an idiot if he said something stupid in class, was involved in a nasty love triangle with two other teachers on campus, and had won so many free pizzas from 92.3 FM’s daily call-in trivia game that they changed the rules so the same caller could win only once a month.

When I applied to the University of Chicago that year I met with an alumnus who talked to me about all kinds of things, including which high school classes I was taking. When I told him I was taking world history he was baffled. “Is that just a two-semester class?” he asked. It was. “How can you learn the entire history of the world in just two semesters?”

The answer, of course, is that you can’t. “World History” brought a whole new level of meaning to the phrase “survey class.” If I recall correctly, it began with the Stone Age and ended with World War II eight months later. That’s about a century’s-worth of history every week. Though Mr. Beaver was a captivating teacher and dogmatically focused on the epochs he considered particularly noteworthy, the class was patently incapable of doing more than scratching the surface of its purported subject. If faithful advertising were required for high school class names, this one would have been called “World History from Mr. Beaver’s Perspective.” (Of course I realize this is the case for any class on a more or less subjective topic in the humanities, such as history, literature, political science, sociology, etc. But my point here is that this was an extreme example of a teacher cherry-picking the “important” material from a span of 5000+ years.)

In the end, I would have served my mind better if I’d taken Mrs. Allison’s class on the French and Indian Wars. Less ground covered, but with enough depth that I would know much more about that period in history than I do (which, 20 years out of high school, is that it was the colonial counterpart to Europe’s Seven Years’ War. The end).

Similarly, as a result of wading in that shallow pool of Internet knowledge for all those years, I had in some ways forfeited my “complex inner density.” As Nicholas Carr wrote in the Atlantic (“Is Google Making Us Stupid? What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains”),

The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author’s words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds. In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas. Deep reading, as Maryanne Wolf argues, is indistinguishable from deep thinking.

If we lose those quiet spaces, or fill them up with “content,” we will sacrifice something important not only in our selves but in our culture.

II.

In truth, I’m probably overselling this “problem” a bit. I have no trouble reading a book. I’ve even read a few recently! But how do you find the ones that will appeal to you most? As Gabriel Zaid wrote in So Many Books: Reading and Publishing in an Age of Abundance,

The human race publishes a book every thirty seconds.... Books are published at such a rapid rate that they make us exponentially more ignorant. If a person reads a book a day, he would be neglecting to read four thousand others, published the same day. In other words, the books he didn't read would pile up four thousand times faster than his knowledge. (22)
(Perhaps a defeatist view of reading, but fortunately Zaid goes on to write, “Maybe the measure of our reading should therefore be, not the number of books we've read, but the state in which they leave us . . . what matters is . . . whether reading makes us, physically, more alive” [24]. Agreed!)

So what’s the solution? There are many, I’m sure, but I prefer David Foster Wallace’s calm approach (as outlined in “Deciderization 2007 - a Special Report,” his introduction to The Best American Essays 2007):

Professional filtering/winnowing is a type of service that we citizens and consumers now depend on more and more, and in ever-increasing ways, as the quantity of available information and products and art and opinions and choices and all the complications and ramifications thereof expands at roughly the rate of Moore's Law. (xv)
True, this opens one up to all kinds of biases, particularly on the Internet (which Nicholas Carr, again, points to in his book The Big Switch: “[Google] impose[s] homogeneity on the Internet's wild heterogeneity. As the tools and algorithms become more sophisticated and our online profiles more refined, the Internet will act increasingly as an incredibly sensitive feedback loop, constantly playing back to us, in amplified form, our existing preferences” [161]. As a result, according to New Yorker writer Ken Auletta, “Carr believes that people will narrow their frame of reference, gravitate toward those whose opinions they share, and perhaps be less willing to compromise, because the narrow information we receive will magnify our differences, making it harder to reach agreement” [54]) but people everywhere have been taking sides and refusing to consider counterarguments for centuries now. Otherwise there would be no such thing as political parties, philosophy departments, or war. So let’s not sound the end-of-civilization alarm quite yet, OK? As Wallace goes on to write,

I suspect that part of why “bias” is so loaded and dicey a word just now—and why it's so much-invoked and potent in cultural disputes—is that we are starting to become more aware of just how much subcontracting and outsourcing and submitting to other Deciders we're all now forced to do, which is threatening (the inchoate awareness is) to our sense of ourselves as intelligent free agents. And yet there is no clear alternative to this outsourcing and submission. It may possibly be that acuity and taste in choosing which Deciders one submits to is now the real measure of informed adulthood. Since I was raised with more traditional Enlightenment-era criteria, this possibility strikes me as consumerist and scary . . . to which the counterargument would be, again, that the alternatives are literally abysmal. (xvi)

[M]any Americans are worried that what appears to be the reality we're experiencing and making choices about is maybe actually just a small, skewed section of reality that's been pre-chosen for us by shadowy entities and forces, whether these be left-leaning media, corporate cabals, government disinformers, our own unconscious prejudices, etc. (xvi)

Part of our [American] emergency is that it's so tempting . . . to retreat to narrow arrogance, pre-formed positions, rigid filters, the 'moral clarity' of the immature. The alternative is dealing with massive, high-entropy amounts of info and ambiguity and conflict and flux; it's continually discovering new areas of personal ignorance and delusion. In sum, to really try to be informed and literate today is to feel stupid nearly all the time, and to need help. (xxiii)
Ah, a refreshing beacon of sagacity, isn’t he? Where will we be in the coming years, without DFW to guide us? I shudder to think, but with any luck he left us with enough insightful knowledge to get by. So far so good.

III.

To bring us back to the point of this post, then: How do I filter my life? I read a few magazines and journals, browse a few annuals, visit a few websites, watch a few TV shows and movies, and call it a day. It’s all about what you like. Here’s what I like:

Magazines

The New Yorker
Vanity Fair

Journals

The Paris Review
McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern
Granta
Tin House
Indiana Review

Annuals

Pushcart Prize
The Best American Short Stories/Essays/Comics/Nonrequired Reading
The Year’s Best Science Fiction

Websites

The New York Times
Salon
New Scientist
Wikipedia (trust but verify)
Amazon
Goodreads
The Comics Journal
Pitchfork
Television without Pity
Netflix
Internet Movie Database
Apple Movie Trailers
Gamespot

Television

Chuck
Glee
Men of a Certain Age
The Office
Parenthood
Southland
So You Think You Can Dance
True Blood

IV.

Even with this short list to guide me, my days still pass by too quickly. Maybe that's another provocation of this crisis of mine: at age 37 my sense of time wasted is far more acute than it was when I was 25. Back then I was convinced I'd have enough time to read and (even more naively) reread everything I wanted to. I used to keep my back issues of the New Yorker and Vanity Fair, convinced that somewhere down the line I would revisit the articles that resonated with me. Needless to say, I've thrown out those boxes of magazines and no longer keep the new issues after I've read through them. Books still get reshelved because I do reread some of the great ones, but in general the optimism of youth has given way to the cynicism of middle age.

Anyway, that's what this blog is supposed to be about (avoiding wasted time, I mean, not cynicism). I don't expect anyone besides me to read it, necessarily (none of my previous blog's readers are aware of its existence), but as long as it serves its purpose to me, then it's done its job. For anyone else it can only pose this question: How do you filter your life?

Bibliography

Auletta, Ken, "Searching for Trouble," the New Yorker (October 12, 2009)

Carr, Nicholas, The Big Switch (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2008)

Carr, Nicholas, "Is Google Making Us Stupid? What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains," the Atlantic (July 2008)

Foreman, Richard, "The Pancake People, or, 'The Gods Are Pounding My Head,'" Edge: The Third Culture (March 8, 2005)

Lepore, Jill, "Untimely," the New Yorker (April 19, 2010)

Wallace, David Foster, "Deciderization 2007 - a Special Report," The Best American Essays 2007 (New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2007)

Zaid, Gabriel, So Many Books: Reading and Publishing in an Age of Abundance (Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2003)