Solitude And Communion

Previous technologies have expanded communication. But the last round may be contracting it. The eloquence of letters has turned into the unnuanced spareness of texts; the intimacy of phone conversations has turned into the missed signals of mobile phone chat. I think of that lost world, the way we lived before these new networking technologies, as having two poles: solitude and communion. The new chatter puts us somewhere in between, assuaging fears of being alone without risking real connection. It is a shallow between two deep zones, a safe spot between the dangers of contact with ourselves, with others.

I live in the heart of it, and it’s normal to walk through a crowd — on a train, or a group of young people waiting to eat in a restaurant — in which everyone is staring at the tiny screens in their hands. It seems less likely that each of the kids waiting for the table for eight has an urgent matter at hand than that this is the habitual orientation of their consciousness. At times I feel as though I’m in a bad science fiction movie where everyone takes orders from tiny boxes that link them to alien overlords. Which is what corporations are anyway, and mobile phones decoupled from corporations are not exactly common.

REBECCA SOLNIT Diary from London Review Of Books Vol. 35 No. 16

. . . now it's hard to get through a meal with friends without somebody reaching for an iPhone to retrieve the kind of fact it used to be the brain's responsibility to remember.

JONATHAN FRANZEN Saturday Guardian Review 14-09-13

Nice, Solnit's word 'shallow'.

Are we in danger of losing access to the humanly important, life-enhancing states of 'solitude and communion'? We certainly have to work harder to achieve them. And they are, in my view, deeply necessary.

Just a few observations.

I know someone who walked the Pennine Way with his earpiece incessantly feeding mediaspeak for the whole trip.

The other day, as I strolled round a beautiful nearby town on a gorgeous sunny afternoon, I tried to estimate how many people were smartphoning and iPadding. My guess was 70%. They were doing it alone, in couples and in groups, in shop doorways, sitting on benches in parks and railway stations, standing, walking, running.

And am I the only person who thinks it's rude to tweet and text at mealtimes and in intimate company? (I may be quite out-of-date here, as I've noticed how many people now seem able to integrate the new technologies with ease into social situations, multitasking quite naturally.)

Amazon

In my own little corner of the world, which is to say American fiction, Jeff Bezos of Amazon may not be the antichrist, but he surely looks like one of the four horsemen. Amazon wants a world in which books are either self-published or published by Amazon itself, with readers dependent on Amazon reviews in choosing books, and with authors responsible for their own promotion. The work of yakkers and tweeters and braggers, and of people with the money to pay somebody to churn out hundreds of five-star reviews for them, will flourish in that world. But what happens to the people who became writers because yakking and tweeting and bragging felt to them like intolerably shallow forms of social engagement? What happens to the people who want to communicate in depth, individual to individual, in the quiet and permanence of the printed word, and who were shaped by their love of writers who wrote when publication still assured some kind of quality control and literary reputations were more than a matter of self-promotional decibel levels? As fewer and fewer readers are able to find their way, amid all the noise and disappointing books and phony reviews, to the work produced by the new generation of this kind of writer, Amazon is well on its way to making writers into the kind of prospectless workers whom its contractors employ in its warehouses, labouring harder for less and less, with no job security, because the warehouses are situated in places where they're the only business hiring. And the more of the population that lives like those workers, the greater the downward pressure on book prices and the greater the squeeze on conventional booksellers, because when you're not making much money you want your entertainment for free, and when your life is hard you want instant gratification ('Overnight free shipping!').

JONATHAN FRANZEN Saturday Guardian Review 14-09-13