linebaugh
Well-known member
see I feel that too but then you remember that 90% of anyone whose ever written anything good was either awful and/or a psued regardless of decade.
semiotext(e)
Yeah, but we used to be able to point to the 10% who weren't.
sus
Moderator
Hurt you forgot me
sus
Moderator
Maybe tweeting's the new writing and I should switch to how good someone is online when I'm discussing people under 35. It's not as though I'm the only person under that age lamenting the stuff I'm talking about though. You see people on Twitter, Reddit and whatever else all sharing similar opinions about the technology having a negative impact on stuff like attention spans and journalism.
luka
Well-known member
Your writing is definitely good but it's also unreadable. That's the problem you have.
Come on, man.
sus
Moderator
Every page or you're no longer my friend
What I think the big hurdle with the internet is is how conscious it makes people of every other writer. There's no room to breathe and naturally develop something. There's such a weight of easily accessible information and it can be accessed at such a rate that anything you do is unavoidably refracted through this vast web of poses, references and second opinions.
That's obviously true for someone writing pre-internet too, but the intensity of it is new and what I think the problem is. I suspect that if you locked someone in a room with loads of books, even if you forced them to read them all in bits and simultaneously, they would still fare better than your average internet user.
That's obviously true for someone writing pre-internet too, but the intensity of it is new and what I think the problem is. I suspect that if you locked someone in a room with loads of books, even if you forced them to read them all in bits and simultaneously, they would still fare better than your average internet user.
If your brain's forming and deepening connections all the time and you immerse yourself in Twitter then it's got to be like sticking a stimulant in there or something. The rate at which it moves and the size of the chunks it moves in are so different to reading a book. A permanent sprint.
luka
Well-known member
Velocity is definitely a big and important thing and it's also that feedback ping ping ping. That's why emotions are really not possible, why a whole range of affect is blocked off, because it's impossible to be alone now in any real sense, and also becuaSe of the way time has completely changed its character
Reading D&G the other day felt newer than anything I'd read article-wise, tweet-wise etc this year because they were actually creating things. Obviously they had their influences too and there are lots of references to other people in the books, but they're also showing you what they've done with those influences whereas a lot of what I read nowadays feels as though it's people just commenting on things and never slowing down enough to do anything else.
Virilio's point about synchronising emotion seems to extend to human thought in general with the internet. I don't know whether they were legit, but those alleged memes from China, the Middle-East and elsewhere following the usual format of stuff on 4chan were funny to me at first, but now the thought of everyone slotting jokes into the same template all over the world and just changing the language seems incredibly depressing.