Futurist sensibility = no sensibility.

The "Futurist sensibility", according to Marinetti, is the modern mind set brought about by our dependence on telephones, trains, cars, tv ... all technology, essentially. All our crazy gadgets have effected our psyche more than we realize, he argues. He dwells on a list of the phenomena caused by our obsessions. They all move us further away from European ideals (the laissez fair lifestyle, 'less is more' attitude, and emphasis on sensuality) and closer to a cold, isolated existence. Here are a few notable items on the list ...

- Acceleration of the pace of life in general. We want things to happen faster than instantaneous, not just online, but everywhere.

- Dread of quiet. I feel this. Silence makes me nervous, perhaps because I am a child of the interwebs. I think this has a lot to do with the first point. Silence is stillness, stillness is slowness.

- Attitude of daily heroism. This one I find sort of halarious. I'm not sure what Marinetti means by this. To be sure, the internet grants us freedom in the possibility to manipulate our identities, greater agency over our life and activities, but he's talking about technology all across the board, including bikes and trains and stuff. He even refers to a telegraph - so I guess this was written before the days of ye ole' interwebs. I can't imagine how sending a telegraph would make you feel like a hero. (I guess theres something to be said for crossing something off a to do list though...and if that makes you feel like a hero, then more power to you).

- Multiplication of human desires. The idea that we can't simply be happy with what we have anymore scares me. I think theres an element of human nature present here in the fact that we are pretty much inherently envious creatures, and when we see Pam Beth and Sherry with sweet highlights, we instantly think of ourselves and how much we deserve that, too. In terms of technology, as more becomes available to us, the more we desire.

- Man multiplied by the machine. AVATARS ATTACK!

- Idea and love of the record. We've always had this, I think. Technology just helps. Bazin said that we are creatures who have a strange preoccupation with preserving things. He called this our mummy complex. Hence, our fascination with film and photography and its unparralled ability to capture a moment in time. We treasure these things, especially after those who they depict are gone.

- Disdain for 'amore'. Certainly, I think romance is being abandoned in this modern age ... its changing, at least. In terms of the internet, sex becomes the selling tactic, the lure, the point. It's the "cut to the chase" mentality. In the disdian for amore, Marinetti refers to the fact that women are granted more agency over their own lives with technology, and are exposed to a world of substitutes for love. He refers to the general "latest model" which I find sort of presumptious and superficial, and makes said women that Marinetti refers to sound materialistic and lame. (Again, I fail to see the relevance of the telegraph here.) Unless of couse said women are sending hateful telegraphs to ex lovers showing off how much more satisfied they are with the "latest model".

All these products of technology have generated our "pictorial dynamism, our antigraceful music in its free, irregular rhythms, our noise-art and our words-in-freedom." Marinetti makes a bunch of huge sweeping statements in his general "technology" he speaks of. I think the points above could apply to the use of the internet, but not necessarily a bicycle or something. A pencil can be considered technology, for crying out loud. I reckon a pencil won't cloy our humanly senses so entirely that we throw away any conception of amore.

While I'm at it, I think as long as there is Grimaldi's pizza, there will be amore. As long as there's chocolate, there will be amore. As long as there's Jon Cusack there will be romance. And I don't forsee him ever dying.

Besides, noise and words in freedom sound pretty cool to me and Marinetti sounds super old fashioned and frigid. His lament of this futuristic sensibility seems to me like a lament for how damn dreary he is.

Poems on the interwebs !- Oh, accelerated times.

"Cruising", by Ingrid Ankerson and Megan Sapnar, combines spoken word with a crazy interactive reel of black and white images of the speakers hometown. It's story about high school girl antics in "small town Wisconsin" - pink lipstick, sniffing out the street like dogs, cruising mane street in Mary Joes fathers station wagon, (told against a background of what I presume to be Spanish guitar?)

At first I couldn't really tell if my mouse had any effect on the way the image reel moved. When I got patient with this internet contraption, I realized it did - I could make the reel spin by faster or slower, move it closer or further away. It reminded me of a little video game I had when I was a kid - I could drive this little car down a track, the car would stay in the same place but I could move the track with the steering wheel. I reckon if I wanted to get super analytical about this, I would say that the electronic medium allows the viewer to manipulate the presentation of the poem, thereby showing the lack of control the speaker has over her life. (I was a teenage girl once, I had fun once, I'm hip, ok ? I know what its like to grow up in a small town and have life flash before my eyes at times.)

Anyway ...

We've come a long way since Albert Tennyson recorded his poems into a wax cylinder.

Chop wood, regain life.

I think Borgmann was onto something when he said that the focal practises of things sponsor skill and discipline and result in a stronger, more 'real' sense of community.

For example, the focal practises revolving around heating your place with a stove, as opposed to simply paying for central heating, involve the act of gathering wood, chopping it, gathering around the hearth, singing Kuymbaya and making banana boats ...

Borgman laments that we can now buy simulated pre packaged banana boats at Seven Eleven, without having to do much more than tug at a plastic wrapper for a few seconds. (I dont know if these actually exist, it's just my awesome example.)

Anyway, the point is, that while we are slaving away with these tedious tasks that go along with having a stove, something magical happens - We talk, we sweat, we swear, we hate life a little bit, but we form a rapport with our fellow creatures with whom we toil. We achieve solidarity through the communal struggle, we understand each other a little better.

A community happens !

(a low tech life + suffering = community)

It seems to me like that Borgamm laments the loss of the tribe we all once were. We used to travel in packs and search for food together, eat together, build out shelters together, and live together. We aren't animals anymore (at least we think we aren't) and we are becoming increasingly solitary. We have our digital communities to thank for this, I believe. We become less in touch with ourselves and each other as we spend so much time inside our space biased technologies.

I agree that community is more than simply communication, and that the world is comprised of the fruits of our labours, but why can't that include our ethereal productions online? Devices, devices ... these are devices, not things, Borgmann would say. They conceal their inner workings. Borgmann doesn't trust them. Well, just because you can't touch it doesnt mean its not real, or valid. Is an online idea in an essay or article inferior to a hard copy?

The funny thing is though, the space biased technologies that modern western society is so oriented toward are meant to overcome the natural boundaries of space and time, so that we save time. But then shouldnt we have time to do all these focal things?

What are people actually doing now that we save so much time?
Creating facebook profiles? Watching porn? Breeding hamsters?

There are a good many number of communities that revolve around doing things online. Like this student group I'm a part of, we have a blog for other students in the Faculty of Arts to submit poems and fiction and art. We consider this blog a store window of these labours. And it's not easy. There are a good many tasks involved, like layout, selection, organizing.

I wouldn't compare it to buying McDonalds on the way home instead of stopping at a farmers market to buy groceries.

Nor would I compare it to learning to buying an ipod instead of leanring to play the violin. Someone tried to make this comparison in a class I took in first year and I remember it to this day because I found it so positively ludicrous.

There are some things that are simply not comparable. A stove and A/C are not comparable to writing an e-mail to your favourite boy band. These ideas are both based in expediency, but aren't really on the same level. Sure, its easy to get to know someone when your both sweating your asses off chopping wood, but it's also pretty easy to get to know people when you are working on a creative endeavor that happens to be posted on the world wide web.

I don't need to be a part of this student group, but I need to keep my house warm in the winter or else I'll freeze to death. Is it possible that Borgman focuses only on parallel examples that are needs as opposed to wants? I think we could all acknowledge that we dont really need the internet, we could live without it, but life would be a lot harder and more tedious.

and we wouldn't have as much time to breed hamsters.

Viva la Google !

The idea of a quick read is nothing new. They’ve been around since the Victorian Era.

- The Penny Dreadful, 19th century – small chapbooks published on cheap paper for middle class adolescents for mindless entertainment. It was sensational fiction for the masses.

- Magazines. A lot of long stories were originally published serially in magazines. Pinocchio was originally published in sequence in The Strand magazine. No one ever complained about reading small parts of a tale at a time then.

- Comic books / graphic novels. Often more pictures than words, some crazy amazing books are graphic novels – V for Vendetta, The Watchmen ... is their intellectual value compromised due to the inclusion of pictures? Archie is a bloody God as far as I’m concerned.

- The poetry chapbook. Designed to be flipped through.

- Coffee table books. Visually pleasing AND informative. I’ve totally quoted coffee table books in essay’s before, no lie.

The list goes on ...

Google may present a quick and painless way to get at information, but I don’t think it is making us stupid. There are valid points to the argument that Google is detrimental to young scholarly minds, to be sure, but the bottom line is, the human desire to be an expert at something, to live for something, will triumph Google’s brevity and pithiness. We are miners, and as long as there are questions, there will be demands for answers.

(Plus, I'm kind of scared Google can hear my thoughts and might turn me into one of those colourful plastic balls in their headquarters.)

No matter how we may try to pummel his skinny ass, the geek will never die.

The internet will eat your soul.

Digitextuality is a term that expresses the continuities between old media and new media.

It differs from mere intertextuality because it moves beyond a new signifying system, and makes its meaning not only by building a new text through the absorption of influence from other texts, but by embedding the entirety of other text within the new.

The internet has swallowed everything else - how can other media compete?

To be sure, the internet, unlike any other media outlet, can make us believe that we exist as an avatar. I am not my Facebook account, for example. But someone who checks it out thoroughly might believe they are well aquainted with me even though it doesnt show my real name, pictures from only a small segment of a few years of my life, or even a comprehensive list of interests or favourite books.

Turkle stated that it is on the internet that our confrontations with technology as it collides with our sense of human identity are fresh, even raw. Serious gamers out there might believe that the internet is the only true life. And there are a bunch of games that capitalize on this. Second life, Simms, and so many others, are digital identities that we can slip into and out of like a pair of shoes.

There are lots of ways we can interact with the internet. To interact internally is to become a member of a virtual world. To interact externally is to be situated outside of it, controlling it "from above". Then there are exploratory, when we are free to wander around the online world, and ontological, when we determind the world and the story that comes out of it.

Games usually involve internal / ontological participation (especially adventure games, as opposed to simulation games).

If there is anything Noel Caroll taught me with his discussion of horror films, it is the fact that the emotions we experience through fiction are exactly the same as the ones envoked by reality.

It makes me sort of uncomfortable to think I could have control over an entire world, fall in love, kill people, have babies, get rich, and even die, without any of that ever even existing exept in my own mind.

But that brings me to a larger question ... does it really matter ?

After I watched the Matrix I was quite content to decide that if this world simply didn't exist, I wouldn't really care. The experience of life is simply that - an experience. So I suppose it doesn't really matter if you want to live vicariously through an avatar.

My room mates aren't even up yet and I've already had an existential crisis. What ELSE is new?

Walter Ong - Jesuit priest by day, academic truth seeker by night.

Walter Ong thought that writing is the most momentous of all human technological innovations. It isn't merely an appendage to speech, but rather restructures consciousness itself. He described writing as a technology that we have to force ourselves to learn, and it effects the transformation of human thought from the world of sound to the world of sight. Writing allows for the "interiorization of thought", and implies that the word is a thing, not an event.

Such a transition has implications for structuralism, deconstruction.

This is where I can't help but draw on my post modern homeboy, Adorno, and his scathing modernist raval George Orwell.

Orwell maintains that our slovenly modern language is the driving force behind our deteriorating culture. (LOL, brb, ttyl, OMG !!)He believes that a concise style, conducive to logic, reason and consistency, is the ideal avenue to truth. So Orwell kind of takes Ong's idea that writing restructures thought and takes it a step further and gets petty about style.

Howver, Orwell’s style poses too many restrictions to provide an adequate method of communication for particularly radical thoughts, thereby limiting self expression and actually contributing to the downfall of language and culture.

The contrast between Orwell’s intentions see themselves echoed in postmodern aims. Both Jacques Derrida and Theodore Adorno, postmodern thinkers, also had an agenda of political hope and change, but sought to achieve these goals by means of an elaborate writing style. Both Orwell and Adorno recognized a close relation between the corruption of language and the corruption of politics, but disagreed on the need for clear language as a vehicle for change.

The idea that writing restructures consciousness seems to be floating around all over the place, especially in my program Arts and Contemporary Studies.

Ong lamented this fact. He wasn't down with the feeling of finality writing possesses, and the closure it encouraged. (Pressing backspace is impossible, apparently.) But I see what he is getting at. Orality is so up in the air. For example if I ran into a friend on campus and they said "Kait lets do coffee Thursday" and I replied "Oh yeah sure 3 oclock?" I pretty much am free to do whatever I want on Thursday at 3 because there is no sure-fire way my friend can go back and cite this statement - nothing has been set in stone. If they approach me later about it I could just tell them they were going crazy,and I hadn't seen them for a week. But if this conversation goes down via text message, the plans are more finalized.

(I do this often, for fun. Just to test Ong's theory)

Welcome to my Narrative in a Digital Age Blog.

I named this blog after an excerpt from an Allen Ginsberg poem, Howl (1956). Part II of the poem, depicting this line, is a lament of "the monster of mental consciousness that preys on the Lamb". Meaning, the detrimental state of industrial civilization, characterized by the word 'moloch'. Ginsberg expresses resentfulness toward the radios, smokestacks, prisons and buildings he references.

Moloch is also the name of a monster in the movie Metropolis. This 1927 silent film was said to have influenced his poem. I watched this film recently and found it to be surprisingly cynical and depressing, (considering it has no dialogue). It is set in 2026, when the class divide has reached crazy levels such that the working class retreats to an underworld of gloom and filth to live out their days, and the rich live in sunny splendour eating grapes and dancing to polka music. The entire film is dominated by obscure, elaborate technology.

I felt that Howl is appropriate in this discussion of Narrative in a Digital Age because it embodies so much of the popular opinion we hear about increasing technology. It is widely thought that the internet is changing the way we think and read, Google is promoting artificial intellegence, and crazy visual effects are rendering us slaves to visual stimulation as opposed to intellectual.

These are all relevant points, I reckon.
But what can be said of the sunny splendour of convenience? The necessity of accessible information to the writer? The sheer pleasure of talking to my homeboys and girls on facebook chat?

At any rate, we've reached a digital age and can't go back now. So we may as well be look on the bright side of it. And that's what this blog will try to achieve. An optimistic view of digitized narrative. I might fail brutally and throw my laptop out the window onto Bloor street, (but I really doubt this). My idea of high tech is pretty much a gee-haw whimmie diddle. This is going to be interesting.

Join me on the wild ride as I explore the trials and tribulations of the mind that is pure machinery ...