In Withdrawal...

I've been on traveling for almost two weeks now, and a good portion of that time I haven't had Internet access available to me on the 24-7 basis I'm accustomed to. I knew I was used to using it, but I never realized quite how many of my daily and monthly errands required extensive use of the Internet. I pay bills online. I've been finishing up grad applications, and many of those have online components which take a lot of time to fill out.

On the more communications-connected front, I've missed having email and IM as an alternative to the phone for contacting some friends. Not to mention the blog-reading I'm behind on.

I suppose it's not that surprising--and even a bit healthy--that I'm a bit out of touch while on vacation visiting others. And realistically, it hasn't been terribly hard to get to places with wireless for a few minutes now and then. But it's certain that I've learned to appreciate once again my full-time Internet at home.

And on the creativity front, I find it interesting how hard it is to do, not the writing itself, but the pitching and printing of the writing without easy access to the usual tools--the Internet and a printer. It's one thing to compose without these things, but it's hard to research markets and send stuff out without them.

Now that I've had a few days with Internet, I'll be back to another week of spotty access before I get back to my standard way of life. And it seems that the potential portability of our errands nowadays, while nice, has a few potential downsides to it. But that's okay--most of my key online errands have been completed now, so all will be well.

It's been nice to get away a bit, but it's usually also nice to get back by the end. That great truth of traveling hasn't changed much with the advent of technology. It just has a technology-related twist to it at times now.

Observation Doesn't Quite Fit Either Hype...

So a few weeks ago I was walking from security to my gate in the Richmond, Virginia airport. As I did, I thought about how different the communication patterns in airports are now from ten years ago. Many more people talking on cell phones. Many more people (I was one of them) listening to iPods. People with laptops.

A critic of technology, I realized, might point out those things in the airport and say they were overly-virtualizing communication. That they were keeping from talking to each other face-to-face. Living in virtual worlds instead of the real world.

But then again, there were still lots of people reading books. Talking to people they were traveling with. But my favorite sight--one that made me smile--was two people who didn't look like they knew each other, yet were talking to each other. Why? It seemed--from a glance, at least--that the reason they had connected was because of the electrical outlets their laptops were plugged into.

It's true that communications media has changed the world to a certain degree. And it's probably unhealthily virtualized some of our relationships. But it's delightful to think that it's unexpectedly also forged face-to-face conversations between strangers.

The GRE, the Postal Service, and Internet Study Guides

So I came home the other day and there in my real live mailbox (not the virtual one) there was an envelope from ETS, the organization that manages the GREs. Now, seeing as how I didn't need to take the GRE to get into this MA program, I just took the GRE Subject Test in Literature on November 4. So when I saw the return address, I thought, "Wow! I thought the scores were supposed to take four to six weeks! That's really quick!" (I really was thinking in exclamation points.)

But then--alas--I looked down further on the envelope, and saw the label, which included the words "Practice Test." And I harrumphed. (I'm not sure when the last time is that I actually harrumphed, but I did. Honest.) You see, this was neither my scores nor my practice test for my upcoming General Test--the packaging made it clear that it was the practice test that was supposed to arrive before I took the Subject Test on November 4.

So I'm now expecting my Subject Test scores to arrive by mail sometime after I hear back from most of the programs I'm applying to. The expectations have officially been lowered. Silly paper-based tests. Silly Canadian-American postal service seeming-lack-of-cooperation.

Of course, other than it being a predictor of future mailings, getting the practice tests late wasn't actually that big a deal, thanks to the Internet. I had downloaded and printed a practice test months ago (not that I actually looked at it until a week before). And I found all sorts of helpful study guides online (especially Vade Mecum and Hapax Legomena). And I raided the Cole's Notes- and Cliff's Notes-like sites for lots of superficial information about a lot of authors and works (I find it ironic that all those sites I've been warning undergraduates away from for the last two years were perfect helps for studying for this test). And I had a book to study from (I looked at that all of two weeks before the test).

So getting the practice test two and a half weeks after the actual test date wasn't a big deal, thanks, in large part, to the Internet. It may not be a "wonder of the world," but it is quite handy at times. Otherwise, I would have been quite annoyed at ETS and/or the postal service.

The Internet: A Wonder of the World?

The Web Redefines Reality: I don't know what it is--I'm a big fan of the Web--but whenever I read an article like this one, which proclaims the Internet as one of the wonders of the world, I find myself getting skeptical. It's not that I don't think the Internet hasn't changed our society, our culture, and our sense of the world.

But I suppose I've been behind the scenes too long to be amazed at "the man behind the curtain." Take part in the creation, usability testing, and maintenance of enough websites, it's hard to be in awe of "hyperlinks, routers and fiber-optic cables" that are in constant need of updating and may crash at any time.

And as an academic, it's hard to read a phrase like "It has taken giant steps toward accomplishing one of the goals of the ancients: gathering all the knowledge in the world in one place" without thinking about the huge amount of critical thinking that must be done to discriminate which parts of it are trustworthy.

Yes, the Internet is changing our lives in profound ways. But for one thing, only some of these ways are good. And for another, some of the changes are only faux-changes. Sure the Internet might show us "the interconnectivity of things," but people have been connecting things for a long time. Perhaps, looking at history, I'm not convinced that "the enlightenment of the modern world" will stand up to the test of time. And there are down sides to too much explicit "interconnectivity of things" as well: Information overload. The possibility of increased dependence on connections being made for us instead of finding them for ourselves.

So yeah, I see the point: the Internet is pretty cool. But all earthbound "wonders" have their limitations. As does the rhetoric praising the things deemed to be wonders.

"What Is the Technology For?"

"Researchers have...found that a distraction such as your cell phone ringing, has a greater impact on your concentration than smoking some marijuana.

"'Civilization advances by extending the number of operations which we can perform without thinking about them,' philosopher North Whitehead noted in 1911. Technology should automate the mundane--the trivial truths--so that we have more time to think about great truths.

"If technology is not making our lives more convenient, and giving us more time to think, then we need to question: What is the technology for?

--Gerry McGovern, "Managing in a Technology-Driven World"

Thought this quote was an interesting one, though my thoughts aren't wholly developed about it.

I'm not sure what I think about the statement about cell phones and marijuana... After all, cell phones can build community, and I'm not sure the idea of an attention span should be utterly sancrosanct--it is often some of the "distractions" from what we think of as our "real work" that enrich and deepen our lives the most, even if they make it difficult to concentrate at times.

Then again, there are limits to the stretching of our attention spans, and McGovern makes a good point about taking time to think about what we're using the technology for. I've often thought that our society has made an awful waste of the time we save by technology--all we've done is crammed more productivity into that extra time instead of using it to do things better (and also to do better things) during that time.

Technological Effects on Thinking: Then and Now

In pages 16-18 of his Pulitzer Prize-winning book God: A Biography, literary critic Jack Miles contends that Christians thought of their biblical canon differently because they used a different (at the time newer) technological form: the codex, or bound book, instead of the scroll.

He claims that Christians were more likely to think of their biblical canon, as they compiled it, as being small chapters of a larger work because of the package they were using to put it into, while the Jews, still using individual scrolls, were more likely to think of, say, "Genesis," as an individual book as well as part of the overall Scriptural canon. The difference, he thinks, is the technological container--one which the Hebrews moved to later, but stayed away from for longer.

This contention is a fascinating one. Because of its implications for the Hebrew and Christian understandings of books and Books. And because of its implications for the thoughts it spurs about how new written media "containers" newly available to us--e.g., the Internet, the word processing program, instant messaging, email, etc.--may be changing our thinking about how to put together written works today. My thoughts on the present-day changes are as yet amorphous, but it's a fascinating comparison.

By the way, this book (God: A Biography) looks like a fascinating one so far: it looks at the character of God in the Hebrew Bible from, not a theological or historical perspective, but from a literary "close reading" perspective. Miles studies God as a complicated character in a literary work who many, many people in the Western world have sought to emulate over the last couple thousand years.

Effects of Technology on the Novel

The Novel, 2.0: This fascinating article in Slate has so many interesting facets that it's hard to know what to respond to. I agree with the authors that technology is bound to change the face of the novel, but I'm not entirely sure how. Seeing as how bound book sales keep going up and up, though, I disagree that the novel is moving online any time soon (I've said since the advent of ebooks that until there's a really good reader with a readable screen, I doubt that online books will take off for anything but research and reference purposes--and even once that happens, there will always be adherents to paper).

I do agree that the web and other technology is changing both the way we do things and our attention spans, and I think that will affect some novel-writing and novel-reading (for instance, I think that the current popularity of mystery narratives comes in part out of our fascination with the detective-like quality to finding facts online). But on the whole, I think that people still long for the continuity and resolution provided by a narrative structure in an increasingly fragmented and information-overloaded world, so I don't see the traditionally-plotted novel as going away for quite some time.

As an editor of an online literary journal which encourages creative submissions that use the possibilities inherent in the online form--and having myself written a short online novel at one point (nothing could induce me to tell you the pseudonym under which I wrote it)--the most intriguing part of the article to me is the opportunities offered by the online form, as listed on page 5 of the article. I certainly experienced the workshop-like quality he mentions while I was writing my serialized story, and the impressionistic linking he suggests fascinates me as a creative concept. From now on, I'm determined to use such types of linking every so often in this blog, if only to stimulate my sense of creativity and wordplay.