Do Not Disturb

In Theory, 2005

A Legacy So Far Removed

Decades

Less Is More [Expensive]

Lately, I've spent some time reconsidering my online life and how it seems to have grown disproportionately large. Let me explain:

In the past decade I've relocated to another city, seen many of my closest and most durable friends likewise move to other cities, and for my own part disappeared into competing black holes of career and a long, tedious journey through cancer (and a multitude of treatments for said affliction) that have so consumed my life that I may as well have moved to another solar system. As many of my most important personal connections have grown geographically remote and the circumstances of my life conspired to kept me more homebound, my connection to the larger social world has slowly shifted from actual face-to-face to Facebook. And instant messaging. And email. And so on.

I'm as grateful as anyone for the way these tools have enabled me to maintain meaningful connections that would otherwise have been lost to geography and circumstance, but can't shake the feeling that too great a percentage of my social life is mediated through the internet. In a lucid and humane essay in The New Scientist, Yair Amichai-Hamburger also worries that the cultivation and maintenance of a rich online life sometimes comes at the expense of a more psychologically satisfying real one, that a growing percentage of people lead lonely, melencholy lives bereft of meaningful human contact despite their having 3,000 Facebook friends and a continent full of people following their every Tweet.

If there is a backlash against a perpetually connected life lived through iPhones or Blackberries, it's not making much of a ripple in the marketplace. But just in case, a few manufacturers have taken tentative steps at building products marketed explicitly to address the concern. Bang and Olufsen's now discontinued Serene mobile phone was a beautiful, but wildly uneven first attempt that offered a deliberately limited feature set absent of any rich internet access, instant messaging, Facebook or Twitter. More recently, Sony Ericsson introduced the Pureness mobile phone that it markets as a stylish* (and improbably expensive) alternative for affluent customers who very deliberately want not to be tethered to social media every moment of their lives (Sony Ericsson and Wallpaper magazine have created a microsite that offers insight into the design process and thinking underpinning the Pureness phone, as well a forum for debating the role of mobile devices in contemporary life. Link here). What the Serene and Pureness have in common are striking design, prohibitive pricing, and marketing campaigns that both elevate and differentiate the phones principally by the features they lack.

Of course there's no guarantee that disconnecting oneself from social media will result in a more rewarding life outside of it. But for my own part it's something that with each passing day seems more and more worth exploring.

*the Pureness is in every way a worthy successor to Sony Ericsson's one spectacular design classic, the lovely and equally feature-free T610.

[Posted with iBlogger from my iPhone]

The Borderland

I've been absent for a few months. New posts coming soon. Promise.

Production and Decay of Strange Particles

Vanishing Point

An Army of One

“To be a tourist is to escape accountability. Errors and failings don't cling to you the way they do back home. You're able to drift across continents and languages, suspending the operation of sound thought. Tourism is the march of stupidity. You're expected to be stupid. The entire mechanism of the host country is geared to travelers acting stupidly. You walk around dazed, squinting into fold-out maps. You don't know how to talk to people, how to get anywhere, what the money means, what time it is, what to eat or how to eat it. Being stupid is the pattern, the level and the norm. You can exist on this level for weeks and months without reprimand or dire consequence. Together with thousands, you are granted immunities and broad freedoms. You are an army of fools, wearing bright polyesters, riding camels, taking pictures of each other, haggard, dysenteric, thirsty. There is nothing to think about but the next shapeless event.”

Don DeLillo

from "The Names"

Round and Round

"Experience is a form of paralysis" -Erik Satie

The Measured Response

Inroad

2009

Downtown 94

1994

When Routine Bites Hard

1993

On Gratz Street

Knoxville, Tennessee

My Hood, Circa 1979

Another Time. Another Place.

I've been ruminating a lot on the circular nature of change. Well, the circular nature of my change. Circling back, as it were, here are a few more photographs from that period several years ago when I last found myself at a cross roads.

You Can Tell Me All About It On The Next Bardo

Knoxville 1997, Stormfront

Twelve years ago, after coasting along on neutral, predictable curves for what felt like entirely too long, things began to shift. Nothing seismic, or dramatic, or even particularly interesting at first. Just a series of small changes that seemed to be accumulating into something bigger, and a sense of things ending. I could see this particularly sharp, acute corner ahead but had no idea what was around it. But I did know everything was going to change and I remember taking very conscious stock of my life and wondering what would still be in inventory when it was all settled. Then I turned the corner, everything did change, and quite a few things closest to my heart, and a very many that weren't, were missing from inventory when it was done. Turn the page.

Today, everything is changing again. This time though, the shifts are seismic. And dramatic. And interesting, albeit in that slowing-down-to-look-at-the-traffic-accident sort of way. I made coffee this morning and figured the time was right to start taking stock.