You have very accurately described my experiences on social media. My husband often wants to remind me that disparaging “The Internet” or “online usage” (which I can fall into when I despair of the destructive nature of the mainstream or what you call legacy social media) is a broad and therefore unproductive argument. What I hear you saying here is what’s needed is a reset in our thinking and activity so that we treat the virtual spaces as the unknown adventuresome places they are. They are not home. They are a journey we come home from eventually….maybe?
Abbey, so glad this resonated with you. Right, it's not all good or all bad, it's how we choose to behave around it (like so many things). To get my own head anywhere close to right about it all -- to activate that reset -- I had to recognize that I have a bit of an addictive relationship with the vice of curiositas, knowing for interest's sake, rather than having the virtue of studiositas, knowing for Truth's sake. More on this another time, probably!
Thanks! I still mean to delve deeper into your long form unscheduled brain download when other work allows. And I am waffling about whether I can make the Plough thing in San Anton or if it’s too much given the whole picture of life: whatever happens, I’m looking forward to hearing your take on that.
"ideologies and technological innovations … promise to provide clear windows but instead function as unreal filters, distorting the mind’s rapprochement with reality." -- In Too Big to Know, David Weinberger argues that over the centuries the West has come to think of truth as shaped like a book. A book has a aura of finality, certainty, and completeness about it that gives that impression that what it asserts is known with finality, certainty, and completeness. But this, he argues, is just what Joshua Hren is calling an unreal filter, and it is distorting the mind's rapprochement with reality, causing us to regard our knowledge as far more complete and certain than it really is. The Web, Weinberger argues, is teaching us just how uncertain and incomplete our knowledge really is, and eroding our confidence in experts in a way that is at least as salutary as it is troubling.
Yes, our technology for learning and sharing knowledge shapes and filters what we think we know and how we think we know it, and the radical shift that we have undergone, from truth shaped like a book to truth shaped like a web, is troubling and hard to get our heads around. Both can play us false. But at least we are, for now at least, aware that the Web can play us false. We are more wary of the Web than we were of books, and that, at least, is a good thing. And we will learn how to make better use of the Web than we do now, hopefully without becoming too trusting of it.
And the novel, I would point out, is the most non-convivial form of art or entertainment ever invented, a thing which isolates the reader in silence for hours at a time. Substack is a far more convivial place than a novel.
But the undoubted blessing of the online world is that it enables us to have this conversation, and to have the several other fruitful conversations that we have had, here and elsewhere, but never in person. The online world allows me to live in a small town in Nova Scotia and yet also participate interesting conversations on consequential matters with people all over the world. So for me, the answer to your question is both. I find refreshment, reintegration, and renewal both in the place I live and in the conversations I can have. And if it were not for the online world, I would have to choose one or the other, and that would be a very hard choice to make.
Thanks Mark--right, didn’t everyone complain at the beginning of the novel’s history that it isolated people from community & took them out of the flow of shared life? Yet eventually we found ways to fold it in, so as to support human flourishing and real-life connections. (Bookstore readings, seminars, libraries, class discussions--all constitutive of a kind of flourishing, no?) I feel sure something similar will happen with the digital realm eventually, but as with everything, we have to be willing to practice moderation and stay chary of extremes of all kinds.
Yes, exactly. It takes a while to find the balance after a major disruption, but we will find it. Which is not to say that the disruption won't have made a difference. We will always see knowledge and truth differently now. But we will find our sea legs in this new world.
Hi Katy (waves across a room of virtual friends....many whom we have in common). I'm so glad to have found you here on Substack.
I've been writing online since 2012 and circled the virtual water cooler of social media for way too long...my discontent and unease only increased the last year or so and I finally walked away completely from IG in April and FB end of September of this year.
The impetus was a podcast called Writing off Social (find them on your favorite platform). I've since taken their inaugural course and learned a t o n about how to build a platform (I do loathe that word) without social media. I've written about it quite recently here on the 'stack. You might take a moment to check it out when you have a chance.
ps. This fellow birder applauds the recent post photo :-)
Hi Jody, thanks for stopping by. I’ll for sure check out the podcast recommendation! Btw, we get kingfishers in my (not-cold) neighborhood this time of year; hoping to grab a good photo soon. :)
Oh my.... a kingfisher in actual life. That would be amazing. We have northern flickers, towhees, blue jays and the usual chickadees here in our Seattleland backyard. The birds are a joy, aren't they?
You have very accurately described my experiences on social media. My husband often wants to remind me that disparaging “The Internet” or “online usage” (which I can fall into when I despair of the destructive nature of the mainstream or what you call legacy social media) is a broad and therefore unproductive argument. What I hear you saying here is what’s needed is a reset in our thinking and activity so that we treat the virtual spaces as the unknown adventuresome places they are. They are not home. They are a journey we come home from eventually….maybe?
Abbey, so glad this resonated with you. Right, it's not all good or all bad, it's how we choose to behave around it (like so many things). To get my own head anywhere close to right about it all -- to activate that reset -- I had to recognize that I have a bit of an addictive relationship with the vice of curiositas, knowing for interest's sake, rather than having the virtue of studiositas, knowing for Truth's sake. More on this another time, probably!
Glad to hear it's going well.
Thanks! I still mean to delve deeper into your long form unscheduled brain download when other work allows. And I am waffling about whether I can make the Plough thing in San Anton or if it’s too much given the whole picture of life: whatever happens, I’m looking forward to hearing your take on that.
"ideologies and technological innovations … promise to provide clear windows but instead function as unreal filters, distorting the mind’s rapprochement with reality." -- In Too Big to Know, David Weinberger argues that over the centuries the West has come to think of truth as shaped like a book. A book has a aura of finality, certainty, and completeness about it that gives that impression that what it asserts is known with finality, certainty, and completeness. But this, he argues, is just what Joshua Hren is calling an unreal filter, and it is distorting the mind's rapprochement with reality, causing us to regard our knowledge as far more complete and certain than it really is. The Web, Weinberger argues, is teaching us just how uncertain and incomplete our knowledge really is, and eroding our confidence in experts in a way that is at least as salutary as it is troubling.
Yes, our technology for learning and sharing knowledge shapes and filters what we think we know and how we think we know it, and the radical shift that we have undergone, from truth shaped like a book to truth shaped like a web, is troubling and hard to get our heads around. Both can play us false. But at least we are, for now at least, aware that the Web can play us false. We are more wary of the Web than we were of books, and that, at least, is a good thing. And we will learn how to make better use of the Web than we do now, hopefully without becoming too trusting of it.
And the novel, I would point out, is the most non-convivial form of art or entertainment ever invented, a thing which isolates the reader in silence for hours at a time. Substack is a far more convivial place than a novel.
But the undoubted blessing of the online world is that it enables us to have this conversation, and to have the several other fruitful conversations that we have had, here and elsewhere, but never in person. The online world allows me to live in a small town in Nova Scotia and yet also participate interesting conversations on consequential matters with people all over the world. So for me, the answer to your question is both. I find refreshment, reintegration, and renewal both in the place I live and in the conversations I can have. And if it were not for the online world, I would have to choose one or the other, and that would be a very hard choice to make.
Thanks Mark--right, didn’t everyone complain at the beginning of the novel’s history that it isolated people from community & took them out of the flow of shared life? Yet eventually we found ways to fold it in, so as to support human flourishing and real-life connections. (Bookstore readings, seminars, libraries, class discussions--all constitutive of a kind of flourishing, no?) I feel sure something similar will happen with the digital realm eventually, but as with everything, we have to be willing to practice moderation and stay chary of extremes of all kinds.
Yes, exactly. It takes a while to find the balance after a major disruption, but we will find it. Which is not to say that the disruption won't have made a difference. We will always see knowledge and truth differently now. But we will find our sea legs in this new world.
Hi Katy (waves across a room of virtual friends....many whom we have in common). I'm so glad to have found you here on Substack.
I've been writing online since 2012 and circled the virtual water cooler of social media for way too long...my discontent and unease only increased the last year or so and I finally walked away completely from IG in April and FB end of September of this year.
The impetus was a podcast called Writing off Social (find them on your favorite platform). I've since taken their inaugural course and learned a t o n about how to build a platform (I do loathe that word) without social media. I've written about it quite recently here on the 'stack. You might take a moment to check it out when you have a chance.
ps. This fellow birder applauds the recent post photo :-)
Hi Jody, thanks for stopping by. I’ll for sure check out the podcast recommendation! Btw, we get kingfishers in my (not-cold) neighborhood this time of year; hoping to grab a good photo soon. :)
Oh my.... a kingfisher in actual life. That would be amazing. We have northern flickers, towhees, blue jays and the usual chickadees here in our Seattleland backyard. The birds are a joy, aren't they?