On paying attention, media that is social, and clean-cut edges
November 21, 2019
Dear Eva,
This week I have spent a good chunk of mindspace contemplating a 90+ minute interview of Jia Tolentino on the Ezra Klein podcast. It was an old episode, one I resurfaced to the top of my very long podcast queue on a whim. Klein and Tolentino spent the bulk of the conversation discussing what it is like to live their professional lives online (spoiler: it does not sound fun), and the ways the internet distorts reality and shapes discourse in antisocial and counterproductive ways. I am struck by the contrast between their experience with online communication and ours here at rogshinch.com. Obviously, one major difference is that they are famous and we are not (thank god). But there is more.
I looked it up, and the definition of social media is: forms of electronic communication through which users create online communities to share information, ideas, personal messages, and other content. By that definition, this letter-writing project is a form of social media, perhaps the most prosocial, nourishing kind there is. It feels instructive to use this terminology to describe what we are doing—perhaps it is a way of reclaiming a term that has become associated with one of the most depleting forces in our 21st century lives. Maybe there is more than one way to use the internet.
Lately, I have settled on an analogy of rogshinch.com being like a tiny corner in just one of the thousands upon thousands of public parks all over the world. You and I are a pair of friends quietly doing Tai Chi or playing chess in that corner. We are near others whom we do not know; they might glance over, but we are not performing. [Sidenote: it occurred to me that as the surveillance state grows, physical public spaces may eventually take on more qualities of digital public spaces, as the possibility of being recorded and photographed increases, and our accordion-like string of past experiences in public becomes fixed and discoverable in unexpected ways.] When I think about our endeavor with this metaphorical lens, it seems clear that our goal should not be to invite more people into our exchange. (Not that either of us ever suggested this.) I think this project works in huge part because we are writing to and for each other. I know my audience (you). I learn from my audience (you). My audience (you) is participating in the endeavor in the most literal, deepest sense possible. This sort of thing doesn’t / shouldn’t / can’t scale.
What we can do, however, is prop a sign against the open gate to the park explaining what we are up to, providing a bit of context. And then, ultimately, as we gaze back upon the physical manifestation of our stretching selves (to answer my own question from last week—yes, the internet is built to accommodate our stretching selves because look! it already has), we can extract the things we have learned that might somehow be useful to others, finding ways to package them up for those who are not us.
In the Tolentino interview, Ezra Klein paraphrased something Jenny Odell had said or written about how, when we are online, we spend so much time and energy explaining ourselves to people who do not have context for us. Tolentino built upon this to say that she often thinks about what a waste of civic energy it is for her and others to expend so much effort every day trying to explain / persuade / justify to strangers. It struck me that our situation is the opposite. We are grappling with whether and how to communicate to those without context at all. We have been focused first and foremost on writing for each other—as friends do in real life, yet somehow often do not in online real life. It is somewhat gratifying to recognize this; it feels like evidence that we have our priorities in order. You and our friendship matter far more to me than the strangers we may eventually communicate with as we expand our focus. That sounds like such a self-evident statement, yet so much of social media is not structured with this truth in mind. It is so often built to prioritize the megaphone.
Recently, there was a Call Your Girlfriend episode with Samantha Powers, the former Ambassador to the UN. Aminatou Sow and Powers spent a bunch of time talking about how to avoid resignation and a sense of futility in the face of global injustice. For Powers operating at a global scale, her individual ability to make change while she was an ambassador felt, inevitably, inadequate. Politics and policy—where you are inherently dealing with people and problems in the aggregate—seem to be domains were this dilemma must be acutely felt at all times. But online life can create a version of this for anyone. No one of us alone can tackle climate change, or social justice, or the refugee crisis. Yet the internet bombards us with the evidence of these problems every minute of every day. The answer is not, of course, to cut off from the world. We have a duty not to pretend we are islands.
In our analog lives, we do not need to be reminded that individual lives matter, that our personal relationships matter. If anything, we sometimes need to be reminded how small we are. It seems to me that we have done here in creating a semi-private, semi-public digital space has been to create a way to sustain this clarity while we are online. In other words, I think we are onto something, my friend.
Yours,
Sarah
Friday November 22 2019
Dear Sarah,
I am feeling pleased and cozy to settle in to type up my letter to you this week. I started writing it yesterday by hand during a moody-blues kind of day (was it the cake batter with raw eggs that I nibbled on the day before? Who knows.) and finished it up this morning as I read again through your letter from last week. Your letter was jammy and full of goodies, as it always is, and last week’s felt like a particularly strikingly woven text.
I’m still reflecting on my letter to you last week, and your letter to me, and I hope you won’t mind if I drop in more notes about the new thing we’re starting to build together — where we’re gathering, sharing with each other, and thinking about the things we consume. This week as I thought about that project, I was puzzling over the fact that while I had some things I was reading here and there, as far as what I was “consuming” — I found myself thinking about furniture shapes, about wood and table legs and tables as places to stack books, as alternative book shelves. I could technically share with you the websites where I was researching metal table legs, or a link with info about how one finishes a live-edge piece of wood (you carve away the bark on the edges because it may get crumbly and messy over time) — but somehow that didn’t feel exactly in keeping with my sense of what we’re thinking about around the new project. Though I could be wrong! I went to a wood shop this week, a store selling reclaimed urban wood (trees that had to be removed for various reasons, or that had been felled in a storm or other such happening, prepared as lumber), and then I went to the Women’s Woodshop to cut some pieces of baltic birch plywood for a guitar pedal board I am putting together for M at his request. I take satisfaction in using the table saw, making successful cuts in plywood, where I can see the dense, tight stripes of the baltic birch edges multiplied through the division of the sheet into pieces. It was satisfying to gather my cut pieces, to see the straight, true lines replicated one after another. There is satisfaction to be had in a clean-cut edge.
This is a rambling way of saying that this week I feel like I was consuming less, consuming differently. What is the goal of taking in, of the consumption of information? Is it important that we all take in volumes of information? It would seem that it cannot be important; there is no exact way in which all the information that the world has on offer has specific application in my daily life. It can feel like packing material filling my skull, rendering my brain immobile inside my head. I’ve been thinking along these lines while I’ve been taking in the public impeachment hearings and testimonies this week. What value is there for me to hear these public testimonies? (I’m not saying there isn’t value, only wondering what the value is.) I have been curious and interested to hear how different people perform, how there are varied ways to ask questions, how a person can be cross-examined, with questioners seeking to tease out details and angles on details, and how a person’s words can somehow hold multiple truths — pleasing or upsetting different people in different ways. There is an element of witnessing these testimonies that I think is valuable, being a witness to the testimonies. It is interesting to observe the strange intersection of these formal proceedings with the say-anything space of social media, which is disconcerting and disorienting, and which is also the way things have been lately. I can listen to these proceedings as I have been doing while I’m in the car going here and there — but I’m not certain it’s necessary for me to do so. The path we are all on toward November 2020 seems so long right now, seems a million miles long, while this week of only seven days itself feels long. When is it important to pay attention? There would seem to be the sense, generally embedded in us since our youth, that someone else shapes where our attention should land. Students of all ages with their own nascent or emerging interests are directed to pay attention to what is being taught, whatever it may be. How do we learn to take control of our field of attention? If someone were to say, Well, what do you want to look at today? — what if we simply chose to close our eyes, or look away, and say, for a moment, Nothing. Or perhaps, Nothing new.
I found myself thinking that this taking control of our field of attention — I am calling it the rebellion! — needs to start earlier and earlier. What is this practice of shaping people, feeding them on similar stories? Why do we need to be similar in these particular ways? In what ways do we need to be similar, to know the same things? Perhaps there are too many young people and students in the world to receive individually personalized programs of education — but why, or why not? What is the appropriate balance of shared learning, experience, knowledge that ties us together and lets us make common, shared-purpose decisions where we need to, balanced with an attention to individual human potential? (I’m still roaming around my thoughts about the concept of the “common core” from last week. (I still haven’t done a bit of research about what is actually included in the common core, but the concept alone gives me plenty to think on, and there will be time for research.) Over time, beyond school, what are the things we all need to know together? Are there things we all learn that are perhaps unnecessary? Who decides what is necessary, and how? What else could we be making room for?)
I’ve also been reflecting on words that you and I heard while working together, words that represented some of the philosophy of our workplace: the idea that Writers write to be read — and I’ve been thinking, Yes, but… Our letter exchange has been fascinating for so many reasons, one being that I am pleased and satisfied that you read my letters! This would seem to be obvious — if you weren’t reading my letters, or I wasn’t reading yours, then this wouldn’t work, and what would we even be doing? — and yet it feels like it wants to be stated. I think for me there is first a sweetness just in the writing, and then in the fact that I know you will read my letter and think about it and respond to it. You’re responding because that is how this format works — it’s not an exchange if we aren’t going back and forth! — but your response also makes my letter real in a different way. Somehow an undertone of the sentiment of Writers write to be read is that they (we) are writing to be read by as many people as possible. I feel like that simply cannot be a realistic goal — it isn’t my goal — because you cannot control how many people will read your words, or want to read them. I have friends and acquaintances who are writers, and I am very happy for their writing and their successes, and at the same time I may not read their writing. I don’t mean this to be cruel; I simply can’t read it all. It doesn’t mean I don’t care for my friends and fellow humans tapping away at their keyboards, wrangling words, cutting and rearranging and hunting for the perfect word sounds and shapes. Our letter exchange feels to me at this moment like a perfect fulfillment of writing and being read! And the icing on top (or, I suppose, layered throughout) is that we still have so much to mine, and to build on. A writer and reader named Eva writes to be thoroughly read by a reader and writer named Sarah. And vice versa. As ever, the specific telling seems to do greater justice to the idea than does the general statement.
And I want to think again about your question — why are we doing this in public, writing and exchanging and posting these letters? Or, would the project have been the same if it wasn’t public? Let the public record show that Sarah and Eva have made this commitment. Is this some version of defining for ourselves what it is to be writers? If we had each only written these letters (which is not the case) and kept them private, are we still writers? I think we could say yes; perhaps some would say no. Does writing have to be a public act in order for one to call oneself a writer? There is something here that echoes what happens with social media — we all have a desire to be seen, acknowledged, responded to. Being seen and acknowledged and responded to publicly is an additional layer. Right now it feels to me like an identity statement of sorts to have posted these letters publicly. My thoughts and feelings on that question might change in the next week — but for now I look forward to your reading of my letter, and your thoughts back, and I look forward to reading what you’ve been thinking on this past week!
Until soon,
Your friend,
Eva