Fighting the scourge of e-literacy (Part 1)

Not that long ago it was common to hear people say, “knowledge is power.” And these were people who knew what they were talking about. Imagine that. Actually knowing something had value. It was even (dare I say) important. It’s practically Amish. Today thanks in part to the restless impatience brought on by countless of tons of pharmaceuticals slowly dissolving in the nation’s water supply we say, “information is power.” Though it’s usually blurted out too quickly to be understood. Infahmashunispowah!!! Say it loud! Say it faster! Faster, dammit!!

Who has time to deal with all that tedious analysis and boring thinking we used to do “back in the day”? Things move fast now! We need instant solutions – instant solutions for our instant problems. Fortunately, the Internet feeds us a breathless, uninterrupted 24-hour a day stream of raw data without regard to favor or even old-school accuracy.

Okay, so we all agree information has somehow become power. Here’s some information for you: It rained. Celtics scored 103. A man named Edward. Paper is made from trees. This sentence is six words long.

Aside from a trip down Surreal Lane and the personal fun I had coming up with that last sentence; that was an exercise in pointlessness. Which is precisely my point. An endless stream of isolated infobits is about as valuable as a paint-by-number of Elvis at the Last Supper. On velvet.

The point is, we’re in such a screaming hurry to get at the information we’re not actually accomplishing anything. The hurry is the activity. Waving your arms and running in a circle is now very impressive. We don’t bother putting together the data points because that takes time. We don’t bother asking for context because that takes time. We don’t notice that without context unrelated date points are surreal. But boy, do we have a pile of information at hand. We’ve got a pile of something alright.

Being on the Internet is a lot like looking at a vase you’ve just dropped. All the pieces are there, and with some effort it could be something. But it’s not. Instead it’s a disjointed, disconnected fragmented mess. It’s up to you to clean it up and make sense of it. But you won’t. You don’t have the time. More often than not, you’ll pick up a couple of the larger pieces, squint your eyes and assume you have a pretty good idea of what the vase kind of, sort of, maybe once looked like. And you’d be dead wrong.

But who has time to be right? By the time you stopped to piece even two pieces of information together, the information went stale and out of date and you forgot what you went online to find in the first place. Hey, look at that, downloadable music clips from David Hasselhoff. Unpublished pictures of Obama. Video of a kitten and a duck sleeping together. Wait, what was I talking about again?

This seems like just the right place to stop for the moment. Having presented what annoys me about the Internet, I’ll continue shortly in Part 2 to take a look at the result of this fast-forward evolution – and where I see it taking us.

Really? Another blog? Really?

I don't like blogs. I'll admit that much right up front. 

Yes, I applaud their intent to democratize writing and journalism by seizing it back from the literary journals that operate like private clubs behind locked doors marked "MFAs only" and the professional journalists whose access to the people they write about long ago stripped them of any objectivity they once had. The problem lies in the execution. Anything Microsoft ever stuffed into a box comes to mind. 

At their worst – and nearly every one is a cringe-worthy example of "the worst thing I've ever read" – they're tedious exercises in self-aggrandizement. There, the mindless minutiae we all go through every day is examined and held up for display, as if "blogging" were the sound of undigested chunks of someone's life being regurgitated for public consumption. And we do lap it up, don't we?

I'm perpetually astonished how ferociously people protect banal pieces of data like their weight, age, how much rent they pay, or what they make. But they seemingly have no qualms whatsoever about taking what should be intimate thoughts, hopes, desires, triumphs, heartbreaks, or just about anything we once naturally kept to ourselves and handing it over to the entire world for comment. It's like having a therapy session on a street corner.

"Airing your dirty laundry" is how my grandmother used to put it.

If you put it out there, people will look. Whether we're being subjected to some loser's search for a girlfriend/wife/mommy/wet nurse or the ramblings of a small town nobody trying to navigate the "big city" or the descending arc of a no-talent bar band with unattainable visions of arena glory, or any of ten thousand other blobs of mental flotsam on a virtual sea, someone somewhere will read it. But just because you woke up alone again this morning and someone else reads about it, that does not mean you have anything to say. It simply means the people reading your pointless drivel lead even more boring lives than you do. 

The only blog that was ever any good was "Julie and Julia" by Julie Powell. Actually it wasn't just good. It was astonishing for the obvious reason that the woman can write. She can say more with a few well-chosen adjectives that most people can say in a thousand words. And that's it right there. Having a keyboard in front of you does not mean you can write. Clacking on a laptop in Starbucks no more makes you a writer than renting a car makes you Dale Earnhardt Jr. It does, however, make you a tiresome cliche.

Tragically, writing seems to have been taken over by a generation of hipsters for whom it's enough to look the part by wearing a smirk and an ironic tee shirt. Working on what they want to say and how they want to say it, crafting a sentence, developing a voice all take up time that's better spent promoting themselves. Most of these writer/blogger/posers put less thought into the words they're typing than they do in choosing which dirty watch cap to wear that day. But that's okay. For some reason, abusing the language apparently makes them seem "of the moment."

On the subway the other day, I noticed a headline in The Daily News over another passenger's shoulder that read: "Israel Sez Offensive to Continue." Sez? Really? Is The Daily News so desperate to appear relevant? I guarantee somewhere there are Daily News readers who think that's the way the word is spelled. I refuse to contribute to the downward spiral into cultural imbecility wrought by the web.

So is it a contradiction for someone who holds blogs in disdain to write one? Not at all. Seeing an Ed Wood film doesn't keep me from watching movies. Paintings of clowns don't taint my enjoyment of Renoir, Velasquez, or Cezanne. I think it's time for a well-written blog with a unique voice and a sense of humor. One that's carefully thought out and presented in complete sentences, proper spelling and all. Yes, it all sounds very Old School, but we did manage to communicate before email and texting and even blogging.

From time to time when I was growing up people would say to me, "You ought to write a book." Though back then and where I grew up it came out as "yawttawrittabook." So I am. Sort of.

Stick around. Things are about to get interesting.