Why Do Anything?

What are your intentions before doing something, particularly in creativity? I see creativity as something quotidian and integral to my understanding of myself. I feel "aligned" when creative, but the Internet has shifted those alignments, which I see as a manifestation of cognitive dissonance.

As Joanne McNeil says in her engaging book Lurking:

"My life, before I was aware of the bargain, is up for grabs, because I lived online before I realized what the internet takes from me."

And as philosopher Villem Flusser said in Towards a Philosophy of Photography:

"People taking snaps can now only see the world through the camera and in photographic categories. They are not "in charge of" taking photographs, they are consumed by the greed of their camera, they have become an extension of the button of their camera. Their actions are automatic camera functions. A permanent flow of unconsciously created images is the result. They form a camera memory, a databank of automatic functions. Anyone who leafs through the album of a person who takes snaps does not recognize, as it were, the captured experiences, knowledge, or values of a human being, but they automatically realize camera possibilities."

Like we worked for the camera, we work for the internet and social media.

As creative people, do we do things just for the Internet? In the early web, many creative people were eager to have domains and websites, and that could have been when we became misaligned with pure intentions and motivations. Lots of our time was devoted to building websites. I don't miss that at all.

Uses/misuses of Nostalgia

It's best to use nostalgia while it is still fresh and you can talk with people that had direct experience with the past. As people die, the oral tradition gets more broken.

As a thought experiment, keep stepping back 25 years and consider how those people were nostalgic for technologies of the past.                 

In 1995, there might have been something in 1970 worth revisiting for the Silent Generation. Their zeitgeist was postwar when they were teenagers. Was there something in 1955 to revisit, even now? 1930, 1905, 1880--each time you step back 25 years there is less information that you have intimate knowledge of. 

I used to frequently communicate with an aunt born in 1910 and a cousin born in 1930. Who knows if they’d say it was worthwhile revisiting or reviving technologies 25 years in the past. It would depend on the stresses, such as the Great Depression. My aunt probably wouldn't want to go back to the early 30s (although in retrospect now, the 1930s were the golden age of train travel). The key factor would have been conveniences, like cars, washing machines, and air conditioners. In 2030 will we see social media as being a burden? Probably. Who would have been nostalgic for 1930 in 1955 in terms of bad memories? All nostalgias aren't created equal. (I recently saw the film 1917. Sam Mendes was in some ways nostalgic and created a great cinematic experience, but people in their 50s in the 1970s might have had PTSD from it).

One could get nostalgic for the early web, but then you revisit all the darkness that was already showing up in the beginning

I stumbled on this Charlie Rose interview done in 1994. If you look at the debates that were going on then, it was all about the Clintons, and why some people hate them. Things haven't changed.

I was nostalgic for the bop era in jazz circa 1955, which I understood as a zeitgeist in music, but he experienced the dark sides of it and wasn't nostalgic at all.

You can tell you're in decline when you have more nostalgia because people are "homesick", even for imaginary "homes", as I was for bop. (It's so interesting that computers have used "home" as a metaphor for over three decades).

Ways Back

There are small ways you can revive the past in very useful and satisfying ways. For me, it is writing in music notation, that although I am using software, I am still in the same mindset as using pen and paper: the thought processes remain unchanged. It is a "phantom limb" effect. The score itself is an "extension" just as instruments are. Now smartphones are the extension and rewire our brain just as playing instruments have for me. 

If I haven't played an instrument in a while, I start to miss it and want to play it (like returning "home"). I can practice mentally, but the part of the "nostalgia" is the tactile, not just the memory of tactility. One could go on a diet of just memories of foods, but memories don't have actual calories; They are not life-giving. Now many musicians use smartphones and computers as controllers, but they do not have the nurturing tactile aspect, just as food has actual calories that keep us alive. But information also keeps us alive, as well as the quick access to it. But we always did fine before we had this new technology, but alas we have moved on. There are always new Norms which do away with a lot of nostalgia--which may be the reason we artificially create it.

I am old enough to have lived in a time when media was always "hot" and we didn't have access to it. This gave us more time, although TV-watching and two-hour long telephone calls were the "social media" of the time. Once media became "cool" (cool to the touch) there was a sense of unbounded freedom, like Woodstock became a free event: liberating and exhilarating. Personally, I saw possible collaboration as the end result of new media freedoms.

It is critical in a collaborative sense that we are mutually interested in the same things to the point of taking action on them. I always tell people that I am so interested in music that you could wake me up in the middle of the night to play or to write. I'm looking for people that share this enthusiasm and intensity. But this is now a rarity, and we probably won't find much of it on the internet because the intensity is bound to dissipate when people are distracted by the internet itself and wanting to be with it instead of another person. Again, we are working for the Internet. Perhaps there was something useful to revisit from 1970, but those born in 1955 might not always agree.

Question your intentions and revisit what you would do "unplugged", which was the way musicians used to relocate the active core within a piece of music bloated with new technologies and perhaps misplaced or lost intentions.