Letter From the Editor—022207
For Lent I was going to give up my Blackberry.
I’ve called it the worst thing that has ever happened to me. Got a lot of e-mail? Check your Blackberry. Uncomfortable in public? Read the Times on your Blackberry. Can’t remember what block the bank is on but you’ve already spent $50 this month on 411? Google from your Blackberry. There are all types of rules about how long you should wait before you respond, so people don’t come to rely upon immediate response. I subscribe to none of these.
In the Winter 2007 issue of N+1, Mark Greif writes an ostensible biography of my Blackberry back-and-forth, calling my experience, “a life of permanent dissatisfaction and a compulsion to frenetic activity.” He then attributes to my ilk and me an “Anaesthetic Ideology,” a self-protecting interest in Epicureanism, Stoicism, drugs, and general disaffection. I’ve flirted with all of them. I’ve even bought Real Simple, and in so doing added a magazine devoted to cleaning up life’s mess to my already toppling heap of publications.
Greif is hard on the news; current events are empty narratives of problem and (non)resolution, and the newspaper is a “frame for diverse, incommensurable disasters.” And be warned: the lust for news is limitless. Greif cites couch potatoes who report feeling comforted as they watch cars pile up and salmonella wreck their peanut better. By the sheer quantity of information we receive, Greif explains, we become immune to its impact. But there’s nothing here that Georg Simmel hasn’t already steeled us against.
Greif claims that we no longer live in an era of the arts, an art object being special, and occupying outside of the everyday. In that case, Greif’s polemical doesn’t go far enough: 436 galleries will be represented at this week’s Armory Fair. And the walls of the salon looked busy!
Tellingly, Greif spends much time describing the problem, but only two paragraphs prescribing a cure, or justifying one. And when we finally unveil the question:
“Would there be anything there when we found it?” Well, is there a God? Is there?
What Greif understandably rejects is the lack of real, deep meditation of the self, mediated (sometimes) by close connections with others. We are distracted from ourselves. Assuming for a moment that there is a deeper self that isn’t socially constructed, superficially, trouble is certainly afoot: iPods on the subway and so forth.
But if there’s one thing that fast-paced media is good for, it is developing identities. There’s no inherent reason that online profiles are any less “real” that our face-to-face personality. If anything they’re more honest because reception is virtually uncontrollable. Nor should online interactions be considered mutually exclusive to physical contact: witness online dating.
I receive an excess of e-mail—at 4:37 p.m., 10 press agents thought of me, or The Eye, or the listerv one of us happen to subscribe to. Gmail allows me to archive any junk within a few quick keystrokes. I become a stronger filter. The sheer volume guarantees a greater pool of information from which to cull, so I am forced to be more aware of what I want, and what I want to do.
In this issue, we select stories for you that fit your demographic, which, given your demographic and academic niche, is quite similar to ours. Max Foxman brings you a meditation on comics and academia (page 7): take your pick. We scour the city for Manhattan’s best cupcakes (page 5), and Sara Davis brings you New York’s most serious socialite (page 3).
Choose your reading wisely.