Formidabili quegli anni (put the world back together again)

Quella di oggi e' una lettura un po' lunga, ma se appartenete alla mia generazione e se quindi avete vissuto la dimensione naturale del tempo e dello spazio prima dell'avvento di Internet, vi fara' riflettere e forse anche cambiare qualche abitudine.

Non si tratta di essere fondamentalisti, ovvio. Questa comunicazione tra voi e me passa proprio attraverso la rete. Piuttosto si tratta secondo me di imparare a definire zone della nostra vita libere da ogni connessione: spazi di introspezione e solitudine, particolarmente necessari se come me siete un po' introversi.

Sono frammenti estratti da The encyclopedia of trouble and spaciousness di Rebecca Solnit. Buona lettura.


1995

"When I think about, say, 1995, or whenever the last moment was before most of us were on the Internet and had mobile phones, it seems like a hundred years ago. Letters came once a day, predictably, in the hands of the postal carrier.

News came in three flavors — radio, television, print — and at appointed hours. Some of us even had a newspaper delivered every morning".


Ona cosa alla volta

"The bygone time had rhythm, and it had room for you to do one thing at a time; it had different parts; mornings included this, and evenings that, and a great many of us had these schedules in common. I would read the paper while listening to the radio, but I wouldn’t check my mail while updating my status while checking the news sites while talking on the phone.

Phones were wired to the wall, or if they were cordless, they were still housebound. The sound quality was usually good. On them people had long, deep conversations of a sort almost unknown today, now that phones are used while driving, while shopping, while walking in front of cars against the light and into fountains. 

The general assumption was that when you were on the phone, that’s all you were".

Non ti sento, ti richiamo

"Letters morphed into emails, and for a long time emails had all the depth and complexity of letters. They were a beautiful new form that spliced together the intimacy of what you might write from the heart with the speed of telegraphs.

Then emails deteriorated into something more like text messages… Text messages were bound by the limits of telegrams — the state-of-the-art technology of the 1840s — and were almost as awkward to punch out. 

Soon phone calls were made mostly on mobile phones, whose sound quality is mediocre and prone to failure altogether (“you’re breaking up” or “we’re breaking up” is the cry of our time) even when one or both speakers aren’t multitasking. 

Communication began to dwindle into peremptory practical phrases and fragments, wile the niceties of spelling, grammar, and punctuation were put aside, along with the more lyrical and profound possibilities. 

Communication between two people often turned into group chatter: you told all you Facebook friends or Twitter followers how you felt, and followed the popularity of your post or tweet. Your life had ratings".

Soli non si muore

"Previous technologies have expanded communication. But the last round may be contracting it. The eloquence of letters has turned into the nuanced spareness of texts; the intimacy of phone conversations has turned into the missed signals of mobile phone chat. 

I think of that lost world, the way we lived before these new networking technologies, as having two poles: solitude and communion. The new chatter puts us somewhere in between, assuaging fears of being alone without risking real connection. 

It is a shallow between two deeper zones, a safe spot between the dangers of contact with ourselves, with others".

Un tavolo per 8

"It seems less likely that each of the kids waiting for the table for eight has an urgent matter at hand than that this is the habitual orientation of their consciousness. At times I feel as though I’m in a bad science fiction movie where everyone takes orders from tiny boxes that link them to alien overlords.

Which is what corporations are anyway, and mobile phones decoupled from corporations are not exactly common".

Ansia da prestazione

"A restlessness has seized hold of many of us, a sense that we should be doing something else, no matter what we are doing, or doing at least two things at once, or going to check some other medium. It’s an anxiety about keeping up, about not being left out or getting behind".

C'e' tutto un mondo intorno

"It’s hard, now, to be with someone else wholly, uninterruptedly, and it’s hard to be truly alone. The fine art of doing nothing in particular, also known as thinking, or musing, or introspection, or simply moments of being, was part of what happened when you walked from here to there, alone, or stared out the train window, or contemplated the road, but the new technologies have flooded those open spaces.

Space for free thought is routinely regarded as a void and filled up with sounds and distractions".

Il mondo ricomposto

"Getting out of [the rabbit hole of total immersion in the networked world] is about slowness and about finding alternatives to the alienation that accompanies a sweater knitted by a machine in a sweatshop in a country you know nothing about, or jam made by a giant corporation that has terrible environmental and labor practices and might be tied to the death of honeybees or the poisoning of farm workers. 

It’s an attempt to put the world back together again, in its materials but also its time and labor. It’s both laughably small and heroically ambitious".