Post-text
The other day, out of a likely useless intention to remain diligently informed about "trends in social media," I read this article about Instagram advice threads and how they are an apparently popular form of social instruction for young kids. The article begins:
When Sophie, a 13-year-old in Arizona, began eighth grade last year, she wanted to start things off on the right foot. Instead of picking up the latest issue of Teen Vogue or googling around for advice, she reached for her phone and followed a slew of “thread” accounts on Instagram. These accounts provide her, and the thousands of other teens and tweens who have become addicted to them, with a daily feed of highly digestible information about how to tackle acne, become more popular at school, deal with fake friends, get a boyfriend, keep your grades up, and more.
I reread the article several times, but I had a hard time comprehending it on a literal level. I've forgotten a lot about what it was like to be young, to feel that social anxiety might stem simply from a lack of knowledge or technique — that it was a void that could be directly filled through the advice of a total stranger, rather than a matter of a settled flaw in one's personality that was unlikely to be dislodged through any sort of media consumption. When I was in elementary school I used to try to walk home from school while reading a book because it made me feel protected, even though it likely meant that other kids were laughing at me. But as long as my imagination was engaged and distracted, none of that mattered. I knew what a book demanded, but it was much harder to imagine what other kids wanted from me. It didn't occur to me to try to learn that.
As much as I sought shelter in books, it feels impossible to me that anyone might find similar refuge in Instagram, with its vivid depictions of enviableness and its constant provision of attention metrics and signals. How to become more popular at school? Maybe try not worrying about it. And then maybe stop looking to apps that model just how ruthless the logic of attention-seeking can be. You want to make "real" rather than fake friends? Don't look for shortcuts and online proxies. (Maybe I should start my own Instagram thread account.)
I tend to forget that people don't generally want refuge from social contact but tend to look instead for easily manageable instances or semblances of it. It could even be said that my proclivity for reading was not a rejection of sociality but a search for such a semblance, invented people and distant situations that I could unilaterally invest myself in and then withdraw from at will.
Anyway, I felt like I fell into the article's trap, baited into taking a reactionary, pessimistic view of what changing media technology is doing to children's social lives and research skills. "Teens say they’d basically do anything to avoid searching for answers to their problems outside of Instagram," the article reports. Which teens? All teens? The ones without phones too? One everyteen is quoted as saying that threads are appealing because "you can read longer things in little chunks. It’s not like reading this giant paragraph at once. No one wants to do that."
Yes, no one bothers to "read" anymore, you silly adult reader. You and your turgid textual world are being left behind for screens, pixels, aniemojis, instructional videos, and picture sets for the eventual grown-ups who will administer the nonliterate future. There is no need to research any question outside the realm of pictures and "friends" who tell you what to think and how to look while you "think" it. Why read decontextualized words conveying faux-objective "facts" when you can have a more attractive surrogate for yourself talk the information at you, right in your face, like an intimate friend. Why separate information from images? There is no outside the caption.
To feel a little bit less goaded and depressed about the coming biblio-pocalypse, I started to re-read Elizabeth Eisenstein's The Printing Revolution in Modern Europe — the abridged version of The Printing Press as an Agent of Change. (It embarrasses me to admit that I am reading the "for dummies" version again, as if that lapse in rigor and not my lack of discipline and methodology is what makes me a dilettante.) Eisenstein argues that print culture will not fade like the scribal culture that preceded it: "The effects of printing seem to have been exerted always unevenly, yet always continuously and cumulatively from the late 15th century on," she writes. "I can find no point at which they ceased to be exerted or even began to diminish." She dismisses the idea of a "cultural crisis" brought on by electronic media's effects on reading habits, even as she outlines the way a similar crisis was experienced in past centuries as print culture took hold.
One of print culture's main effects was on the nature of archives: As the past became more readily preservable, it also became a palpable burden. The past becomes disposable as it becomes preservable. (Electronic media inherit and amplify this.) In Eisenstein's view, this accumulation fosters cultural pessimism, manifest in the now mandatory efforts to sift through too much information. This made some commentators nostalgic for scribal culture, in which survival alone guaranteed a work's significance, and people weren't corrupted with the taste for immediacy and novelty that print can also cater to.
Print made it possible for there to be professional writers, but these writers were, in Eisenstein's account, the most likely to be pessimistic about print culture — dismissive and remorseful about the vulgarity of the reading public on which they depended. "Anxiety about getting attention and holding it was also built into the trade of the new professional author," she notes (an observation that could equally be applied to influencers, thread posters, YouTubers and Twitch streamers and the like). The authors were torn between cultivating an audience and educating it; any desire to teach philistines about high culture at the level of a text's content was compromised by what the form of print itself implied — that sentiments were easily representable and duplicable, a luxury to be bought, sold, put on and indulged, and that culture itself was just a commodity. "A vested interest in idleness, in promoting the value of pleasure-seeking and leisure, in cultivating consumption of the 'finer' things of life, was built into the trade of all novelists and poets (and of other artists as well). Claims to superior historical dignity and spiritual value were uneasily reconciled with turning out bestselling works that sold like drugs on the market."
Writers have to create demand for their work not by teaching them ethical truths but by teaching them to enjoy time-killing in decadent isolation. The passage above suggests that print culture makes consumerism possible: It teaches and rewards the disposition necessary to treat shopping as pleasure, to turn procurement into a narrative capable of inspiring satisfying emotional experiences, seen as being available on demand. Consumerism is the triumph of the imagination, though it is sometimes depicted as imagination's dull antithesis, as a kind of weak passivity. Eisenstein's own emphasis on "idleness," as if reading weren't imaginative work, tends to give that impression. But if print culture produces consumerism, it's obviously not a safe harbor from electronic media's image culture and the supposed superficiality it yields.
Eisenstein's analysis of print culture's collusion with an emerging leisure society made me wonder whether new media always herald their own arrival by promising new opportunities to sell passivity (a.k.a. "convenience") to consumers. This appears as the most obvious way to extract value from a new medium: to learn how to use the information it conveys to placate rather than inform audiences, teach them to submit, to focus their individuated attention where you want it and have them call that freedom. I think of the young me walking down the sidewalk with a book in my face, probably something by Douglas Adams, so free until I walked into a telephone pole.
New media seem to demand a greater passivity, to foster it — it makes people appear willing to instrumentalize their attention span and surrender it. This tendency is evident in the various pivots to video in social media. Video commandeers your time and harnesses your attention to a greater degree than text, and thus can be construed as requiring less work of viewers; it sets you free of the need to decide what to pay attention to, what words to skip, what sentences to re-read. No more silent scanning; information animates itself.
Media producers and consumers alike share a fantasy of the media product being capable of stupefying viewers, but this effect appears tenuous, unstable. A medium loses its immersive capacities; it becomes palpable that one is consuming it distractedly, with a mind partly dispersed among possible alternatives, contemplating choices, performing the work of prioritizing. Focus dissolves into choice again. (This will likely happen even with VR, no matter how "immersive" it becomes.) Nostalgia for the lost sense of compulsion ensues. Images become even harder to read than text.
Eisenstein notes that "books on the memory arts multiplied after printing" even though "the need to rely on these arts decreased." I wonder what kind of discourse is proliferating now that has that same urgency in the face of impending superfluity. At this instant, lots of us are using the internet to preach a set of informational skills that the internet has already rendered moribund. We're using new affordances to address outmoded limitations, and viewing new ways to learn as bafflingly inadequate because they don't confront those old concerns.
Some people are sad that kids can't write in cursive anymore. I look at my own handwriting, sloppy and illegible in the margin of my copy of Eisenstein's book. Some of those notes are from 1999, when I read this book for a prelim exam. They mean nothing to me now. I used to be spooked by the idea of graphology, the idea that one's personality could be inferred from their script hand, and I dreamed of being able to type everything out, and my personality could remain my precious secret. I didn't anticipate the question of fonts.