offyougoapparently:

eagleflieswiththedove:

Wonkette owner/editor Ken Layne gchatted about quitting Wonkette and quitting the Internet:

We have a remarkable ability to know exactly what things we’re doing are harmful to us … and then we keep doing those things, until we decide to stop.

For anyone who feels this Internet emptiness chewing at them, I would say, do a little test. Go outside and take a 15-minute walk — around the block, through the park, just a short walk. While you’re doing this, clear your mind of work and of home. Just look at things, birds and cars and trees and the clouds and buildings and dumpsters, and when you think of something internal just say “Thinking” to yourself and go back to walking and breathing. Then return to your computer. Do the usual things you do on your computer, like check the news and your email and the blogs you read and whatever people post on Facebook and Twitter.

Do this second part, the computer-looking-at, for just 15 minutes. You can set one of those web timers … hang on, I have one in my bookmarks.

When this stopwatch beeps, honestly ask yourself how you feel. Compare this to how you felt at the end of your 15-minute walk. Ask yourself what, if anything, you learned during those 15 minutes of wasting time on the Internet. Did it help you in some way? Are you better off? This is a question often asked by political challengers: Are you better off than __ years ago? Well, are you better off than fifteen minutes ago? If not, don’t re-elect the Internet.

GM: That’s a slogan for our time!

KL: Yeah, a Cafe Press t-shirt!

Anyway, the answer is almost certainly going to be No, you’re not better off. But you’re going to be agitated now, both restless and slothful, and you’re either going to feel something negative about somebody you don’t even know or you’re going to want something you don’t need.

I like that Ken Layne cares deeply about shit, even if he seems scary and mean sometimes.

The point he makes here is becoming an oft-repeated one and will continue, I figure. It rings true for me. Blogs and social media and personal projections: agitated, restless, slothful, feeling something negative about somebody you don’t even know, wanting something you don’t need. Yep.

This is an interesting interview. And I understand what Layne means. I used to read Wonkette during the 2008 election season, but afterwards I had to stop; I was just making myself feel awful. I’ve had a significant online life since 1997 and it has been a constant process of figuring out how to funnel this vast ocean down to what tiny shore I benefit from. I filter the waves more and more, and I don’t feel like I’m missing out, and I always try to encourage my friends to do the same.

But I also want to address something else Layne says before this:

But the wider question about dignity is this: Why do we seem so able to recognize it from afar — in the Arab Spring protests, at Tiananmen Square, through the lens of the past to Selma and to Malcolm X and Chavez — and yet we live such tawdry, cheap lives?

Why not have dignity today, for ourselves? We don’t need to wait for a Gandhi or Bobby Seale for this. You wake up, regardless of your circumstances, and you have a pretty open book. You can turn on the teevee and have some people yell at you, and then get in the car and have people yell at you, and then feel bad all the time, and then come home and flop on the couch or in front of the computer, and eat fast food that you know is rotting you away, and then go to bed exhausted and depressed and repeat until death …. or you could not do any of those things, because you’re going to choose personal dignity instead.

To me this reads like the affluenza of white western privilege. What is dignity? Poor people of color standing up to their oppressors. Why don’t “we” have dignity? Because “we” are on the top of the kyriarchal ladder; dignity is here used as the condescending name for exoticized, glorified suffering. How is this not just a variation on the old meme that white people don’t have any culture? I find it particularly noteworthy that he commends the Arab Spring uprising while advocating for a (dignified?) life disconnected from social media and the internet; weren’t the #Jan25 and #Feb17 made partially possible because of these things? Isn’t access to the internet, and the freedom of bloggers, now a legitimate human rights issue?

I have to leave; I’m about to be late to an appointment. But I did want to draw this out a bit. I don’t think it’s fair or right to ascribe nobility broadly to the lives of Others, and I don’t think it makes sense to otherize them at all when in fact they - you - we - are all part of this internet, too.

I think WE can do better than that.

Yes, yes, yes, the point about affluenza in this. I’m less optimistic about the use of social media as a tool for revolution (somewhere slightly more invested in than Malcolm Gladwell’s Small Change, though), and I think you would be hard-pressed to find a frequent user of the internet who doesn’t understand that restless/slothful feeling, but I think that’s also a matter, as @offyougoapparently says above, of the way you use it and filter what you take in and do. And, not for nothing, I also had to give up Wonkette, and I think there is absolutely a correlation between those feelings of awfulness and lack of fulfillment, and reading constant news updates without an outlet for positive action.

I feel like Layne also ignores, or is ignorant of, the way the internet and marginal lives intersect, which is again part of the affluenza point @offyougoapparently made. The internet isn’t exclusively a tool of the disaffected.

(via anygoddamnedcolleen)