SpiralTruth

I’ve never bought into the idea that some old schoolers like to rally around about the Internet killing off true creativity and creating a cult of the amateur (Everyone’s an amateur when he/she starts out, and if they keep doing whatever it is for long enough, they become an expert. End of story). But I do feel that the fast paced nature of information these days seems to destroy something of value from the old world even as it hypnotizes us with it’s convenience. Maybe that “something of value” is contemplative thought. When’s the last time you just contemplated something with no real goals in mind?

From Reading in a Digital Age by Sven Birkerts:

READING the Atlantic cover story by Nicholas Carr on the effect of Google (and online behavior in general), I find myself especially fixated on the idea that contemplative thought is endangered. This starts me wondering about the difference between contemplative and analytic thought. The former is intransitive and experiential in its nature, is for itself; the latter is transitive, is goal directed. According to the logic of transitive thought, information is a means, its increments mainly building blocks toward some synthesis or explanation. In that thought-world it’s clearly desirable to have a powerful machine that can gather and sort material in order to isolate the needed facts. But in the other, the contemplative thought-world—where reflection is itself the end, a means of testing and refining the relation to the world, a way of pursuing connection toward more affectively satisfying kinds of illumination, or insight—information is nothing without its contexts. I come to think that contemplation and analysis are not merely two kinds of thinking: they are opposed kinds of thinking. Then I realize that the Internet and the novel are opposites as well.