Can I Have Your Attention Please, by Oscar Schwartz
I remember sitting in the back seat of my parents’ car on a long drive back from
Melbourne Airport, listening to my mum excitedly tell my dad that she had spent “two-
hours surfing the net” in an airport in America. It was 1995 and I was 7-years old. I
listened vaguely to my mum explain how ‘the net’ worked, and it seemed, to me, like
a new activity, or a hobby, like swimming or maybe chess. I felt a curious admiration
for my mum, as if she had been, somehow, inside a computer, surfing a digital blue
wave with futuristic, dimly pixelated American people.
When we first got the Internet at home, my parents knew more about it than
me and my sisters. They had to teach us how to use the dial up modem, how to
make passwords and usernames, how to use email. My dad read books and
magazines about the Internet, and I remember him telling me how it was going to
change the world, that soon anyone anywhere in the world would be able to become
a genius.
It didn’t take long, though, before I was spending a lot more time on the Internet than my parents. I would get home from school and spend the next few hours talking to friends and strangers on chat groups. The Internet, for me, was not about educating myself, like it was for my dad. The information I shared on chat groups was banal and mindless. It was just another thing that I used to communicate with and be entertained by. I did not reflect on it. I seamlessly integrated this abstract network that connected millions of bedrooms into my consciousness, like I had the telephone or the TV.
In an article appearing in the New York Times in September this year, New York-based writer Tao Lin recounts the steady and private way the Internet became part of his life. Like me, Lin is old enough to remember a time without the Internet, but young enough to have experienced solitary exploration of it as a teenager. Lin writes that now he sometimes imagines the Internet as a U.F.O that landed one day in his garden, which his parents first noticed but then became half-hearted about, while he, their son, “as if by instinct”, relocated his life to.
Despite my dad’s early utopian enthusiasm I feel that he, like Tao Lin’s parents, has become somehow detached from the Internet, or bamboozled, maybe even left behind. When I speak with him about social media, he is not so much confused by it conceptually as perplexed as to why anyone would be compelled to participate in it. I think my dad still believes in the Internet as an infinite digital storehouse for sharing old media, a place for unilateral interaction with books, music and video – not other people.
Because social media is not a physical medium, like radio, television or computers, and because it broadcasts itself off pre-existing technologies, it is difficult to conceptualise it as a ‘medium’, like, say, TV. But, as Marshall McLuhan pointed out, all new mediums at first appear “as mere codes of transmission for older achievement and established patterns of thought”, and only later, emerge as mediums expressing “new languages with new and unique powers of expression.”
Literary critic, AD Jameson, has described Tao Lin’s poetry as belonging to “some kind of loose-knit shared sensibility” emerging post-September 11 2001 that privileged sincerity over irony. Jameson, who refers to this sensibility as the New Sincerity, describes it as “a resurgence of interest in preciousness, sentiment, & twee” spanning over the cinema of Wes Anderson, the music of Sufjan Stevens and the Decemberists, and the writing of Dorothea Lasky, Nate Pritts and Matt Hart, among others. Although there is little concretely similar about these artists, their work seems to be motivated by a desire to communicate personal experience directly to other people. This means that reading a poem or listening to song is not so much about interpreting a message, but being moved by it.
It didn’t take long, though, before I was spending a lot more time on the Internet than my parents. I would get home from school and spend the next few hours talking to friends and strangers on chat groups. The Internet, for me, was not about educating myself, like it was for my dad. The information I shared on chat groups was banal and mindless. It was just another thing that I used to communicate with and be entertained by. I did not reflect on it. I seamlessly integrated this abstract network that connected millions of bedrooms into my consciousness, like I had the telephone or the TV.
In an article appearing in the New York Times in September this year, New York-based writer Tao Lin recounts the steady and private way the Internet became part of his life. Like me, Lin is old enough to remember a time without the Internet, but young enough to have experienced solitary exploration of it as a teenager. Lin writes that now he sometimes imagines the Internet as a U.F.O that landed one day in his garden, which his parents first noticed but then became half-hearted about, while he, their son, “as if by instinct”, relocated his life to.
Despite my dad’s early utopian enthusiasm I feel that he, like Tao Lin’s parents, has become somehow detached from the Internet, or bamboozled, maybe even left behind. When I speak with him about social media, he is not so much confused by it conceptually as perplexed as to why anyone would be compelled to participate in it. I think my dad still believes in the Internet as an infinite digital storehouse for sharing old media, a place for unilateral interaction with books, music and video – not other people.
Because social media is not a physical medium, like radio, television or computers, and because it broadcasts itself off pre-existing technologies, it is difficult to conceptualise it as a ‘medium’, like, say, TV. But, as Marshall McLuhan pointed out, all new mediums at first appear “as mere codes of transmission for older achievement and established patterns of thought”, and only later, emerge as mediums expressing “new languages with new and unique powers of expression.”
In 1936 Walter Benjamin wrote about how early photographers used cameras
to capture images that had previously been painted or engraved, like portraits and
landscapes, but as the medium proliferated, people started using cameras in new ways: to record crime scenes, mass migrations of people, sports games, the
unobservable movements of animals, for example. Images, and the human
perception of the world, were qualitatively transformed by the new medium, even
though this transformation had not been intended when the medium was invented.
It is probably too early to be prognostic about what new forms of previously
inconceivable cultural products social media will enable. It might turn out that social
media is eventually recognised as the medium Marshall McLuhan was talking about
in 1962 when he wrote, “the next medium, whatever it is – it may be the extension of
consciousness” (265). Or it might be that social media is subsumed very rapidly by
some other medium in the not too distant future, some gadget that enables telepathy.
I don’t know. But I feel like I am starting to perceive, in the writing of Tao Lin and
others his age, the first expressions of a new type of art that has developed slowly
and insidiously in the minds of those who grew up quietly plugged in and instinctively
communicating.
In 2005, when Tao Lin was finishing a degree in Journalism at NYU, quietly working on his writing in libraries around Manhattan, he kept a blog called ‘Reader of Depressing Books’. In September of that year, Lin wrote on his blog: “Of the writers I've read, I feel like it'd be hardest to program a computer to write something that Lorrie Moore has written ... she is more human and less robot than all other writers, I feel, that I have read.” Lin compares Lorrie Moore’s writing with at type of “authorless-sounding” writing that uses stock-phrases, cliché and plot devices, techniques which make Tao Lin “feel vaguely cheated and vaguely unalive and vaguely despairing”, as if “the author has made a clone of him or her self ... and the author is at home, sleeping, eating, living his or her real life, and I am trying stupidly to make a human connection with the clone, the once-removed and deconsciousnessed thing, the unhuman, scarecrowed thing.”
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In 2005, when Tao Lin was finishing a degree in Journalism at NYU, quietly working on his writing in libraries around Manhattan, he kept a blog called ‘Reader of Depressing Books’. In September of that year, Lin wrote on his blog: “Of the writers I've read, I feel like it'd be hardest to program a computer to write something that Lorrie Moore has written ... she is more human and less robot than all other writers, I feel, that I have read.” Lin compares Lorrie Moore’s writing with at type of “authorless-sounding” writing that uses stock-phrases, cliché and plot devices, techniques which make Tao Lin “feel vaguely cheated and vaguely unalive and vaguely despairing”, as if “the author has made a clone of him or her self ... and the author is at home, sleeping, eating, living his or her real life, and I am trying stupidly to make a human connection with the clone, the once-removed and deconsciousnessed thing, the unhuman, scarecrowed thing.”
Lin, who self-admittedly doesn’t have training in robotics or computers, is not,
I don’t think, writing about the technical limitations of artificial natural language
processing or algorithmic creativity, but is asking a philosophical question about
language and technology: that is, how can I relate my experiences and emotions to
another human through language in a way that remains un-programmable, un-
reproducible in an age of algorithmic reproduction?
In his first book of poetry, you are a little bit happier than i am (2006), Lin
attests to his humanness through the non-metaphorical description of concrete experiences and "unrequited feelings, loneliness, meaninglessness, death, limited time, and the arbitrary nature of existence."
i will create a new category
on my instant messenger buddy list
i will call it
‘people i like who don’t like me back’
and i will move your screen name into that group
and i will invite you to my house and show you
and you will say, ‘if i didn’t like you why did i come over’ and you will look at my face
and i will have an honest answer for your question
i will tell you that you came over to be polite
The first poem in the book is called ‘some of my happiest moments in life occur on AOL instant messenger’:
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on my instant messenger buddy list
i will call it
‘people i like who don’t like me back’
and i will move your screen name into that group
and i will invite you to my house and show you
and you will say, ‘if i didn’t like you why did i come over’ and you will look at my face
and i will have an honest answer for your question
i will tell you that you came over to be polite
and after a while you will go home
and you won’t call
and i won’t either
and after a while i won’t like you anymore
and after a while we’ll forget each other
and after a while you will be beautiful and alone inside of your coffin
and i’ll be cold and alone inside of my coffin
and you won’t call
and i won’t either
and after a while i won’t like you anymore
and after a while we’ll forget each other
and after a while you will be beautiful and alone inside of your coffin
and i’ll be cold and alone inside of my coffin
Literary critic, AD Jameson, has described Tao Lin’s poetry as belonging to “some kind of loose-knit shared sensibility” emerging post-September 11 2001 that privileged sincerity over irony. Jameson, who refers to this sensibility as the New Sincerity, describes it as “a resurgence of interest in preciousness, sentiment, & twee” spanning over the cinema of Wes Anderson, the music of Sufjan Stevens and the Decemberists, and the writing of Dorothea Lasky, Nate Pritts and Matt Hart, among others. Although there is little concretely similar about these artists, their work seems to be motivated by a desire to communicate personal experience directly to other people. This means that reading a poem or listening to song is not so much about interpreting a message, but being moved by it.
This can be contrasted with the conceptualism, irony and formal
experimentation of North American writers of the previous decades, such as David
Foster Wallace, whose writing challenged readers by being indeterminate, and
therefore, interpretable along multiple semantic lines. In an essay concerning the
influence of TV in fiction writing in America, Foster Wallace predicted that a return to
sincerity might occur as a reaction against irony and detachment, precipitated, in part,
by the future technologies that would inevitably displace TV.
The next real literary “rebels” in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels, born oglers who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single- entendre principles. Who treat of plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self- consciousness and hip fatigue. These anti-rebels would be outdated, of course, before they even started. Dead on the page. Too sincere. Clearly repressed. Backward, quaint, naive, anachronistic. Maybe that’ll be the point ... The old postmodern insurgents risked the gasp and squeal: shock, disgust, outrage, censorship, accusations of socialism, anarchism, nihilism. Today’s risks are different. The new rebels might be artists willing to ... risk accusations of sentimentality, melodrama. Of overcredulity. Of softness. (193)
That sincerity might be a response to Internet technology is being addressed
by a number of younger writers, including Krystal South, who in an essay called
‘Identify Yourself’, writes about how the Internet has shaped her identity from such a critical age that she no longer bothers to separate her online and offline
experiences. South observes that the challenge of growing up on the Internet has
been figuring out how to use non-human, mathematical machines to denote her
human non-mathematical emotions – or her identity. Self-identification on the Internet
is a parentless experience, a self-taught skill for people born between approximately
1982 -1992, those whose parents were aware of the Internet U.F.O. in the garden,
but didn’t instinctively relocate to it.
In 2008, Tao Lin established an independent publishing house called Muumuu House, which published the writing of a number of writers within this age bracket – Megan Boyle, Ellen Kennedy, Brandon Scott Gorrell and Zachary German – who were writing in similarly detached, unaffected yet existentially absorbed and emotional styles. Reading their work often feels like they are trying to pass a reverse Turing Test; as if they are trying to prove their humanness through the screen via text. In an online social environment, the ability to communicate emotions and meaning as directly as possible becomes more important than formal experimentation. For those who have been brought up using the Internet, unlike their post-modern predecessors, the construction of a self-identity through text is a platitude; the Internet is a text- based ever-shifting, concatenating, and contentious current of being.
In 2008, Tao Lin established an independent publishing house called Muumuu House, which published the writing of a number of writers within this age bracket – Megan Boyle, Ellen Kennedy, Brandon Scott Gorrell and Zachary German – who were writing in similarly detached, unaffected yet existentially absorbed and emotional styles. Reading their work often feels like they are trying to pass a reverse Turing Test; as if they are trying to prove their humanness through the screen via text. In an online social environment, the ability to communicate emotions and meaning as directly as possible becomes more important than formal experimentation. For those who have been brought up using the Internet, unlike their post-modern predecessors, the construction of a self-identity through text is a platitude; the Internet is a text- based ever-shifting, concatenating, and contentious current of being.
By 2010, the community that formed around Muumuu House accumulated a
considerable Internet following, particularly Tao Lin, whose work was being lent
authority via reviews in the New York Times and other ‘IRL’ gatekeepers of cultural
authority. At around the same time, ‘Alt Lit’ became a term used to catalogue these
writers, seemingly invented by a Tumblr blog called ‘Alt Lit Gossip’. The exact
etymology of the term is unclear, but it might have been inspired, in part, by a popular
blog called Hipster Runoff, which would use the word ‘alt’ – as in ‘alternative’ – as an
adjective for cultural items not part of the ‘mainstream’. Although Tao Lin does not
refer to himself as Alt Lit unless otherwise solicited, the work posted on ‘Alt Lit
Gossip’ and other Alt Lit blogs was directly influenced by his the spare, terse, detached, noncommittal, affectless communication of highly emotional and personal
experiences. As such, much of the Alt Lit writing being produced in 2010-2011 concerned highly intimate details of emotional distress, sexual encounters and drug
use. This established links between Alt Lit and online publications like Thought Catalog and Vice, which positioned themselves as alternative (hipster) media
distributors that branded their reportage as “immersionist”, a kind of post-Gonzo style
of story about ‘real’ things told via one person’s point of view.
detached, noncommittal, affectless
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communication of highly emotional and personal
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In 2011, when Portland college student Marie Calloway was 21-years old, she
sent Tao Lin an unsolicited 15,000-word manuscript, via email, of a story she had
written about a sexual encounter with a relatively well known New York-based writer
in his 40s. Tao Lin agreed to publish the piece on Muumuu House, under condition
that they change the name of the New York writer to ‘Adrien Brody’ to cover his
identity. Marie Calloway was a pseudonym the young writer herself was using.
The story begins with an email correspondence in which Marie Calloway tells Adrien Brody that she admires his work, and she sends him a link to her Tumblr. After he responds encouragingly to her writing, Calloway flies to New York to meet him, and discovers that he has a girlfriend. Nevertheless the two end up spending a few days together; they talk about Marxism, browse items at American Apparel, and have sex multiple times. Like Tao Lin, Calloway reports the action of the story with unaffected, detached, dissociative language. Tao Lin writes of Calloway’s story, “I liked her ability to describe a memory objectively and interestingly and without preconception or judgment.”
The story begins with an email correspondence in which Marie Calloway tells Adrien Brody that she admires his work, and she sends him a link to her Tumblr. After he responds encouragingly to her writing, Calloway flies to New York to meet him, and discovers that he has a girlfriend. Nevertheless the two end up spending a few days together; they talk about Marxism, browse items at American Apparel, and have sex multiple times. Like Tao Lin, Calloway reports the action of the story with unaffected, detached, dissociative language. Tao Lin writes of Calloway’s story, “I liked her ability to describe a memory objectively and interestingly and without preconception or judgment.”
One of us brought up cumming on my face instead.
"I've never done that before..." he said.
He said he would do it, but then said he wouldn't, and he kept going back and forth like this until I rolled my eyes.
"Oh, now you're rolling your eyes at me."
"I've never done that before..." he said.
He said he would do it, but then said he wouldn't, and he kept going back and forth like this until I rolled my eyes.
"Oh, now you're rolling your eyes at me."
"Well, do you want to do it or not?"
"That's a fair question..."
I looked up at him, feeling vaguely annoyed.
"Okay, I will," he said.
And then a few minutes later he pulled out and took the condom off and was sitting on his knees above the side of my face.
I could tell he was really nervous, and I was afraid he wouldn't be able to cum. To put him at ease I decided to reenact a scene from a Japanese pornography I had once watched. I opened my eyes and looked into his and smiled up at him.
Then when he finally came on my face I moaned and moved the cum from my cheeks with my finger tips to my mouth, and then sucked my fingers. His face changed to this huge dumb grin, like he couldn't believe it, couldn't believe his luck.
"I feel so vulnerable," he said, his voice shaking.
I felt annoyed he was only focused on his own feelings, after he had just shot a load on my face.
"Can you take a picture of me with my phone?" I asked.
He got up and got my phone, and then after I told him how to, took a photo. He didn't ask why I wanted a photo, he didn't say anything about it, like I hoped he wouldn't.
"Oh, you can't see anything, it's too dark, " I said, looking at the photo.
"That's a fair question..."
I looked up at him, feeling vaguely annoyed.
"Okay, I will," he said.
And then a few minutes later he pulled out and took the condom off and was sitting on his knees above the side of my face.
I could tell he was really nervous, and I was afraid he wouldn't be able to cum. To put him at ease I decided to reenact a scene from a Japanese pornography I had once watched. I opened my eyes and looked into his and smiled up at him.
Then when he finally came on my face I moaned and moved the cum from my cheeks with my finger tips to my mouth, and then sucked my fingers. His face changed to this huge dumb grin, like he couldn't believe it, couldn't believe his luck.
"I feel so vulnerable," he said, his voice shaking.
I felt annoyed he was only focused on his own feelings, after he had just shot a load on my face.
"Can you take a picture of me with my phone?" I asked.
He got up and got my phone, and then after I told him how to, took a photo. He didn't ask why I wanted a photo, he didn't say anything about it, like I hoped he wouldn't.
"Oh, you can't see anything, it's too dark, " I said, looking at the photo.
When Tao Lin posted Calloway’s story on the Muumuu House website, it
precipitated a small level of viral activity. Some bloggers praised the clarity and
honesty of Calloway’s writing while others accused her of pathological narcissism or
lack of talent. Predictably, the story was controversial within the New York publishing
community, as people Googled and uncovered details about Adrien Brody’s true
identity.
Before Calloway achieved Internet fame she kept a popular Tumblr blog that detailed similar stories of her sexual experiences, including a brief period in which she had sex for money in London. She also posted pictures of herself naked on her Tumblr to accompany her stories. Calloway explains that she wrote these blogs “to express my worldview/subjectivity because it felt then that no one had any idea. I guess ultimately I wanted to connect with others in order to feel less alone.”
Before Calloway achieved Internet fame she kept a popular Tumblr blog that detailed similar stories of her sexual experiences, including a brief period in which she had sex for money in London. She also posted pictures of herself naked on her Tumblr to accompany her stories. Calloway explains that she wrote these blogs “to express my worldview/subjectivity because it felt then that no one had any idea. I guess ultimately I wanted to connect with others in order to feel less alone.”
This diaristic style of self-exposure has a lineage of writers including Arthur
Rimbaud, Simone de Beauvoir, Anais Nin, Jack Kerouac and Kathy Acker, among
many others. These writers, like Calloway, submitted themselves to emotional
extremes in order to write about them. What makes Calloway’s experience slightly
different, however, is the method, the pace and scope, with which her story was
distributed. In the past, stories have had to be approved by publishing houses, and
then subjected to editing and sometimes censorship. Today, blogging sites like
LiveJournal (an online diary) and Tumblr allow writers to broadcast their experiences
unfiltered to millions of people. Before Tao Lin posted ‘Adrien Brody’ on Muumuu
House, Calloway posted it on her personal Tumblr with the older writer’s real name,
and a picture of her with his semen on her face.
Anna Poletti’s discussion of perzine culture, in her book Intimate Ephemera,
provides an interesting comparison. Perzine culture is an offshoot of the post-punk
zine culture of the 1990s. Unlike other zines, the content of perzines is the explicit expression of self to establish a distinctive and intimate connection between author
and reader. Parallels between perzine culture and blogging culture are obvious in
Tumblr blogs like Molly Soda’s, whose post-punk/riot grrrl aesthetic looks just like a
digitised version of a popular 1990s-style perzines.
As material, handmade objects, perzines require from scratch design; text
layout, paper quality, printing methods are idiosyncratic expressions of an aesthetic
philosophy and leave a trace of the zine-maker’s presence, or, as Walter Benjmain
would call it, “aura”. While blogs have customisable HTML, there is still an underlying
design aesthetic imposed by the business/programmers that own/built the platform,
and implicit in the aesthetic is a certain philosophy about how information ought to be
represented.
Also, unlike perzines, which are printed in small runs and distributed among a
like-minded community, a highly intimate blog post can ‘go viral’ and transform
individual subjectivity into a meme. The risk of this is that the individual is depersonalised, and taken as symbolic of some larger cultural trend, as can be seen
with Marie Calloway, who, after the publication of the story, became a ‘symbol’ of
what many considered Internet culture’s narcissism, voyeurism and infantile
exhibitionism – which made her a target for anonymous and merciless criticism
online.
In Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction Walter Benjamin suggests that
criticising an actor in a film is more like criticising an inanimate and reproducible
object than a human being. This effect is intensified on the Internet where criticism is
un-moderated and instant, completely unaccountable and, therefore, empathy-less.
After the publication of ‘Adrien Brody’, Calloway was subject to intense online
scrutiny and abuse. She recounts, "I incessantly ruminated about all of it to the point
of mental exhaustion, working myself up to a panic attack which finally culminated in
me hiding from my parents' Christmas party in the guest bathroom. There, I curled up
into the fetal position and hyperventilated". Calloway, like many young authors, has
used the Internet to draw her audience nearer, and achieve intimacy; but the very
same technology subjects her to a boundless room of unaccountable hate.
i thought I had copied a URL, but when I hit command+v in browser it pasted
“FRICIIICKING BOOOOOOOOOOST.”
Partly as a response to the anonymity and cruelty enabled by Internet culture, Steve
Roggenbuck, a 25-year old American poet and vegan activist, has ‘re-branded’ Alt Lit
as a positive community that is self-organised through participation. As a community
that has developed almost exclusively on social media, Alt Lit has never had the
barriers to participation associated with print media. Unlike the editorial pages of
newspapers – in which participation is selected by an editor, and punctuated by the
speed with which newspapers are printed, delivered, and responded to via the postal
service – as long as you have Internet access and a computer of some sort, you can
participate in Alt Lit literally 24/7.
For the past three years, Roggenbuck has pushed the idea of participation to its limit. In early 2010, he wrote and self-published a chapbook of minimalist, astutely sentimental, almost pastoral poetry called i am like october when i am dead. Roggenbuck printed 1000 copies of the book and sent them out for free to many of his online followers, and also released it for free into the public domain as an ebook. Following the release of the book he published the following message on his blog:
For the past three years, Roggenbuck has pushed the idea of participation to its limit. In early 2010, he wrote and self-published a chapbook of minimalist, astutely sentimental, almost pastoral poetry called i am like october when i am dead. Roggenbuck printed 1000 copies of the book and sent them out for free to many of his online followers, and also released it for free into the public domain as an ebook. Following the release of the book he published the following message on his blog:
i want to encourage you to use my writing and art however you want. it is just here for you to enjoy it. you can post my poems on your blog and upload my art to your facebook. you can print or republish my writing wherever you like, with or without credit. you can modify it, then publish it. you can sell it under your own name.
Roggenbuck’s online followers were enthusiastic in assisting him with
distribution. They shared the link to the ebook via social media, and those who
Roggenbuck sent free copies took ‘selfies’ with the book and posted them online. By the summer of 2011, i am like october when i am dead had over 15,000 downloads.
Compare this to ‘traditional’’ print-based distribution of poetry in which a print run of
200 is considered good, and anything more than that, excellent.
Although Roggenbuck didn’t directly benefit financially from the publication of
his first chapbook, the attention it generated online built a community of people to
whom he could directly release his cultural content, including T-shirts, stickers and
posters from which he is able to make, what he considers, enough money to support
his lifestyle. When judged alone on abstract ideas of ‘literary merit’, the poems in
Roggenbuck’s first chapbook are probably not formally ground-breaking, but his
networking and distribution methods on social media ought to be considered part of
his artistry. His formula for self-publishing is simple: post content for free online, build
an audience, and then collect output into books. The proofing and editing is done in
public with the benefit of constant feedback and encouragement. This represents a
new paradigm for publishing that values attention and community building as highly
as aesthetic innovation, and doesn’t distinguish between readers and friends.
Since the release of his first chapbook, Roggenbuck has contributed prolifically to multiple online content streams. He produces YouTube videos that are a combination of absurdist humour and vegan activism; he constructs image macros (lines of poetry superimposed over jpeg images); he holds video conference calls for poetry readings and q&a’s with his followers; he Tweets, comments on Facebook and updates Tumblr relentlessly; and most impressively he responds to almost all his fans when they reach out to him via social media. The purpose of this consistent and periodic release of content is, according to Roggenbuck, to build a recognisable personal brand, and to generate and maintain attention around this personal brand.
In 2013, the poetry Roggenbuck is feeding into social media experiments with the language of the Internet. Roggenbuck’s latest collection of poetry IF YOU DONT LOVE THE MOON YOUR AN ASSHOLE is appropriated from social media platforms like YouTube and msn messenger logs, and includes the tone and cultural references used by predominantly young people when they communicate online.
Since the release of his first chapbook, Roggenbuck has contributed prolifically to multiple online content streams. He produces YouTube videos that are a combination of absurdist humour and vegan activism; he constructs image macros (lines of poetry superimposed over jpeg images); he holds video conference calls for poetry readings and q&a’s with his followers; he Tweets, comments on Facebook and updates Tumblr relentlessly; and most impressively he responds to almost all his fans when they reach out to him via social media. The purpose of this consistent and periodic release of content is, according to Roggenbuck, to build a recognisable personal brand, and to generate and maintain attention around this personal brand.
In 2013, the poetry Roggenbuck is feeding into social media experiments with the language of the Internet. Roggenbuck’s latest collection of poetry IF YOU DONT LOVE THE MOON YOUR AN ASSHOLE is appropriated from social media platforms like YouTube and msn messenger logs, and includes the tone and cultural references used by predominantly young people when they communicate online.
I Love to See That Many Of My Followers are Dogs But If I Ever Find Out that
You Are Not a Dog IRL You Will be In Some Shit
The language borrows from the Internet slang of his peers, recontextualizes it
in the form of a book of poetry, transforms slightly by not correcting typos, and then
he gives it back to the Internet through tireless promotion and meme-like distribution.
In IF YOU DONT LOVE THE MOON, Roggenbuck uses the certain phrase, like
“hashtag YOLO”, so many times that I can’t help but associate them with him and his
brand, reminiscent of what Nike does with a phrase like ‘Just Do It’.
In 2012, Roggenbuck started a collaborative Tumblr blog called Internet Poetry
that publishes, “screenshots of poetry, poetry on twitter, email, gchat, amazon book
reviews, live chat customer service windows: poetry as wikipedia entries, blog
comments, trackbacks/pings, google bombs, youtube video responses: poetry as
facebook statuses, facebook groups, facebook notes, facebook events, facebook
pictures, facebook videos, and facebook friend requests.”
Like the image above, a lot of the content that goes up on Internet Poetry is produced
from appropriated images and screenshots of social media correspondences,
encouraging the rapid production of new content. This method of cultural production
has been given the name ‘quickshit’ within some online writing communities.
Quickshit includes speedily produced and amateur ebooks of poetry, which are
distributed via pdf through social media. Eschewing literary journals, Quickshit writers
have complete liberty over how and what they publish, and without externally
imposed reviewing, editing and quality control, they can easily publish dozens of
ebooks a year. A repercussion of Quickshit-style publishing is that the lure of
attention begins to trump ‘quality’. For an Alt Lit writer, in order to ‘get attention’ they
have to participate not in punctuated bursts, but constantly, totally, immersively;
participation becomes an act of endurance. In a way, the content of the writing
becomes less important than the fact it is simply there on the newsfeed, like a type
of defensive advertising reminding you of the writer’s existence.
This quick ‘mashup’ content has been criticised for being lightweight and vapid. Jaron Lanier, a computer scientist instrumental in scaling the early Internet to a
broader user base, has written that a culture that appropriates without acknowledging
sources, and values quantity over quality will debase individuality and originality by
making cultural production seem like the result of a collective hive-mind at the
expense of the notion of the singular artist. Lanier’s point is that cultural production
should be acknowledged as emanating from individuals, and not the technology they
are using. "We can't afford to respect our designs so much” he writes, “What is
important about printing presses [and technology in general] is not the mechanism
but the authors".
Internet artist Brad Troemel argues that Lanier’s position owes to a notion of
‘the individual masterpiece’ that holds no clout for younger, connected artists. In 2009,
Troemel started a Tumblr blog called The Jogging, which works like Internet Poetry
but for visual artists; the images posted on The Jogging are produced predominantly
by young artists who “trump craft and contemplative brooding with immediacy and
rapid production.” Troemel calls these hyperproductive artists and writers ‘Aesthletes’,
because the pace of their work requires athleticism instead of refinement. Aesthletes,
Troemel writes, “have transformed the notion of a “work” from a series of isolated
projects to a constant broadcast of one’s artistic identity as a recognizable, unique
brand ... This has reversed the traditional recipe that you need to create art to have
an audience. Today’s artist on The Internet needs an audience to create art. An
aesthlete’s audience, once assembled, becomes part of their medium.”
In 2011, conceptual poet Kenneth Goldsmith, wrote a book called Uncreative Writing,
which positions the contemporary writer as an appropriator and programmer, an
organiser of pre-existing data rather than a producer of original text. This new type of
writer, Goldsmith argues, does not consider their work to be creative expressions of
subjectivity and personal genius; rather, they see their work as being part of a
collaborative network.
Goldsmith explains “while this new writing has an electronic gleam in its eyes, its results are distinctly analog, taking inspiration from radical modernist ideas and juicing them with twenty-first century technology". Owing to this ‘modernist’ mode of thinking, Goldsmith is still indebted to the idea that art has objective aesthetic value, and that it can be quantified and measured to create some type of hierarchy of artistic merit. Goldsmith writes, “The moment we throw judgment and quality out the window we're in trouble. Democracy is fine for YouTube, but it's generally a recipe for disaster when it comes to art".
Goldsmith explains “while this new writing has an electronic gleam in its eyes, its results are distinctly analog, taking inspiration from radical modernist ideas and juicing them with twenty-first century technology". Owing to this ‘modernist’ mode of thinking, Goldsmith is still indebted to the idea that art has objective aesthetic value, and that it can be quantified and measured to create some type of hierarchy of artistic merit. Goldsmith writes, “The moment we throw judgment and quality out the window we're in trouble. Democracy is fine for YouTube, but it's generally a recipe for disaster when it comes to art".
The idea of ‘objective literary merit’ is at odds with the motivations of all of the
writers and artists I have written about so far. I would argue that ‘objective literary
merit’ is the idea most directly challenged by the activities of social media writers and artists. ‘Objective literary merit’ enforces distance between the artist and the
audience by implying that what you are experiencing when you read a poem isn’t
communication with the person who wrote it, but the experience of some inherent,
quantifiable merit contained and depersonalized within the poem. In the age of social
media, however, these artists don’t want to be separate from their work, or their
audience, because their personality and the audience constitute the work itself.
Goldsmith perceives the impact technology is having on writing, but there is a
generational gap between him, and Tao Lin, Marie Calloway and Steve Roggenbuck.
While his ideas work to further the distance between producer and product, their
work unifies identity with product, and attempts to draw the reader closer to an
authentic expression of the self. Write not to “create art” but to feel comforted and
less alone. The point is, Goldsmith is not an Internet native, and will never be as
completely immersed in the Internet as these writers are. He hasn’t had the same
experience of constructing identity via online chat or gaming, alone in his bedroom,
adolescent, experimenting. He did not relocate his entire life to the U.F.O. in the
garden.
While Goldsmith can talk almost ironically about being a node in the network,
this is a reality Internet natives have almost subconsciously internalised in their
formative years. They have had to distinguish themselves as humans in a world
mediated by machines. Their ‘aesthetic’ exists in the tensions between the ecstasy of
connection and the anxiety of solipsism. There is a frightened and anxious quality in
all of these writers, a sentimentality that Goldsmith opposes, an un-ironic desire for
direct communication. And when this is the motivation for art, objective notions of literary merit become utterly unimportant. Especially if your poem gets 500 reblogs,
23 retweets, and 175 Facebook Likes.
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