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Music: Arcade Fire: The Suburbs (2010)
I was reaching around to post a synth-pop video to celebrate the arrival of Friday when I realized the gesture was born of guilt: I've let my blog go, something like a digital waistline expanding into the flab of wordless blackness. I thought (upon the thought) that, like my waistline, this is as much the product of age and a patterned progress or the march of the inevitable as it is a loss (a mourning over) discipline. That patterned progress---the inevitable---is social networking and the sacrifice of meat for speed (saying something of substance versus saying something that circulates)---Facebook is the new blog. Or something called tumblr, where borrowed imagery takes the place of wordy self-expression. And the second, the loss, this loss is a shift of norms regarding the parceling of time. The decline of the blog is the transformation of Rosechron, a loss of the contemplative for the mark, "contemplation is happening elsewhere."
I started the work-week on Monday with the decision to track, for the week, where I was spending my time and contemplative efforts. Since this blog debuted a decade or so ago, the intellectual tasks associated with my vocation have shifted, not dramatically but gradually, toward what is called "service." A decade ago I had class and committees, but much more time dedicated to thinking thoughts for their own sake. It seems now thinking always has an end other than itself, and often it is about the welfare of others. While I moan about the instrumentality of that shift, I have to admit it's not a terrible trade off: I spent almost two days writing recommendation letters for students---well, I would say colleagues or friends (as I wouldn't write a letter for just anyone). I spent a morning prepping for class, then began writing (well, retrofitting a previous thing, but still creating a new thing nonetheless) a presentation for a civic group on a topic I know a little about (occultism in U.S. popular culture). On Tuesday I woke early to brush up on the talk, went to school and delivered it to the group, visited with them a bit, then rushed off to teach my undergraduate class, after which . . . . Wait a minute. You don't want to read about that. Nor do I want to write about the laundry list of the week . . . sorry. The point of running through the list of "what I did this week" is that I'm engaging people intellectually in "real space" more than I have in my career. This much is different, different from five years ago in a dramatic way.
The increasing temporal demand of "face time" is not a new realization, but it is something important to underscore about the academic life: the more you do it, the more "face time" you get and perhaps want, the more "face time" asked of you or that you volunteer. Or perhaps this is simply the way professorship goes: the more you do it, the less and less you are allowed to, or want to, sit in front of screen?
Well, there's a familiar refrain: "I don't know." I don't know exactly how to think about the decline of blog writing, even taking the take-off of short, social-networking "tweets" or "status updates" into account. There are smart, academic accounts of the decline of the blog in general (Jodi Dean's marvelous Blog Theory comes to mind), many of which concern the eclipse of what Katherine Hayles termed "deep learning" (or contemplation) versus "hyper learning," or what we might call the thought of circulatory affect: blip here, sentiment there, the landing of an opinion-and-quip bomb. It---whatever "it" is at the moment---gets your attention, raises the jib (but where are we sailing, Josh?), at least for a moment. There's the "truthy" resonance of the hyper after a long week of teaching and meetings and face-to-face exchange: It's 1:30 a.m. here and I'm tired and digging deep to say something of substance, but still, it's a lot less taxing to express myself like a DJ: see the next post, because it is synth-pop Friday, after all. That's the substance. I'm not sure being honest about it is a good thing, but to put the sentiment appropriately (if you're into that sort of thing), "it is what it is." Ugh. I think.