Via my Arts Editor, a non-BBS friend (don’t worry if that didn’t make any sense) has passed on an article written by Andrew Sullivan, who ran a blog named The Daily Dish (later just The Dish) for 15 years. In this article Andrew recounts the aftermath of quitting the blog, of surrounding himself with silence, and then generalizes the whole thing to humanity. It’s far too wide-ranging for a comprehensive response, but it certainly struck a chord with me – and I suspect any of my old BBS friends.
For a decade and a half, I’d been a web obsessive, publishing blog posts multiple times a day, seven days a week, and ultimately corralling a team that curated the web every 20 minutes during peak hours. Each morning began with a full immersion in the stream of internet consciousness and news, jumping from site to site, tweet to tweet, breaking news story to hottest take, scanning countless images and videos, catching up with multiple memes. Throughout the day, I’d cough up an insight or an argument or a joke about what had just occurred or what was happening right now. And at times, as events took over, I’d spend weeks manically grabbing every tiny scrap of a developing story in order to fuse them into a narrative in real time. I was in an unending dialogue with readers who were caviling, praising, booing, correcting. My brain had never been so occupied so insistently by so many different subjects and in so public a way for so long.
For those who don’t know, a BBS was, back in the day, a Bulletin Board System. In my case, a computer was connected to a modem, connected to a phone line. Someone called the number, the modem answered, the caller’s modem responded, the computer was notified of a connection, and a program on the computer would then guide the user through a collection of message spaces which they could read and write.
Sounds simple, even boring, right?
The compulsive mania Andrew describes is eerily familiar. I remember hundreds of mornings of “checking the board” to see what, if anything, had been contributed overnight, an intellectual argument to chew to the gristle during the day, or humor, or whatever had happened. Then the long day at work (sometimes I’d find a way to call from work), to be followed by a leisurely consumption of the content of the board, essays composed (eventually offline, as the board was very busy) and posted, emotions surging, sometimes, like the tide up the Bay of Fundy. Such was youth.
Many of my friends from the hobby had similar compulsion, dialing numbers over and over and over until the busy signal was replaced by the blessed ring. One group of nighthawks arranged a schedule among themselves in order to minimize busy signals. A good friend decided to start a board, set it up one evening in her bedroom – and didn’t sleep that night as callers immediately began flooding in to see what she’d started.
At the time, anyone asking what we were doing was often met by a long “ummmm” as we (or at least I) tried to explain the How and the Why of BBSing; today, it’s trivial. But I never imagined that such a huge fraction of the world would ever do what I did back then – use electronics to not only communicate, but modify how we communicate. Strip away body language, for the bad and the good. Remove race and gender from the equation. Minimize the age component, the hierarchical components – just get a thought out there so that it could stand, or fall, on its own.
But the compulsion – Andrew quotes 5 hours, on average, spent on your smartphone each day! It’s an echo of what we were doing thirty years ago, not attenuated, but strengthened and mutating yet again. Here’s Andrew on that mutation:
By rapidly substituting virtual reality for reality, we are diminishing the scope of this interaction even as we multiply the number of people with whom we interact. We remove or drastically filter all the information we might get by being with another person. We reduce them to some outlines — a Facebook “friend,” an Instagram photo, a text message — in a controlled and sequestered world that exists largely free of the sudden eruptions or encumbrances of actual human interaction. We become each other’s “contacts,” efficient shadows of ourselves.
Will this be a stable change, or will it decay into something else? Or will we retreat? While reading, I thought of starting a place where wifi and smartphones are banned – and 5 minutes later see Andrew has beaten me to it. No matter; his basic thoughts on the importance of silence, of thinking, of inactivity, ring true. Something to consider the next time you can’t find your phone: sit and stare. Or read his article.
(h/t Ron Anderson)
