Yesterday, in "history"...
One of the things that I really enjoy about reading Cory Doctorow regularly is that his posts at Pluralistic bake in a series of links to the stories that he was reading or posting on that particular day 5, 10, 15, and/or 20 years ago. It’s not a particularly complicated feature to enable, especially on a site like his that generates daily content, but it’s a small gesture towards temporal bandwidth that I enjoy, even if I’m only just reading the headlines mostly.
I was thinking about this yesterday for a couple of reasons. First, I spent a fair chunk of time this weekend with Anna Kornbluh’s Immediacy: Or, the Style of Too Late Capitalism, a book about which I’ll have more to say in the next week or so. Mundane as it may be to observe, Doctorow’s links resist immediacy, insofar as they hint at the persistent concerns and shifting contexts of his work over the years. Second and more importantly, though, I came across this little gem as I was browsing:
That’s right. 40 years ago yesterday was the fictional date that The Breakfast Club took place. I must admit that for the most part, outside of Rex Manning Day, I don’t spend much energy remembering fictional dates on my calendar. And it’s been long enough now that I don’t really even remember whether Breakfast Club holds up all these years later. A few years ago, Sarah Ward wrote that part of its enduring quality comes from its “rebuke of snap judgements, instant categorisations, stereotypes, preconceived notions and dismissing others based on only the most obvious information.” Y’know, all the things that we’ve built an entire media ecosystem around these days.
I also dropped by Facebook. While I’m sympathetic to the argument that the platform’s “Memories” feature isn’t always in the best taste, it did share with me a slide from a talk I was preparing 10 years ago.
Back in 2014, I was getting ready to deliver a talk that I would end up giving at LSU, Wisconsin, and Texas, about the network studies research I was doing at the time. The frame for it was an extended scene from the movie World War Z (which had just been released the year before)—the talk itself was originally titled “World War T” and the scene (for me) dramatized the conflict between two very different network models, the one typified by social media and the more traditional structures that were weakening as a consequence of the Internet.
Anyway, part of my strategy for making these models more legible to an audience of faculty and students in my field was to talk about networks in terms of rhetorical tropes, metonymy and synecdoche. The resonance of that connection is something that’s (obviously) continuing to fuel my writing to this day, even if the emphasis has shifted radically in the meantime. I’ve been thinking about these tropes for more than 10 years now—and my tentative chapter plan has “World War T” as the title for Chapter 4, if you must know.
There’s been a lot of other work, and just life in general, that’s occurred in the interim, but there’s something oddly comforting about the fact that this idea I had ten years ago is still compelling to me. A decade later, I’m still motivated by the prospect of getting a more polished version of it out into the world. And that’s pretty cool.