Not that I’ve been counting, but I realized this week that I’m approaching the 6-month anniversary of my stack. I published my first post on the 16th of December, laying out my personal history of blogging and thinking about the role that this activity had played in my scholarship and my relative sanity.
If you were one of the three people who read that first post, you might be forgiven for not noticing the layers in the title. For me, blogging is very much about time, in that it’s a matter of how I allocate my day-to-day life. I almost always have the time to write, but it’s more about making the time to write, and that’s a verbal shift that I know a lot of us negotiate. And then, “it’s about time” in the colloquial sense: given how much regular writing helps me think and process, returning to a regular schedule was long overdue. There’s a third sense, too, that’s a little harder to pin down, but I’m going to call it “temporal bandwidth” for reasons that will emerge below. For me, the practice of regular public writing is a means of developing that faculty. It allows me to take up topics, think through them, and set them on a personal timeline that enables me to move on to other things. At the same time, it orients me to the future: what will I write about today? this week? this month? So while I’m certainly writing in the present, that writing feels like it takes place in a broader temporal context. The fact that I sometimes write these posts over the course of two to three days only enhances that feeling.
But this week, I’ve been thinking about time more abstractly, and so this post too is about time in a few ways. Two things in particular served to activate this cluster. The first is that, as you might have gathered from the Kindle screen cap from my last post, I’m reading Byung-Chul Han’s Infocracy, and as I work through it, I’m hearing a lot of echoes from another of his works (The Disappearance of Rituals). That’s the way that he writes, to be sure, but the connections that he sketches out between democracy and time are making me think quite a bit about the work that I’m doing. I’ll have more to say about this later, I’m sure, as I finish Infocracy and turn to some of his other work.
But the second thing that caught my eye was a link from this week’s Culture Study, to a story about a sandwich. I don’t want to spoil the story for you, but Katie Honan’s “The Untold Tale of the Artichoke Parm, the Most Mysterious Sandwich in Brooklyn” is one that I highly recommend. It’s a piece that reminded me in good ways of a book that’s in my all-time top ten, Anna Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World. It starts with the author happening across this sandwich and turns into a really interesting history of sandwiches, sandwich shops, and the city itself. As Honan herself remarks towards the end of the piece, “My yearlong fixation on The Sandwich helped me better understand my own city—the way it evolves and grows and changes but still carries its history with it, in the people and the food that sticks around.”
These two texts don’t make an easy pair, or a likely one, but as I was reading about the artichoke parm, there was a vibe to it that resists what Han is critiquing in his book, and that’s where the connection lied for me. For Han, social media corrodes our sense of time. “Discourse,” he explains, “is a time-intensive process,” and Honan’s article resonated for me with this, as the opposite of an Instagram shot of the sandwich (although there are a few pics of the sandwich sprinkled throughout the article, of course). Instead, she unpacks the long, multi-generational story that rests behind an otherwise simple menu item, building what might Han might describe as “temporal architecture” around it, rather than reducing it to fodder for a handful of likes.
This pair of texts also connected with a number of other texts and ideas that have been orbiting for me lately. One of those is Jenny O’Dell’s new book on Saving Time. I’m aware of the irony involved in saying that I haven’t had the time yet to read through it, but it strikes me as a natural follow up for How to Do Nothing, and I’m looking forward to dipping in.
A more immediate connection came from a post last month from Convivial Society, on the “Meta-Positioning Habit of Mind”:
L. M. Sacasas writes about how social media has shifted the way that culture wars operate, where “It’s not so much that we have something to say but that we have a social space we want to be seen to occupy.” Towards the end of his post, he turns to what I find to be a particularly resonant description of context collapse, suggesting that “perhaps the digital sea through which we navigate takes the form of a whirlpool sucking us into the present.” This feels right to me, and corresponds with the work that I was doing almost a decade ago on virality. I’m thinking here of Kim’s “Politics of Trending,” for example, which provides a really cogent account of the way that Twitter’s “trending topics” feature places its thumb on the scale of the New and the Now, and forecloses on sustained political attention and/or action for certain topics.
Anyhow, Sacasas turns to Alan Jacobs talking about temporal bandwidth (citing Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow), explaining that
“temporal bandwidth is the width of your present, your now … The more you dwell in the past and future, the thicker your bandwidth, the more solid your persona. But the narrower your sense of Now, the more tenuous you are.” Paradoxically, then, the more focused we are on the present, the less of a grip we’re able to get on it.
I really like the phrase “temporal bandwidth,” because I think it captures well the growing unease that I’ve felt over the years as social media progressively truncated our discourse. And as I mentioned above, I find the work that I do here to help me counteract it. If nothing else, simply working through ideas, pulling together sources from multiple points in my reading and synthesizing them, helps me locate my brainspace in ways that scrolling Twitter cannot. While I can’t speak for others, I’ve found, in important, concrete ways, that temporal bandwidth has physiological implications for me in terms of anxiety, blood pressure, etc. It’s no accident that I found myself pulling away from social media when I was forced to take measures regarding my physical health.
Nor would I be the first to make connections between social media culture and the mental health challenges facing folks who have been raised in this culture. It’s not as simple as saying that “blogging makes you healthy!” But there’s only so many stories you can see about “digital detox” strategies before you connect the dots and realize that there’s something toxifying about many of these platforms. Like my good friend Derek, I find myself wondering if “Old media’s circulatory rhythms may have (I’m hedging…but I think mostly yes) achieved synchrony with common-ish human biorhythms (e.g., contemplative cycles, dailinesses, but also the bigger hum of orbits and rotations).” The flip of that is to wonder what we’re transforming ourselves into as we leave those older media behind (and increasingly, as we replace the transitional media that we first called upon to disrupt them—the end of the “useful internet,” as Alex Pareene calls it).
Let me close this raggedy collection of thoughts with one last node, from the recent NYTimes editorial about “Why Universities Should Be More Like Monasteries,” a prospect that I would have scoffed at not so long ago. Molly Worthen shares some anecdotal evidence from a couple of schools where professors are experimenting with intentionally low-tech, pseudo-monastic classroom experiences, inviting students to eliminate distraction and to return to a slower model of how education might function. Like I said, I would have found this laughable at a point not so long ago. But I must admit that I now find myself thinking about how courses like these might be an effective way to increase temporal bandwidth, particularly for those who don’t have the benefit of having lived in a culture where it still held some value.
I’m not unaware that that last clause is one long euphemism for the fact that I’m old. And that’s the grain of salt with which this entire entry is spiced.