time to make the doughnuts

Disclaimer
I come here to write until I cannot write no more. I need the practice. I need the discipline.

I saw a movie where actor Matt Dillon played an accurate Charles Bukowski. His character was named Hank Chinaski, and the film was called "Factotum" which apparently means a person employed to do odd jobs. Dillon's character does a range several jobs, serially, and they all end with his employer tracking him down at a local bar and telling him he's fired.

The reason I bring this up is because Hank Chinaski considers himself a writer. He's basically possessed by writing, and so every time he takes a puff or a drink he also has a pencil in the other hand jotting down story lines. Usually, in an adjacent scene we see Chinaski mailing off his material to the New York Times or Black Sparrow Press. Owing to his nomadic living habits, he never receives the numerous letters he receives indicating which stories were submitted and which were ignored. One of his landlords reads them over her morning coffee, tucking the positive reviews in her dress pocket. It's her own little voyeuristic release.

I send my missives into the ether for nobody to read. I've shared this blog with very few people, and as you can tell it's more diary-like than it is instructive in how to write. I spend too much time on procedural issues, navel gazing, mirror watching. That can and should stop, but it's a square one for me. A unit of measurement, a cup to be filled, a telos in the fulfillment.

I'll just sit and write for a while. I had a topic. Oh yes, personal electronic devices with web access, what some call 'internet appliances.' These are the hyped up cellular phones with keypads, phones, and audio/visual capabilities. Everyone uses them, they're intuitive, touch friendly, and help us share our senses with others. But what does that breed? A fidgeting subject.

Technofidgeting
The fidgeting subject is the person whose most recognizable public behaviors are the subject's withdrawal from public interaction. Instead, each person uses time in the public as an opportunity to retreat into the small glowing, touch-sensitive screen through which this person stays in contact with the people the subject prefers. The corpus of behaviors of the fidgeting subject reveal a level of obsession and compulsion with addressing unanswered messages, double checking messages, reading sent mail, looking at stored pictures, generally being enamored with information retrieval, search, and maintenance. This is a behavior based in information storage.

Storage
I recall being in an airport as a young teenager with my cousin. I was obsessed with computers at the time and took on a series of small jobs to save money for one. I never did save that money. I had a mother who had some kind of habit she kept secret but which surfaced in her habit of taking from my stash of cash. I spent a summer with my cousin in Lawton, Oklahoma. It was a post-Garth Brooks, "achy breaky heart" era: summer 1992. We were in the airport and one of the big hard drive companies had an advertisement/display of their latest products. One was a gigabyte hard drive. It was mounted on the wall display behind plexiglass next to one of their smaller multi-megabyte drives. The gigabyte drive was monstrous in comparison with numerous platters on which information was stored. That was a glimpse into a future, a saurian relic, which would become the nimble fleet-footed avian storage device of today. Now we have tiny storage devices with enormous capabilities. A drive holding 1000-times the data as that huge gigabyte drive is about the size of a pill box. This has an important effect. We can store more.

Storage, search, information retrieval--I can't think of better buzz words that define our current moment. We now have the capability to place storage devices in cars, phones, appliances, personal media devices, televisions, and so on. And the economy of storage justifies this. It's cheap to add more space as a feature on next year's cell model. It's cheap to add a hard drive to our next-generation automobile consoles. These storage devices, in their current capacity, allow us to time shift. If we miss a segment of a live broadcast, we can simply rewind, catch-up, and still have access to what is currently streaming, perhaps minutes ahead of our consumption in the car next to us. "Live" has suddenly become a less pressing format. We don't have to plan our day around it. We just need to be able to tell our preferred storage device to record it. That's one outcome of the storage boom. What's the other?

Well, for some storage becomes an obsession. A man who stores a terabyte of naked images on his hard drive loses track of what he has and what he hasn't. Storage outpaces a way to interface discreetly with it. We lack an appropriate index, something that will allow us to discern what we have and don't have and where to find it, in an instant. We return to the picture, the snapshot, the global perspective as a metaphor for knowing all at once what we have stored in the trillions of bites of data on that device the size of an AC power adapter. So in our free time, or in our make time, we search, catalog, move, delete, copy, and rename our stored files. When storage media become cheap, human memory becomes our burden. Namely, we must continually access our storage media if we want to maintain a grasp of what we have. Like a hafiz, we must practice recitation of our drive space's contents, and we do this all the time, like a person who bites one's nails or twirls one's hair. It becomes an incessant, obsessive, and mindless execution of tiny behaviors. That is our current situation.

Recursive behaviors
Waxing poetically while driving down the highway I stated that we've become the dead mannequins to our technical devices. The devices hail us. We rely upon them as augments to our own attention, helping us keep track of appointments, names, numbers, contacts. Some slices of the technosocial milieu I'm describing reflect conscious tactics to access the device purposefully. All the other time is filled with those device's power to direct us.

It's a matter of viewing culture as a temporally recursive medium through which we live, grow, and understand that we reproduce in the tiny rituals of search, retrieval, access, recall, copy, paste, delete, send, receive. Those who see time as a straight line may miss the subtlety of the argument. I claim that once we incorporate the devices into our lives, it's our returning and slowly adaptive use of them, which figures the devices so prominently in our daily lives. If we find them useful, we use them. As we shape our day around their use, we feel we cannot live without them. But that's always been the case. We use tools, which allow us to expand our scope of action and the density of our societies. To the extent that our lives, our society, our identities grow increasingly into these areas of expansion--these lands reclaimed from a sea of impossibility--we become reliant upon the tools which allow it. That's a material condition. The cultural-material element, once again, are our ritual activities, which punctuate tool-use behaviors. Those become the recursive elements that fold our identities and our behaviors into the return to these tools again and again.

Psychopathology
So what does this leave us with? The criticism relies upon using a metaphorical DSM classification to define this techno-fidgeting as pathological. Alas, the definitions of abnormal psychology require a ground of normal behaviors against which we places them and discern their difference. Psychology of this sort is not only culturally specific, it's based upon a metaphorical bell curve with outlier behaviors falling within the category of psychopathology. That being said, how much longer until we lose this ground against which we judge these behaviors?

The last frontier is the mind.
I've been working on an argument within the vein of Richard Dawkins. His "Selfish Gene" theory suggest that animal behavior is driven by a gene's desire for survivability. That's a simple enough argument, and I may have mangled his characterization altogether. I've been considering how ritual, as repetitive practice, is a way to economize brain tissue. If you're having the same experience repetitively then you're practicing what some studies call 'neuroconsolidation.' In short, the same experiences call up and reuse the same neural connections. This way the brain doesn't have to rewire itself too often, which could be a costly activity. I tried this idea on for size by attempting to shake myself of some deep-seated anxieties and the behaviors they spawn. I've had no luck so far, but I'm a messy experimenter. All I've been doing is selling off my stuff en masse. What I am thinking is that, given my argument above, our gadgetry and gadget-related behavioral disorders are re-ordering our brains. Perhaps they aren't. Our behavioral tendencies already reinforce obsessive and reward-based behaviors. These behaviors are much older than the hominid mind and body. If we can structure environments that elicit this in rats, then we're seeing a much older survival strategy. So maybe we aren't 'changing' the brain all that much. But maybe the argument doesn't require evidence of wholesale change, just small stuff. I'll keep thinking about it.