the internet is a little make-believe, isn't it?
I have once again moved platforms for this blog. I wanted something simpler and easier to maintain, and cheaper. The previous iteration of this site was made through Wix, which had many wonderful features, but I would have had to pay a premium subscription ad infinitum to be able to maintain the site. WordPress is an older platform, and its free version is much more agreeable.
Migrating my posts Wix to WordPress was easy. It gave me the chance to rethink the visuals and the purpose of the site overall. This iteration is more personal, less professionally driven. The simpler layout brings the text to the forefront; I chose the font to be as unobtrusive as possible.
But there was one minor detail that I couldn't change during the transition, or wasn't willing to take the time to change---I had left links to the Wix site throughout my social media accounts. Now they were like ghostly breadcrumbs that led to nowhere—dead, or “rotten.”
In an article for The Atlantic, Jonathan Zittrain explores the ephemerality of the internet, which is specifically concerning given the internet's function as a repository for knowledge. One of Zittrain's studies found that 50 percent of links in Supreme Court decisions since 1996, the year the Court first used hyperlinks in decisions, lead to web pages that no longer exist.
What happens when we can no longer access the information we once used to draw our conclusions about the world—or we can't find the sources used by people we trust to draw conclusions about the world for us? What happens to trust, credibility, and knowledge itself?
What makes the internet so easy to crumble also makes it easy to transform. Zittrain points out how digital formats allow writers to change the text on millions of copies of their books at once. Publishers routinely work with Amazon to change typos in the eBook versions of already-released books, which get transmitted to every Kindle copy. In the case of Elin Hilderbrand, the author recently pulled an insensitive joke from her novel's eBook version after receiving flak on Twitter. In a digital world, history can literally be rewritten without us even realizing it—in the time it takes to send a few emails.
Digital periodicals, unable to make money by selling print materials, have increasingly turned to the digital subscription model. People can pay to access digital content. But this model is steeped in precarity. If the money runs out, then the staff can't pay for the server, the domain, and the everyday maintenance to eliminate bugs. The site will putter out of existence, as will all the information and art that it hosted—a loss that any writer who has published work in a now-defunct online literary journal can tell you about. The internet is great for spontaneous generation, but what many people forget, or find they can't afford, is the maintenance.
I have been thinking about this with my writing and note-keeping recently. I often experiment with the apps I use to store my thoughts and organize my life. In high school, I dabbled with EverNote, in college I often used Google Keep, and in my first year of graduate school, I used Notion for everything, from my coursework to my blog posts to my grocery lists. I recently migrated the most essential of these notes to a different app—one I liked but had never heard of before. As I set myself up on this new app, the thought crossed my mind—what if this app fell out of fashion or lost support in the next few years, or even months? What would happen to all of my notes? How long would it take for me to set up shop elsewhere?
One of the reasons I migrated from Notion was that it lacked an offline mode. I could only access my notes when connected to the internet. Our generation has been told over and over again that everything on the internet is permanent—but sometimes servers are down, sometimes the connection is slow and stuttery, and sometimes things disappear forever, into an ether impenetrable for us mere mortals.
This is partly why I continue to write longhand, in journals. I am afraid that after I am gone, or even after the current self writing this is gone, nothing left of me will remain behind. I imagine some apocalyptic future in which the internet has collapsed and we in the First World no longer have on-demand electricity. In this dystopia, I at least have the record of my life.
In You Are Not a Gadget, Jaron Lanier predicted that as soon as eBooks became a dominant form of reading, the worth of books will plummet—like music after streaming, or movies after torrenting. The act of listening to a specific album that you had to retrieve from the record shop across town, or borrow from your local library, while only able to listen to it on the stereo in your own home, is a very different experience from having nearly all recorded music at your fingertips, anywhere and anytime. I find myself playing music even when I know I won't be able to pay attention to even 30 percent of it, just because I know it's accessible to me.
While the world is still full of people who read deeply and lovingly (including myself), I feel echoes of Lanier's predictions in my everyday life. My Kindle is full of books I bought but never read, and I am much less likely to read a book that I borrow on my Libby App versus one I borrow in print from the library. Part of this is about convenience and ease—things tend to feel more valuable the harder you have to work for them, and it's easy to pick up books online that you might not have picked up in-person—but I also think it is the non-physical, ephemeral nature of the internet that makes it so easy to skim, skip, and disregard.
While reading You Are Not a Gadget, I tried to explain the book to Alex. One of Lanier's arguments is that the anonymity and speed of the internet allows people to take on personas, to say or do things they wouldn't otherwise do because there are less tangible consequences. Alex agreed, and added, "That's why I have trouble doing social media or selling things online. It feels like make-believe to me. It's not real. The internet isn't real."
At the library, when there is downtime, I am allowed to work on "professional development." For me, this involves keeping up with the publishing and library worlds—exciting new books of the season, debut novels, trends and cover reveals. To accomplish this, I hop on a site like Book Riot or Literary Hub, or one of the many indie book blogs out in the world, and I browse.
Sometimes it becomes mind-numbing, and sometimes I feel like my brain cells are leaking out of my ears. I am sifting the value from the vapid, jumping from one article to the next, skimming for the most beautiful cover art or intriguing synopsis or for something, anything, to stick. The information flits through my head and for all the time I spend thinking and reading about books, when a patron comes in to ask for a specific recommendation, my first instinct is to reach for our online database.
I am only able to pin the words down if I mouth them silently to myself or take notes on paper. And that's how I know the internet is make-believe. It's not real.
☆☆☆
Works referenced:
"The Internet is Rotting," Jonathan Zittrain
You Are Not a Gadget, Jaron Lanier