{"id":6669,"date":"2015-10-26T08:50:44","date_gmt":"2015-10-26T14:50:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=6669"},"modified":"2015-10-26T09:29:00","modified_gmt":"2015-10-26T15:29:00","slug":"the-new-search","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=6669","title":{"rendered":"The new search"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"touchscreen\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Jenny Hendrix has a finely measured review<\/a> of Sven Birkerts’s new book,\u00a0Changing the Subject: Art and Attention in the Digital Age,\u00a0<\/i>in Boston Review<\/em>. Toward the end, before calling for a new poetry, she writes:<\/span><\/p>\n

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The activity conducted in both church and marketplace is a kind of search, which is of course central to what this technology is for: not just Google, but GPS, dating apps, Netflix, Facebook, Amazon\u2014all guide us toward what they think we want. The shift from cathedral to bazaar represents a shift from search<\/a> as contemplation to search as a way for capitalism to extract value, exploiting information as an energy company might an oil well.\u00a0…\u00a0<\/span>Birkerts\u2019s response is to opt out to the extent that he can. But we might also confront these challenges by encouraging a change in the terms of the search. As I see it, the task of a new Transcendentalism would be less to actively oppose digital technology or save us from it than to, as Rilke put it, \u201cchange it into ourselves,\u201d bringing to it the same kind of transformative, sustained attention that the Transcendentalists brought to the natural world.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWhy should we not also enjoy an original relation to the universe?\u201d Emerson wondered in his introduction to the essay \u201cNature.\u201d \u201cWhy should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition?\u201d One might put the same question to the connected world of today. Most of us will have to use these tools, like it or not; why let someone else decide our relation to them? Transcendentalism was as much about resisting imposed structures of control and interpretation as it was about resisting a mechanized world. Perhaps the role of art now, the way it can best fill the spiritual voids left by our immersion in the digital, is to create for us an \u201coriginal relation\u201d to it.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The problem with tradition, as Emerson saw it, is\u00a0that it too easily turns into a vintage clothing shop. We go in and pick up cheap readymades for our minds to wear. (\u201cWhy should we …\u00a0put the living generation into masquerade out of [the past’s]\u00a0faded wardrobe?\u201d) The problem with escaping tradition is that it can leave us unmoored in the present, our course determined by\u00a0the whims of the current. You tear down the cathedral only to find that the bazaar is a narrower prison. Before we can establish an original relation to digital technology, it strikes me, we’re going to have\u00a0to reacquaint ourselves with the past\u00a0that the\u00a0technology has been designed to hide.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jenny Hendrix has a finely measured review of Sven Birkerts’s new book,\u00a0Changing the Subject: Art and Attention in the Digital Age,\u00a0in Boston Review. Toward the end, before calling for a new poetry, she writes: The activity conducted in both church and marketplace is a kind of search, which is of course central to what this […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6669","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6669","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6669"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6669\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6677,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6669\/revisions\/6677"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6669"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6669"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6669"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}