choosing not to choose

I just read “Walking Mornings,” and I agree with Frabby that it is a lovely, if despondent, piece. It did help me understand Joyce’s wariness of the internet and the Information Age better than I did before. He is deeply worried about the fate of attention, choice, and possibility—things that are central to how we interact with the world, how we make sense of it, and how we make a meaningful place for ourselves within it.

He writes, in reference to ever-proliferating technologies, “never before have human beings been as surrounded as we are now by so much empty possibility. Never before has there been such potentiality harnessed only to displaying itself” (90). It may look like we are making informed choices and absorbing ever-increasing amounts of knowledge from technology, but Joyce thinks that most of the information and experiences that are available to us are actually hollow. This worries Joyce, because he thinks that most of the things that technology presents us with are either insignificant or actually harmful to our ability to be thinking, self- and other-aware individuals. (Although I would argue that hypertext fiction is an exceptional technology: the good stuff seems to be able to suggest new modes of reading and thinking to us—certainly a meaningful contribution.)

Joyce advocates a kind of deliberate, meditative mindfulness—choosing not to preoccupy ourselves with all the distractions we could—that is increasingly hard to achieve with as many diversions as we have in our lives today (and the internet is pretty much the most distracting one.) He wants to figure out “how we might recover a certain necessary silence in the face of a horizon of infinity, how to attend beyond the distractions of the foreground” (90). As someone who attended a Quaker school for eight years, I understand why Joyce thinks silence is so important. If you don’t stop moving and talking every so often, you tend to stop seeing and listening clearly (to things both inner and outer.)

I was reminded of a thought I have often had when reading about the Framers of our Constitution (yes, I’m a dork.) It seems to me that it would be nearly impossible, if not actually impossible, for someone today to be able to educate himself with as much focus and concentration as they seemed to have done. There are always so many things that we can choose to pay attention to that don’t actually require our active attention (TV, I’m looking at you—although there are exceptions.) What Joyce seems to want is an almost monastic simplicity in the midst of an increasingly complex and distracting world—a tough order to fill, but an interesting counterpoint to all the texts we've read that have been so enthusiastic about technology.