Tweedly Deedly Dee

Posted by *thoreau po-mo* , Tuesday, May 11, 2010 3:54 PM















With a blog title like "What Would Thoreau Tweet?," a reader might assume that I've missed the boat on some of Thoreau's most heartfelt critiques about the speeds with which technological advances can destroy one's presence in the world.
Make no mistake. I'm not foolish enough to dehistoricize Henry David Thoreau's perspective of 19th century New England, but his writing continues to incite young and old alike to question the cultural shifts within modern and "post" modern societies. In asking "What Would Thoreau Tweet?," I'm not only irreverently toying with the image of Thoreau behind a computer, hard at work paring down his ministerial quotable quotes. I'm also in earnest. What is someone to do who has lived to witness technological advances catapult most of the post-industrial world from the land of rotary phones and wood-panelled televisions to cellular phones upon which she can now watch archived videos of her favorite 1980s sitcoms?
Like Thoreau, who came to age amidst the American Industrial Revolution and witnessed the impact of industrialization upon the community where he grew up, I grew up outside of a small town and experienced the post-industrial economy shift into high gear as it heralded in the Information (and now Digital) Age. Unlike Thoreau, though, I wasn't from a middle class family, I wasn't under the tutelage of leading Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson, and I wasn't a boy. Still, just as Thoreau would become one of the most ardent defenders and practitioners of the philosophy, I related to his New England pragmatism and wanted very much to throw off the yoke of "civilized" expectations. (I was barely a teenager then, so my limited understanding of his work left a little to be desired.)
My foray into Thoreau's version of Transcendentalism began with Walden, where among many humorous turns of phrases, he also laments the ways in which industrialization was not only rapidly destroying wild places and rural communities but also mainstreaming a mechanized mindset that damaged a person's ability to think deeply. In one of his most famous chapters entitled "Where I Lived and What I Lived For" (the one that sealed the deal on my impending conflict with all things technological), Thoreau writes
Still we live meanly, like ants; though the fable tells us that we were long ago changed into men....Our life is frittered away by detail. An honest man has hardly need to count more than his ten fingers, or in extreme cases he may add his ten toes, and lump the rest. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb-nail. In the midst of this chopping sea of civilized life, such are the clouds and storms and quicksands and thousand-and-one items to be allowed for, that a man has to live, if he would not founder and go to the bottom and not make his port at all, by dead reckoning, and he must be a great calculator indeed who succeeds.
In early 1990s America with the advent of West Coast grunge music, few angsty, white teenagers could bear the thought of living as good little worker bees. Thoreau's critical perspective could not have arrived at a better time to solidify my belief that the way of the future needed to be one which did not forget the thinkers of the past.
I'll step back for a moment to offer a potential alternative to this romantic notion of late 90s adolescent meets 19th century Transcendentalist who enlightens her about the real way of the world.
I didn't only seek out Thoreau because I was a thirteen year old living in a social vacuum and taking her fashion cues from Eddie Vedder. I was also the book nerd member of a family that resisted fancy gadgets. The resistance had more to do with the forced simplicity of the working class than the voluntary simplicity invoked by middle class intellectuals. My Dad may have been as cheap as Thoreau (going as far as promoting his family's subsistence farming practices by "supervising" my brother, mother, and me one year as we tended row after row of turnips and collards), but his hard-scrabble frugality fronted the more somber reality that even if his low, inconsistent wages at the shipyard prevented the technological luxuries afforded folks with disposable income, our red dirt land could yield us the necessities.
Without knowing it, my father and mother's pragmatic daily interactions with our the land sent me to books because not only did I not want to get stuck weeding the turnip patches during the spring afternoons for the rest of my childhood, hiding beneath a straw hat and fending off the synchronized attacks of fire ants, I wanted to find a means through which I could justify thumbing my nose at friends whose parents bought them Laser Disk players, computers, and Nintendo 64. Until I happened upon Walden, I could only hide my envy when a friend gushed about AOL's IM capabilities and how she could read an entire encyclopedia with her new Encarta computer CD. Once I read
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan- like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion. For most men, it appears to me, are in a strange uncertainty about it, whether it is of the devil or of God, and have somewhat hastily concluded that it is the chief end of man here to "glorify God and enjoy him forever."
I held all the ammunition I needed to quell the jealousy I felt when friends typed up assignments and college entrance essays while I labored over handwritten copy and crossed my fingers that admissions committees would find my application packets "rustic."
During the 1990s most people could get by without a personal computer, but when I returned to graduate school in 2004, necessity dictated the purchase of my first computer. In the years since I've become more computer literate, I have struggled to come to terms with my need to be outside and away from fast-paced technological advances and my desire to stay connected to family, friends, and colleagues spread across the globe, not to mention the increased reliance upon computer literacies for even the most basic work.
Where once Thoreau's claim that many technologies could impinge upon community stability (his most notable target at the time was the construction of a railroad, which is akin to the destruction of American urban communities from the 1950s-present when White Flight led to highway systems that cut through vibrant poor/working class communities), contemporary communities no longer rely solely upon geographical proximity to survive (although this perspective still does not account for the limited access that the American underclass has to these community-infused digital technologies). In fact, many more economic opportunities exist for the digitally savvy.
The era of a week lapse between letter sent and letter received is coming to a close, so what's to be lost and what's to be gained in this transition to a digital era?
Many critics of the email/facebook/tumblr/twitter-spattered world argue that what we gain in speed and breadth, we lose in thoughtfulness and depth. In a recent NY Times article, Michiko Kakutani reviews several books that deal with the consequences/impact of digital culture as it relates to authorship as well as a person's ability to think critically. Kakutani writes
"They [writers deconstructing digital culture] examine the consequences of the fragmentation of data that the Web produces, as news articles, novels and record albums are broken down into bits and bytes; the growing emphasis on immediacy and real-time responses; the rising tide of data and information that permeates our lives; and the emphasis that blogging and partisan political Web sites place on subjectivity."
While Kakutani does believe that some high-quality art can come from the melding of traditionally accepted work, " like Zachary Mason’s “Lost Books of the Odyssey,” and "a 3-D video version of Picasso's "Guernica" posted on YouTube" that serve as "intriguing works that raise important and unsettling questions about art and appropriation," he does believe that more often than not, the creative work on the internet is more hack and than thought-provoking pastiche.
In a 2009 Guardian article, Joe Moran considers the idealistic notions that the internet holds the power to build even better communities. He states
Part of me...feels that there is something control-freakish about the desire for perfectly reciprocal communication. It takes too little account of human individuality and uniqueness. "Billions of consciousnesses silt history full, and every one of them the centre of the universe," wrote the late John Updike in his memoirs. "What can we do in the face of this unthinkable truth but scream or take refuge in God?" We could spend our whole lives texting but there will always be part of us that is infinitely remote.
In other words, any community is only as connected as the humans who inhabit it, which brings me to the reason I'm no longer a computer and internet technophobe. Just as the pen, paper, and printing press are key tools that Thoreau employed when creating and sharing his work with his community, the computer with its wired capabilities that allow for more dissemination of information is merely the 21st century equivalent to feather quill and ink. Just as a quill can be fashioned into a paper airplane of sorts during fits of boredom, the use of short tweets can be dashed off without much thought. The good news is that you don't have to be the fastest SMS'er or status master to take part in digital culture. In fact, one of the more exciting aspects of computers and writing is the potential freedom one can have with digital technologies when applying a smidgen of creativity and imagination.
I don't mean to suggest that the proliferation of fast-paced digital technologies isn't affecting one's ability to examine ideas with time and depth, but I do believe that we don't need to choose between hiding in the woods as we carve out angry manifestos and wearing a Blue Tooth to bed. As a relative of Thoreau recently wrote in an article published this Earth Day, Thoreau wasn't the anti-tech guy most folks assume of him:
"Thoreau was very much what you would have expected. He loved to hike and get out on the water in a canoe. But here's something that may surprise you: He didn't reject society.
Actually, he embraced both civilization and the untamed world, and deeply felt that both could exist, so long as man realized that he was a part of the larger picture of nature, and not the other way around."
What Would Thoreau Tweet? Maybe not a darn thing, but if he were alive and felt compelled, he might step in from his morning walk, sit behind a PC, and share one of his numerous, incisive thoughts like
“A man’s interest in a single bluebird is worth more than a complete but dry list of the fauna and flora of a town.”
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Remediating The Transcendental Tract for The Postmodern Digital Age

Posted by *thoreau po-mo* 1:34 PM

Over the past few months, I've been a member of a rhetoric and composition graduate course that investigated the origins and future of computers and writing. As my final project for class, I've created this blog to examine how digital culture intertwines with nature/culture and aim to explore how the Digital Age with its technological savvy can actually build positive connections between humans and the more than human world. In conjunction with this blog, you'll find links to a twitter feed and a tumblr related to this project.

Now, don't get me wrong. I love Thoreau. One of my many nicknames is Nature Nerd, but I'm also deeply invested in applying technologies that will encourage a person's engagement with the world around her.

Besides, my favorite New England curmudgeon may not have been a fan of the railroad, but he didn't write his eloquent treatises with finger and blood. Pen, paper, and the printing press helped him spread the American Transcendental Gospel. Hopefully, this blog will initiate discussion, offer some humor, and send folks out to smell the hyacinth trellised in a bucolic wonderland or (more up my alley) creeping along the nearby garbage dumpster.