People are not fragments. Google is not making us stupid. We surf the web, hopping from bit to bit, clip to clip, and the medium seems inherently shallow. But do we become shallow when we use it?
On bad days, I believe some of the despairing statements that people make about the direction of our culture. Last year, Jaron Lanier made a compelling argument about how technology can lead to a new kind of commodification. In his book You Are Not a Gadget, he writes, “people are encouraged by the economics of free content, crowd dynamics, and lord aggregators to serve up fragments instead of considered whole expressions or arguments.”
How Much Can It Be Worth If It Is Free?
In particular, Lanier criticizes the philosophy of Creative Commons. If you’ve not heard of the practice, it is a license that many emerging artists are using to share their work freely with others. It encourages people to borrow from each other’s work to create mashups and remixes. In fact, TheHighCalling.org, one of the sites I edit for the Foundations for Laity Renewal, publishes nearly 50 articles per month and offers all of them for republication through a Creative Commons license. Several newspapers have begun to use our material to round out their Religion Sections.
How can this be a bad practice? Lanier’s primary critique of current social technology and Creative Commons is this: when we write for free or create for free or offer our work for free, we devalue our own work. We encourage others to be lazy, mashup artists at best or cheap consumers at worst. Fewer and fewer people create or purchase anything new, Lanier argues.
But we do not need to worry that people have fallen into a creative rut. It was never our role to create new worlds. Our role is stewardship. Our role is cultivation. That’s what culture means. Before the fall, we were called to work the garden, to move the dirt around so it would be prettier and more productive. Creating mashups and remixes of what has come before us is still culture if we accept the original meaning of the word—to culture the land, to cultivate.
If we only cultivate our backyard garden, this doesn’t make our work a mere fragment of culture. If we only cultivate 140 characters at a time, we are not fragments. Even if we are short bursts of communication, we do not need to worry. Lanier does worry: “As a whole, this widespread practice of fragmentary, impersonal communication has demeaned interpersonal interaction.” He seems to suggest that communicating in short bursts is itself dehumanizing.
But it isn’t dehumanizing. It is poetry. In fact, communicating through brevity is exactly the form and purpose of poetry. Expressing the deepest possible ideas in the fewest possible words. If there was ever a time that needed poetry, it is our time of tweets and status updates and short form communication.
L. L. Barkat understood this recently when she helped her children (and the community at The High Calling) process tragedy through poetry. Rather than dwell on horrifying YouTube videos of the tsunami that struck Japan, she offered a fragment of emotion for her daughter in a short lyric poem about finding a button on the beach. In my favorite part of the poem, Barkat imagines the woman who lost the button:
I thought of thin white cotton,
a blouse to touch
and a line of empty buttonholes.
These excerpted lines are a fragment of emotion. They are a fragment of the news we all experienced during the week of the earthquake. Yet the image of an imagined blouse that must now contain empty buttonholes has specificity enough to communicate something of worth.
In the comment section of her poem, people offered their own fragments of poetry in response. Glynn Young, a Director of Public Affairs by day, added his thoughts and poetry to “Faith Fiction and Friends” early one morning. His words were another fragment of news, adapted from a story of a Japanese mother who lost her child in the tsunami:
we did not run but
made quick steps,
quick steps, laughing
like the teacher’s song
Maureen Doallas wrote a literal poem out of news fragments at her site “Writing Without Paper,” including this vivid image:
The air-filled down jacket
that saved Mrs. Sato’s life
as she rode the wave, spending
her prayers between breaths, is news.
All across the web, people poured out poetry like prayers for the people of Japan. The open poetry group at One Shot Wednesday included a prayer from Rob Kistner that stayed with me as one of my favorites from that week:
When I read about the art director who wore the same outfit to work every day to simplify her life, I immediately thought: I should try that. I don’t typically hop aboard trends, but I liked the idea of reducing stress by rethinking my daily habits.
Matilda Kahl went with a black and white color palette, rotating through 15 of the same blouse, pants, and jacket. I chose black pants, a yellow tunic, and a cotton blazer—only one of each since it’d just be a week. The next week, I picked a different outfit.
Before I launched my experiment, some friends raised eyebrows. One asked if I’d have to do laundry every night. A coworker thought it would get boring. But when I showed up at work wearing the same outfit for five days in a row, nobody said a thing. Nobody even noticed until I pointed it out.
Turns out, social pressure is often an excuse for the pressure we put on ourselves.
A Today Show/AOL survey found that 78 percent of women spend almost an hour on their appearance every day. Kahl started wearing her “work uniform” to save time and money, but also to alleviate the pressure of having to choose an outfit each day. She told AdAge:
I no longer spend time on choosing clothes nor do I get self-conscious in meetings, which would happen occasionally before. I just keep on with my day without my mind wandering, thinking about if my skirt is too short or my t-shirt too casual. To me, that is empowering.
Kahl wrote in Harper’s Bazaar that she felt her “male colleagues were taken seriously no matter what they wore.” I’m not sure that’s true, but women do seem to worry about it more. According to the Today Show survey, two-thirds of women worry about their appearance at least once a week, more than they worry about finances, health, family/relationships, or professional success. I know that I’d rather be working on my career or relationships or even my health than picking outfits. (In fairness, some take more pleasure in a well-chosen skirt or scarf than I do; I prefer functional clothes that fit well, look professional, and get me through the day in relative comfort.)
Kahl’s decision points to a bigger trend: to simplify our lives, and our closets. Through “kondo-ing,” best-selling author and lifestyle guru Marie Kondo encourages readers to clear out the clutter, to determine whether or not to keep their clothes, books, or other belongings by asking of each item, “Does this spark joy?” Other minimalist fashionistas advocate capsule wardrobes, with a fixed number items selected to mix-and-match for each season.
Cause-oriented campaigns like No-Makeup Month and International Justice Mission’s Dressember have also prompted women to reconsider their habits and to rethink their attention to their appearance.
Our clothes (and our possessions) are an extension of ourselves. When we begin to reevaluate our stuff and the lifestyle we’ve built around it, often a level of discontent lies at the root; Kondo reported that in evaluating what brought her joy, one client discarded not just her shirts and old papers, but also her husband.
So in the middle of a move and a health battle, it makes sense to evaluate my habits, like choosing a new outfit every morning. Is that really necessary to the life I want to lead?
But I need to also ask myself some questions: Like, has this give me “extra” time? To some degree. I reached my running goal for the week. I had less laundry to haul to the basement on the weekend. Those are both things that make me happier than fresh shirts every day.
The bigger question, for me, is: Am I making self-evaluation a pursuit of honesty rather than image-curating? Am I trying to merely make a statement about how little I care about my fashion? Of course I care at some level. But choosing to repeat an outfit all week allows me the convenience of spending just Sunday night or Monday morning deliberating what to wear. (In the words of Matthew 6:28: And why do you worry about clothes?)
When I sorted through my closet afterwards, I evaluated many items by asking: “Would I wear this for five days straight?” I ended up giving plenty of things away that I previously felt pressure to keep solely for the sake of variety in my wardrobe.
The most important thing I’ve discovered in this experiment is that self-evaluation cannot be the goal; the fruit of it is.
Rather than seek out simplicity for simplicity’s sake, it’s up to me to examine what I’ll do with more time, fewer distractions, and less clutter. Will my quest for simplicity free me up to obey God, serve others, pursue a calling? Without a goal or purpose, we risk just adding more stress by anxiously looking for the next way to “simplify” our lives.
as sea waters recede
tears of Nippon
freely flow
may the brave heart
of a rising sun
dry them both
I was also deeply touched by parts of Alegria Imperial’s entry for One Shot Wednesday, “you and I in seven pieces,” in which she wrote,
we grope for our eyes but find
our lips like embers
on a bed of pebbles
As far as I know, these people are not writing poetry as part of an MFA program somewhere. Few of them are scholars or professors in the traditional sense. Few of them have expectations for their poetry outside the communities in which they write. Their work exists in the commons, freely available to readers, freely delivered through email and RSS feeds, and often freely available for reprint under a Creative Commons license. (The others have graciously granted us permission to reprint their words here.) In our world of fragments and tweets and status updates, we need poetry more than ever.
This is not simply a call for the world to sit up and notice poets. The average person needs poetry because it is an important tool for communicating effectively in this new medium of the internet. Excellent poetry will continue to flow out of the universities and MFA programs, but we need to encourage and accept the poetry of the masses too—where friends write to friends, where bloggers encourage each other each week, slowly but surely moving beyond cliché, and where the online world treats communication as something more than the mere exchange of information.
A Challenge to Write Poetry with Books & Culture
This article could end now, waxing philosophic about how “ordinary” people are beginning to write poetry again, but we can do better than that. We can all be better stewards of the world God has given us and the words we use to describe this world.
So we have a writing prompt for you this month.
Write a poem about cultivation. When I talk about cultivation, I mean agriculture but also creativity and culture itself. I am talking about the little place in your world where you have been given a small plot to grow new things and add to the beauty of God’s world. Your deadline is July 1.
Here’s my attempt:
If Love Were Here
There would be a red book
in the red bag.
It is Neruda.
There would be a black bag
beside the red book.
Open the flap, take out
the camera. It smells
so good outside.
Take my picture.
After you write your poem, post it online, then leave us a link in the comments here so we can find your poem. Our comment system makes it difficult to post there with proper stanzas and line breaks, so please include a link to your poems. If you prefer the conversational atmosphere of Facebook, you can also post a link to your work on the Books & Culture Facebook wall. (And be sure to like us on Facebook!)
Remember the deadline, July 1. At that point, I will personally read every entry, leaving comments on as many as I can. John Wilson may show up on a few of your sites as well. Then he and I will choose some pieces to feature next month at Books & Culture.
