d’Arte Board

It has been a little over one month since I first decided to ween myself from the technological “teet” of the internet, and I am beginning to recognize the change in patterns of my behavior as a result.  Now, my Myspace profile is an empty shell (until Myspace deletes it), and my Etsy Store, Linked-In profile, Photobucket account, Paypal account, Ebay account, personal email address, Facebook profile, and whatever else, have all been deleted.  No longer do I rush to the computer when I wake up in the morning, or make it my companion until I am ready to sleep at night; in fact, it has been utterly difficult for me to even raise the enthusiasm to return and type this.  Annie Dillard once wrote, “My whole life, I did not know that I was a bell, until that moment when I was lifted and struck.”  Getting away from the computer has been somewhat like this for me.

In the past month, that I have been farewelling from my virtual world, my physical world has been compounding visceral experiences upon me, and this has made it easier to quit, or easier to forget.  It’s kind of like I traded one life, with its places, people, strings and attachments, for a new one, with new places, people, strings and attachments.  Of course, my wife is the same, but even she has felt herself blurred by the conversion brought on by the move.  In the city of Chicago, we lived in a one bedroom apartment, and in the city of St. Louis, we live in what is essentially, a two story, four bedroom house.  In Chicago, we had a routine to our existence and a routine to the people we met on a daily basis that has been temporarily decimated, at least until we develop new patterns here.  In addition, St. Louis and Chicago are summarily different cities; one obsessed with status, the other devoid of it.  As a result, the simple pace of life has dramatically shifted for my wife and I; a good thing, I think.     

It is within this climate of change that I’ve lost my desire to type and be typed to, or rather I have traded that formality of exchange for the informality of real human dialogue, with all the messiness of race, culture, age and experience intertwined.  There are now immediate repercussions to what I say, and I see people dealing with that same issue, as they formulate the course of their own discussions, prefiguring how what they want to communicate will affect the person(s) they are speaking to.  I admit that in reality, versus virtuality, less information gets conversed, less concisely, but the trade-off rewards the participant in phenomenological ways.  For instance, as I type this, there are birds chirping somewhere outside, the rising sun is chasing shadows down the brick wall outside my window, and steam is billowing up from the dark inside the coffee mug on my desk (eight years as a barista has taught me how to make the perfect cup).  You may have envisioned any of these things as you read the words across your glowing screen, but to experience them, you’d have to be here in the room with me.  Even an eidetiker lacks the clarity that real experience provides, and thus there is a lot to be gained by sharing information with another person, in person.  

As far as the Written Letter Project goes, I have yet to receive any letters from any of my friends, but that’s not to conclude that this experiment is a total failure.  I am going to be sending some out soon, and we’ll see if those receive correspondence.  In terms of my social networking, I have been busy with unpacking, but I used a familial connection to meet with a local photographer, and that two-hour, informal interview resulted in her agreeing to hire me for freelance assignments.  My plan here in St. Louis, is to attend two events a week, one for fun and one for business, and to use them as occasions to meet new people, exchange ideas, and form new partnerships/alliances/arrangements that will hopefully bolster support for both my photography and my painting.  Update Four should address my progress on that front.  

In any case, I have descended my internet exposure from that plateau that I used to live on, maybe, 1 to 2 hours a week down from 2 to 3 hours a day.  I have begun to absolve those feelings of “missing out” by appreciating the things that I am doing, whether  that is relaxing on my deck, walking around my neighborhood, reading outside the museum where I work, talking to my wife, drinking with my brother on my roof under a late night sky, etc.  Like a bell, I am resounding; now, I have only to wait and see what the echo brings.

Left Polaroid: I took of my brother and my wife.

Right Polaroid: My wife took of me.

This entry was posted on May 12, 2009 at 11:42 am and is filed under internet, Jason Gray . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.