In the past few weeks, I feel like I've been thrust into an entirely different world, where violent rapids of ideas are shooting past in every direction, leaving me more or less raped of coherence and expected to deal with the erratic mess of thoughts that flop feebly around my ankles. And for weeks I've been asking myself, "How am I supposed to rope all of these in?"
Well, maybe, as Claudia H. Johnson suggests, "it's about connection".
I used Johnson's textbook, "Crafting Short Screenplays that Connect", for a creative writing course I took last semester. While it provided a wealth of interesting and occasionally useful insights in regards to writing a script, the main argument she presents - that connection is more important than conflict - is of little help to an inexperienced writer, and I found it difficult to take this "touchy-feely" approach seriously. However, when I went back to school this term and entered into an entirely new field of study which somehow encompassed everything that I'd ever done before, I started to get all "touchy-feely" myself.
Life, life as I know it, is connection. It's connection to ourselves, to our environments, and to other people. It's a series of shared experiences and a journey towards that inextinguishable high that some people get from God, others from love, and others still from crack, or what have you. I've been constantly re-evaluating my life for some time now and a lot of the reason for that is because I do feel disconnected. I recently made a personal commitment to buckle down and finish my degree before taking any more time off, meaning full-time school, year-round. But only a few short months into that commitment, and I'm already wondering how I'll manage to preserve my sanity. I know how lucky and privileged I am to have access to all of the social and economic resources that I do. But everyone has their own struggles, and I'm just communicating mine. And mine, is largely a concern of time.
With the addition of an extra course to my regular load of 3 (I know, I'm such a princess), I've already noticed a rapid decline in the amount of "free" time that I have, particularly with 3 of those being heavy in readings, and me being a slow reader. All of a sudden, every activity is taking longer, and the space it occupies is time that I would otherwise use to sleep (as in now). Campus is farther (more time), I no longer have a car (more time), I have two jobs (more time), and amidst all that, I still have a crowd of friends and family going through hard times that I'd really like to be there for.
I like school. That, in and of itself, is like an extremely condensed vessel of experiences, and if my years were unlimited, I would take it one course at a time, forever. Or maybe two, just to be sure I took it a little seriously. Sadly, time touches me in this sense as well, as in the sense that all upstanding members of society need to earn their living, and that takes time, and increasingly more time, as population goes up and cost of living goes up and retirement goes down and takes the job market with it. It is perhaps because of this market that university expectations are so high (in some ways), and yet it is to their own detriment that students may acquire an incredible breadth of knowledge but fail to specialize in any functional way due to the sheer amount of information that's now available to them. It's the blessing and curse of the "information age", and it's probably the reason why a BA is hardly a step above yesterday's GED.
Speaking of the information age, technology also has an ever-increasing role in time, and functions in an odd way with connection. In terms of time, we need only look at the amount of TV the average household watches, or how often they surf the web. Or forget the web, just Facebook or Twitter. Or forget the household, and make it just me. In any case, it's a lot, and in most cases it's a lot more than we think. Constant "connectivity" is actually a disconnection, if not from people, then from anything that might otherwise hold your attention. Smartphones, regular cell phones, tablet and laptop computers... More people than ever before are in possession of at least one of these. And just because you can be connected, a small part of your brain will wonder if you will be. Nick Carr discusses distraction and a lot of other interesting aspects of modern technology in
this lecture, the most interesting parts of which begin around 30 minutes in. He discusses at length the difficulty that humans have developed with deep focus as a result of these innovations. The loss of memory is particularly haunting, and frighteningly true. Just a few hours ago, I received a text message, a late response to a text "conversation" my friend and I had been having earlier. Because I had to empty my inbox to make more space sometime in between the initial conversation and the postponed remark (my phone is of the archaic "flip" variety, and caps text messages at about 100), I could not (and did not) remember what we were talking about.
Of course there are benefits to network communications. With unlimited texts, I can send messages to friends across the country free of extra cost at any time. With Skype, family members may be able to reconnect over insurmountable distances. And with Web 2.0, regular shmucks like me can share trivial perspectives and snapshots of our daily realities with anyone who cares to peruse them. I read an article that called the events in Tunisia the result of the first "Twitter revolution". Needless to say, my interest was piqued, and I decided to join Twitter some days later. Today, having witnessed the global spread of re-tweets from Egypt, I imagine this is a valid argument. This blog entry probably won't "go viral", but it's still a kind of catharsis for me, and who knows, I have 4 followers - I might connect with one of them.
But whether or not I do, this kind of connection is certainly not a replacement for the more tactile, personal connection that people get from being in the physical presence of one another. My most fulfilling relationships remain those that have been nurtured - literally - hand in hand. When I've had the worst day in the world, I'll go out for tea with a good friend, and nothing about that day changes, but I go home feeling better.
According to Edward Hall, my discomfort and feeling of disassociation may be related to his hypothesis of Monochronic and Polychronic time. M-time and P-time, as he calls them, may as well stand for masculine and plural. Monochronic time is what he describes as linear, task-oriented time, and he associates it with men because of the convention of the "working man", who was created by the mechanical clock. Polychronic time is more "people-centered" and flexible in nature, putting the immediate welfare of one's personal relations above any other task at hand. However, this idea of monochronic time is the dominant perception of time in North American culture, and Hall suggests that it is because of this that women (naturally housewives, therefore polychronic beings and walking hazards of emotion) are statistically more depressed in our society.
Hall's argument is often sexist and sometimes racist, but it's an interesting way to consider time, and even certain cultures. As Hall states, the two "types" of time may be used in conjunction by a society in specific aspects of life, but they do not mix. One of the examples given was to imagine a polychronic person making a dentist appointment. At the last moment, an out of town friend arrives and announces they want to meet for lunch. The polychronic person naturally skips their appointment, and has to wait something like 3 weeks before they can get another one. In North American society, this tends to be frowned upon, particularly by the white majority towards immigrant groups who employ this practice. Perhaps, in some ways, rightly so, because it's true that the system is ineffective if not engaged by all. But it's worth noting that neither is necessarily better or worse, only different.
But it's differences like these, differences which completely alter our paradigm, that make it so difficult to change the world. Social and technological sustainability, and for that matter, environmental, economic and political sustainability are such grandiose notions, on which so many people have so much to say, that's it's simply impossible to obtain a globally unified perspective (or at least a majority) on any one issue because there's simply too much to focus on. The world is like an orphanage on fire and how can you say which child to save first? The best we can do (perhaps) is to choose our battles and stick to our guns. I don't know how effective is it to have 10% of the world as model citizens for reducing the carbon footprint while the rest of the population uses even more energy and makes more garbage than ever. But the remaining 90% may be worried about disaster relief or disaster preparation or famine or the local economy or the welfare of gorillas or whatever else. And they're all good causes, and no one's efforts will likely hurt the overall state of affairs, it just seems that any one thing could only be implemented fully and completely with global participation.
For the most part, we can settle with a job half done. After all, if we didn't have some people drowned or buried or burnt or starved or just plain handed their ticket to the Darwin Awards, then we'd be worse off still. We egotistical beings don't like to think of ourselves as numbers, and I, as much as anyone, would prefer not to be crushed to death by the roof of my own home in the event of an earthquake, however, there are already too many people in the world. The economy is suffering, and if or when disaster strikes in our all-powerful 'developed' nations, then we not only have to recover billions of dollars in damaged infrastructure, but we also have to commit to the welfare of the thousands who survived because of that exorbitant infrastructure.
This may seem somewhat lacking in compassion and admittedly steers away from the topic of connection, but I think it's true. I'm certainly not suggesting that people stop helping the earthquake victims in Haiti, nor that we revisit anything like the Holocaust. And I understand that population control hasn't generally been very effective. I, personally, will not have children, but that's an easy call for me to make, because I don't want children anyways. I understand that not everyone will be able to make that choice, for reasons that may have nothing to do with preference.
But that could open up a whole 'nother can of worms.
The point is, if there's one thing that we need to get across to each person on the planet, it is that each of us has a social responsibility. Communications theorist and possible lunatic Marshall McLuhan expresses it succinctly (in the 60's): "In our own time most of us have grown so accustomed to the life of each for himself that is is difficult for us to understand that for the greater part of man's history every man of necessity lived a life of involvement in the welfare of his fellows" (War and Peace in the Global Village). Like it or not, we're all stuck here together, and each of us are in some way responsible for one another. The information age has given us a lot more to know about, but I don't know if we're actually doing anything about it.
And this is what worries me about school. I've quit one of my jobs, interestingly, the more solitary one, at the risk of incurring student loans in future semesters, in order to fully immerse myself in my studies. And I do this, at times. But as school itself becomes less of a social institution, and breaks are spent texting rather than chatting with your neighbour (which is now weird and potentially threatening, as I have learned), then I worry that I will become a sort of disconnected drone, who may write many passionate blog entries on a variety of global plights, but then fall victim to the unconscious mindset of many: There's so many people in the world... someone else will do it.
Not true.
But who even has time to think about all this?
I admit to having no solution for the problems at hand. Like most other people, I'm more worried about the things that immediately affect me. But maybe I can start there. As a baby step, I will do what I can to make sure that my close relationships remain in the forefront of my priorities, and that university remains a social experience. In this way, maybe not only I, but others, will maintain that critical connection and thereby acquire a natural sense of social responsibility. If we want to be a little more polychronic, there's only a rush as we see fit; the important thing is the goal, and that it gets done. Some of our actions may transcend our own lives and we may not live to see our ambitions realized. You might see that as blind faith, a relay that may never end, but unless we're doing something totally unvalidated ("Turning the mattress on the 43rd minute of the 19th hour each day will prevent the volcano from erupting!") then I doubt our descendants will hate us for it. They might even applaud our spunk.
That is, if they still applaud anything then. If they still even speak to each other. Sigh.
Anyways, thanks for listening. I'd love to hear your comments.
