I’ll say it plainly: now I am just adding to the noise, I know. I am just adding to the data deluge, the echo chamber, and so on. I’m linking to the article, The Joy of Quiet, which was published nearly two months ago but one I found just today. It is an article that encapsulates many of the trends I’ve noticed and spoken of before, as many others have: this need to get away from the electricity.
When Derek and I drove across the country to get to Madison, I purposefully looked for a non-wifi Bed & Breakfast off the beaten path (and oh boy, did we find it in the middle of Nowhere, Wyoming). When I studied abroad in London in even 2007, I already loved how my phone plan was too expensive to text or call often, so I just left it in our flat. I felt not only free from this pull to remark on things I saw to a friend through a text (“omg! a man is selling roasted chestnuts in front of the British Museum!”) but I loved that without it I didn’t have a clock at all either. It felt like a very, very quiet and timid jab at the modern world, ever so scripted and scheduled.
On Pinterest, I find myself pinning images that exude quiet and contemplation, simplicity and thoughtfulness. Friends planning weddings (or most often not) love to pin farm-like ones, with rustic barns and a simple spread on a wooden table under a tree. Fascination with good cooking is partly a fascination with being not distracted while you focus directly on the beautiful, tasty meal YOU are going to create with your own hands — your own hands! Is this getting too Marxist, a desperate desire for us to be shaping the world around us through the materials we shape?
So there’s these trends, for the wholesome and pure. Just bread. Just olive oil. Just wine. A lot of my 25 Before 26 goals and then general changes to my life I wanted to make had to do with being more selective, to slow down, to focus. I’m pretty sure part of my new lust for living in Maine mostly comes from just this idea of it in my head, that it would be slower there (maybe because everyone is frozen …).
These trends are a backlash to the information overload idea, the idea that so many books are being written about these days. We do more at our jobs because budgets are crunched, we do more in school because the competition is so fierce. Even relaxation has competition: do I watch a movie or TV show on Netflix, do I play with the Wii, do I play a game on my computer, do I listen to music, do I listen to a podcast, do I read blogs, do I read The New Yorker, do I read a book that’s not related to school, do I partake in some arts ‘n crafts, do I explore my new town more, do I go out to dinner with my boyfriend or friends, do I go to a bar, do I go to a cafe, do I repeatedly cycle through Twitter Facebook Pinterest LinkedIn Gmail WiscMail Yahoo!Mail … Boredom is not an option. Distraction is the way of life.
Is there even a point to a vacation from it? I went to the middle of Nowhere, Wyoming, where we barely had cell phone reception and no Internet. But then we went to bed, got up, and drove back into town. Our brains didn’t feel magically refreshed. They wouldn’t have after a week either — I am almost always more tired after a week of “vacation,” mostly because 1) I know I have to face a lot of work and 2) I usually feel like I should use the vacation time wisely by either cleaning up after a mess or preparing the deluge to come.
I don’t think I can sustain this lifestyle without going crazy and I don’t think a vacation would work. So a lifestyle change, then?
Here’s the crux for me: if you remove yourself from having an online presence, it is suspect these days. I used to work at the Career Counseling Library and we gave workshops to staff members of UC Berkeley about job searching. Social networking was, of course, hounded into them. If you don’t create a presence for yourself, perhaps you’re not fit for the organization. And they notice if you created a LinkedIn profile on the fly that took 5 minutes and then never checked it again. Everyone wants you to be engaged and dynamic. Presence “proves” this.
In library school, there’s constant suggestions for an active professional Twitter account, a blog (hi there!), or other social media networks (a new one devoted to LIS students just opened or perhaps Mendeley is right for you). Librarians and archivists have to embrace social networking just as much as other businesses to advocate for their services — they have to do so to be heard above the others. And we as students are expected to juggle the classes with hundreds of pages of reading per week plus papers/projects to boot, at the very least one internship (but most likely two or more jobs and some other volunteering), student groups for organizations like ALA or SAA, and be on the look out for interesting articles/tweets/status updates related to our field. Even better if you can talk about it eloquently.
It’s a bit of a catch 22. Activity is good because supposedly, it shows you are engaged with the profession. But is that true? If you’re always posting, when are you doing? “Don’t confuse passion with competence.”
Maybe I can’t do an abrupt lifestyle change — as much as I say just living in a small farmhouse in rural Maine with a raspberry patch sounds nice, I would probably go crazy after a week — but I can do other things to combat it. I’ve been slowly downsizing the amount of people I connect with on Facebook, moving acquaintances into that category, unsubscribing from acquaintances’ statuses, asking for just “important life updates.” Some of the people or organizations I felt obligated to follow on Twitter? I realized that’s frankly whack — I am not obligated. I am not obligated to follow all of the library/archive bloggers; everything is a suggestion. I’ve been slowly unsubscribing from more. The articles that are truly interesting, I want to give my full attention to. If I share an article on any platform, it has to be one that isn’t a passing interest — a headline that looks good and relevant to my field — but one that resonates with me on a deeper level, that is written well, and so on. I read recently that most websites are only visited for 10 seconds. I’m in that statistic; with how much I felt like I needed to read or look at or watch out for, I would try to zoom through websites. It’s a bit like skimming an article too quickly though just in case the professor asks a question: after class, I will never remember that article, and what’s the use in that?
I can’t see myself anytime soon breaking off to go live in rural Japan without any cell phone reception, Internet, or other means of communication. But I can see myself focusing in on what really interests me. If all goes as planned, the extra noise I contribute to the Internet will be more like a well written melody.
