It has come to my attention that the world is as it seems, sometimes. Things are fragmentarily realized in glimpsed form all the time but this is characterized mostly by surprise, not the usual consistent performing patterns that we make our world out to be.
You see, everything changed when I got an iPhone: my calls clearer, self-esteem brighter, and my getting back with people ratio—better—not great, but better. I got places confidently, and now I am a photo-grapher of normal type things that I see around (like books, trees, people—other stuff I like). Things got streamlined. For a while there I didn’t even have a computer, just using that good’ol iPhone for everything. The effects of iPhone usage have been positive, sometimes. But mostly the thing keeps me busy and subsumed by those multi-medias that organize life, and in so doing, tell you subtly how life should be, what constitutes the whole thing. Now, I know there are probably many writing on such things, Postman & Hipps being helpful to me, but I wonder more personally the effects of a mediated world.
The past several months I have been working customer service at a bookstore. My primary jobs are to ship things to people around the country and world, order things for people around the country and world while, finally, answering phone calls from people calling in from around the country and around the world. I dig it, being around books and the potential ideas that might be incited by them is scandalous to me. But, when it is all said and done I am a medium, a between point for people on their way to a product. Shippings, orderings, answerings are actions that constitute my role—its the invisible thing that happens when you buy something on Amazon from the bakerbookhouse account. Also, I have been taking online classes this quarter, dating long distance and living with out a car. Let’s just say, in these cases, bad mediums (be it riding your bike through a Michigan winter or simulated class debates) make for bad messages and frustrated reality. The whole disconnected-while-being-connected enterprise is a promotion or an insistent on the way things are, that when questioned, falls apart. It’s an insistent on the way things are, sometimes. And so, when everything else is falling apart I can enter a self-ordered world of getting things the way I want. Unless of course the Internet crashes (which it did yesterday) and everyone turned all apocalyptic. The trouble with this ethos shaping how we interact is that what is real, with tactility and all, becomes the icky substitute to things-my-way. Many will say that things-my-way is a fair description of hell in most cases. I’d venture to agree.
So, I want the real thing these days, even if it is fragmentarily realized. Putting a book in someones hands and telling them about it, sitting second row in a classroom, kissing Caila’s face—there is just no substitute. Mediators are bunk. And the self-esteem produces by an iPhone is peanuts compared to being connected to ones wirkungsgeschichtliches bewußtsein and seeing the world as-is.
