I maintained a blog for six years before the explosion of social media. It dealt with art and music, attracting a mix of interested followers and cyberstalkers. I deleted it 13 years ago in anticipation of the birth of my son. Why should he inherit cyberstalkers? He already has to figure out what to do with my art when I am gone.
Like anyone with internet access, I have witnessed the change in the digital landscape, watching new apps launch and audiences repeatedly splinter. Long-form readers turned into Facebook status readers and then into tweet readers. Finally, reading was replaced by a cursory scroll of images. This is the reverse order of human civilization.
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Wim Wenders released the movie Until the End of the World in 1991.
At one point, Sam Neill’s character says, “I’d always cherished the beginning of the Gospel according to John. ‘In the beginning was the Word.’ I was now afraid that the apocalypse would read, ‘In the end, there were only images.’”
By the end, the characters are undone, wandering around the wilderness wearing VR headsets that play videos of their dreams. This is the future Wenders anticipated at a time when most people were not online. Those online still used internet minutes from an AOL CD they received in the mail and said, “I’m going on the computer for a while.”
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My response to this ever-fracturing world was to remove every distracting app from my phone. This included news apps. I whittled my screen time down to less than 20 minutes a day. That lasted two weeks. The withdrawal was alarming. A study suggests people touch their phones 2,600 times a day. I repeatedly picked up my phone, only to realize there was no reason to do so. My long-term solution was to split the difference and take social media apps off the phone. This is a sad victory. I felt like I had accomplished something, but this was still a defeat compared to how I lived the first forty years of my life. The hooks are so deep.
Why am I on Substack? Why tap into one more platform?
There is a T.S. Eliot passage from his Four Quartets:
“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time”
That may be it. After wandering in the wilderness and watching videos of my dreams, I am back in a world that resembles blogging.
I am still figuring out this platform. I have no idea what a Chat is, but I have few followers, so there is nothing to chat about. My posts will be infrequent. I will consider it a success if I manage one every two weeks. The next one will be published in December. The first posts will be low-stakes entries: year-end lists for art, music, movies, and books. Those will be posted in consecutive days but will calm down afterward.
Once 2024 is running smoothly, I will focus on writing about what went into preparing for an upcoming exhibition and other things that interest me.
As you wait, you can watch Until the End of the World. You can stream it on Criterion or buy the DVD. There is no rental option. Carve out a whole day to watch because it is 4 hours and 47 minutes long. It is also the greatest collection of songs for a movie soundtrack ever assembled.
Oh man, the hooks are deep indeed. The emptiness of picking up a phone with ‘nothing’ on it--ha.
I’ll say this: It was a sad day when I couldn’t cyberstalk your art on Instagram.
Here for whatever this is!