Taking advantage of the digital age seems to require finding time in the cracks. If you have a full-time job, how else is it possible to find time to blog, to text, to surf, other than in the airport, on the street, in the places where one might otherwise unproductively daydream?
The promise, though, has something to do with the world Charles Yu describes in How To Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe. In this novel, the narrator lives in a minor and incomplete universe in which the mass media have disintegrated into personal “clouds” that envelop people’s heads and sometimes linger after the user is gone. As Yu’s narrator describes it, “A lot of news and vapors and sexbot perfume are floating around in the atmosphere here. After a night out in the lost half city, you end up with the dust of dead robots in your hair, or someone’s dreams, or their nightmares.”
A researcher quoted in the New York Times makes the infinitely hopeful assertion that everything you read, even if you instantly forget it, lingers somewhere in your neuronal connections, altering who you are. We blog, I suppose, in the hopes of becoming ghostly brain food, “wraiths of memory” in William James’ lovely phrase, persisting even after our bodies have moved on.
Angela P. Harris 