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Soul
09.01.10
"At some finite point, multiplying human connections no longer expands our consciousness, but begins to suffocate it. Sven Birkerts referred to what is lost in the beehive as 'soul.' 'My use of soul is secular,' he wrote. "Soul is our inwardness, our self-reflectiveness, our orientation to the unknown. Soul waxes in private, wanes in
public . . . Soul is private. Solitary.'" -- Hal Crowther ("One Hundred Fears of Solitude")
In the article referenced above, Crowther spends most of his time ranting curmudgeoningly about how social media is destroying our sense of privacy; in particular, the privacy of America's youth, who seem to have been duped by technology and the illusion of "friendship" into sharing things publicly that Crowther's generation would never dream of sharing at all.
Crowther cries and pleads and warns of an impending end to privacy, as the young lose the battle with self-restraint and post every waking thought on the Internet. It struck me as an article I might write if I were 40 years older. (And probably will write 40 years from now when kids are letting their antonymous holograms roam the streets in their stead, doing who knows what kind of damage to their virtual virtue.)
The other thing about the article — available in the current issue of Granta (111: Going Back) — is that it was a warning from a generation, much older than me, which I see (at least in instances like this) as out of touch, to a generation that is much younger than me, and I'm sure would see me (if I even existed to them) as out of touch. I can quite easily, almost disturbingly so, see both sides of the issue. I don't believe, as Crowther seems to, that privacy is being ripped away from the young, but I do think they are perhaps giving it away too easily.
Continued ...
SAH
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The items that survive for future generations fall into two catergories: Expensive and preserved out of an immediate worth and extremly common which survives out of ubiquity. submitted by Cory Q
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