If Stradivarius had Facebook or an iPhone or Twitter, would he have made violins?
Would he have found the time?
I use the internet every day. But I have a love hate relationship with it. I'm in my 40s. We are in the digital age, but I'm not entirely a digital native. There are things I miss about the machine age. I use a digital camera every day, but there's something magical about holding an old Canon F1 or a Canonet rangefinder. Both are also immensely impractical. Besides shooting film, which is a pain to process, they weigh a ton.
So I satisfy my craving for the mechanical by using fountain pens (the Aurora Optima and Lamy 2000 are favs) and wearing a mechanical automatice watch (it winds by the normal movement of your arm) ... like the Seiko 5, above.
Back to the internet.
If we are constantly Tweeting, or on Facebook, can we produce anything of lasting value? I'm not convinced that we can. Though I use the two services in conjunction with my blog www.bloomsburgarts.com, I'm really only using them as a news feed so people to conveniently access the blog.
I especially dislike Twitter. I don't think it's entirely a coincidence that Twitter contains the word "twit." But I work in publications and public relations and social media is related to my job. So I subscribe to several blogs related to social media. In one blog, a writer took a break from social media in February and bemoaned the fact that without twitter he learned of Whitney Houston's death hours after every one else. And I think: "So what. Was he going to bring her back?"
I think that we are confusing information, which the internet has aplenty, with knowledge and understanding. Yes, information is important. The internet, Twitter included, is really good at delivering information.
But knowledge, and more importantly, understanding takes time and reflection to acquire. In short. Work.
Making a violin, composing a symphony, writing a (good) book, creating anything of lasting value takes time. And not just any time. Stradivarius wasn't checking status updates between carving. It takes focused time and attention. The internet is a wonderful tool — even Facebook and Twitter. But I think the balance is getting out of whack. Perhaps the internet has robbed us of some of our capacity to pay attention.
The way that the internet changes our ability to focus attention has a civic dimension as well. If as a society, we think that it's important to know exactly when Whitney Houston died, but we don't know if lowering tax rates really leads to a long-term increase in tax revenue, then we have a problem. If we don't understand why it's important to know, we have a big problem.
PS: Obviously, I do think that blogs and web pages can have some value. I think they are a convenient way to express reasoned, thoughtful, sometimes flippant and silly, and sometimes really informative things. Check out this staggeringly detailed analysis of the movement in a Seiko 5. BTW: Many Seiko 5's allow you to set the day in Spanish. My wife is a language professor, hence the red "Dom" for Sunday in the image.
