What Does It Mean to "Read" in the Digital Age?
Exploring *rhapsodic* solutions to the virtual disintegration of literacy
Do you ever feel like you can't really read anymore? — or at least, can't critically and coherently gather information, as the internet sprays its informational firehose into every crevice of our lives, smashing like a climate change hurricane onto the coastlines of our consciousness with fragments of pseudo-knowledge that never fit into a coherent whole — and that all that is exacerbated by the intensifying commodification of knowledge by morally dubious social media platforms controlled by oligarchic technocrats — and that all this is getting exponentially worse with the rise of AI?
Do you ever feel that way? …This is an essay about that.
This is the second in a series of essays exploring artistic expression, digital culture and identity formation amidst our modern modes of informational exchange. In the previous segments I've explored how in these virtual contexts we often struggle to simply "be ourselves" because we're compelled to be @ourselves — caught in a reflexive loop of self-representation, where we're less and less able to access the immediacy of reality, and more and more caught in the Hyperreal, inundated by the greater immediacy of the media sea of our devices — a phenomenon that I call metafication, from the Greek meta meaning "with", "after" and "beyond", and also evoking one of the primary, morally dubious institutional agents currently encouraging that process.
Alongside this psychological experience of being self-displaced by the very gesture of self-representation and self-publishing, I've also discussed the sense in which this state of things uniquely affects the artist, the expresser, the person called to put new, carefully wrought informational artifacts out into the world. There is a sense of terrible Too-Muchness, a feeling that there may be "no point" in adding even more to the Great Too Much — and whether or not that's a valid assertion, it is a feeling I've often had, even in the very act of creating this series, this critical representation of my own representational self.
But I don't just want to be offering a critical litany of problems — I also want to talk about solutions as to how to address this socio-informational crisis. In another recent video I refer to the distinction between being viral and being vital — if being viral means succumbing to the metafication of reality by carelessly adding to its layers, and losing yourself in your illusory self — then what does being vital really look like? — What is that kind of creativity, digital and otherwise, that truly affirms life?