"Independent art, free music, and free books are the nobler objective."

Imagine a hay wagon on a dirt road alongside some train tracks. Now imagine a Japanese bullet-train speeds by.

The wagon and the train were alongisde each other for a nanosecond. The hay wagon's driver caught a glimpse of somebody on the train but he doesn't think much about it. He can barely tell the smeared faces behind the glass apart. These passing trains are sleek. They break up the monotony of rolling down this dirt road.

They're not too quick for the human eye, but they are too fast for the wagon driver's brain to comprehend.

These trains are your social media feed blasting along beside you on the internet. They're free entertainment. I'd argue independent art, free music, and free books are the nobler objective.

Why is comprehending our personalized social media feeds important?

Why can't we process every event that speeds by? Are they too fast or are we too slow? What story are we afraid of missing? How do we keep a narrative moving at the speed of human cognition?

Compensating to a storytelling format, bending its restrictions and disadvantages until they become net-positives, is an admirable ability, one that we don't give enough credit. It's a complex mixture compounded from understanding an audience, tempering their expectations, maintaining interest inside the narrative—and outside the narrative if it's TV show on the air week by week in a universe where Internet message boards and Twitter exist—all while remaining consistent and insistent that the story is worth it. There are plots in serialized TV shows that don't have a planned ending.

We don't have to think, the data, the stories, they whiz at us, demanding nothing, requiring no input. It's a library of fragmented free books, riddled with inaccuracies and spelling errors.

Stephen King would applaud that because he's a writer that enjoys scaring himself by what comes out of his own brain as he writes, be it robotic wolves dressed like Doctor Doom or a shapeshifter that can change between looking like a clown and a gargantuan sewer-scurrying spider. He was (is) a writer in it for the self-discovery. Imagine his surprise when he was putting the finishing touches on Wolves of the Calla and realized it was the weirdest version of the Seven Samurai story since A Bug's Life.

Christopher Nolan would not applaud that because he likes stories that are wound like Swiss watches, containing reflective, driving purpose in beginning, middle and end. If you asked him what his favorite book is, he would probably say that mankind has not yet written it yet. If you asked him again, he'd throw out the title From Russia With Love, and tell you to get the fuck out of his face in the most reserved, British way imaginable.

With free time, imagination, and maturation, it took us years to comprehend the layered meanings in an expansive chapter book. They housed characters that we couldn't see visually, but feel vividly speeding and strutting around inside our heads, and now that the speed of personal imagination has become outdated, where the hell are we supposed to find correct pacing in our modern, digital, faster-than-brains society?

We need to slow down. We need to reduce passivity in our immersion into our customized media feeds. We need to accept a greater barrier to entry, because those barriers make us individuals willing to pay a cost of committement, even if the prize is a free show, free music, or free books.

How can we keep this data from just speeding by?

How do we keep ourselves from missing it?

There are news stories that are better-paced serials than than a lot of TV shows, and they're easier and cheaper to produce, sickeningly. A person needs to understand how an audience takes in what's being put to paper or to stage or to screen or to controller because no story exists in a vacuum because they are written by people with lives and perspectives, and tastes in music, and bus routes home from work that repeatedly break down. We suppose this means that we subscribe to a modernist deconstruction theory on deriving meaning in stories. That means the storyteller is either being pompous, or is in denial, or is being spiteful of their medium and ought to tread carefully in that post-modern swamp or they'll soon realize they've gotten their heads little too far up their collective ass.

We are striding right past a notable fulcrum, ironically or not, and we can now absorb media content faster than we care to acknowledge. We have smartphones, and iPads, and 4G LTE, and DirecTV, and Netflix. It's division. Finding focus is becoming less voluntary when shiny objects and limitless content are involved.

Not saying that Netflix isn't a gold-dipped God-gift, but when we're this spoiled for choice, where should we start? Who do we support? We side with creators. We side with the community that aligns with our taste. And we set aside the extraneous data streaming by.

What should we do to slow down online?

Once we know who we want to support, we'll feel safe enough to slow down online.

We find it harder than ever to give time and to acknowledge that slowing down enough to observe the world can become an overwhelming sensation unto itself. We often don't have time to acknowledge it—there's something new to do.

We're fiends for something new. New makes money. New sustains art. New is regenerative, it's new skin and fresh coffee, and it needs to happen. New keeps us from dying a little bit every day.

The Speed of New has accelerated past the point where humans can safely comprehend it all. We cannot even spot all the new bits in the New as it blurs past us. New outruns Purpose. Anybody that's read a cyberpunk novel will tell you that if there is no memory of something, then it has lost meaning, and it has lost purpose. Information and media delivery has continued to speed up beyond—we aren't biologically wired to as quickly as a smartphone. It'll be hard to craft human memories from the hours and days that are filled with so much information fed into us at inhuman speed.

To slow down, you need to figure Purpose. When you have figured your Purpose, you can develop taste, secure your identity, and block out the extra noise. Suddenly the bullet-train slows and you can actually spot the faces in the window.

-- Alex Crumb  (originally published 1/4/12)
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