Notes on Space, Place, Facebook, Harry Potter, and the Construction of Identity/ies

1.

I don't use Facebook very much these days.

I don't object to it, as an entity, an organism: I think it's entitled to its opinions, entitled to grow, entitled to become whatever it is that they (and we) make it. I'm not overly concerned about privacy settings or what potential employers/friends/acquaintances might see (should I be? As a rule, I try not to put anything online that I don't want people to know about; but then, I'm very lucky, or very stupid, or both; my life is not divided into such clear-cut categories as Work and Home and Leisure -  I work from home, often with my friends, the very people with whom I share ideas and experiences and beers, and I'm too uptight for Leisure in the traditional sense, I think). I don't mind the pangs of irrational jealousy as all of my friends' avatars gradually turn into thumbnail-sized photos of their latest offspring or their wedding kiss: I'm going to feel irrationally jealous of people no matter what. Moreover, these people aren't even always my friends. Often they're just people I know, or have known, people on the periphery of my life, people who have briefly (for a night, a week, a few years) - overlapped with me. So they're procreating, marrying, graduating, buying expensive things: but what do I look like to them? Just as distant, just as busy/happy/empty/strange.

No, the reason I don't use it very much is that I don't trust the thing I see in the mirror; or maybe it's that I don't trust the mirror itself. I don't know what version of myself to present, mostly because I don't know what version of myself to be, or is it the other way around? Increasingly I don't know what's flesh and what's reflection, and I've begun to suspect that this is because there's very little difference.

2.

When I first joined Facebook, in late 2004, it was different. I was a freshman in college, living across the river from Harvard, where the whole thing had been born. My peers and I used it as a way of sizing each other up: you befriended people you'd met at parties, people you sat next to in lectures, people you rode the elevator with every morning. You learned that the cute boy down the hall had a girlfriend back home and that the girl sitting next to you in Intro to Fiction also liked Death Cab for Cutie and listed Hemingway as a favorite writer (although it's entirely possible that Death Cab for Cutie and Hemingway were defining influences on everyone I went to university with). The profile was a (nearly) static thing, a collection of quotes, interests, identifications. A series of lists. And a single photograph: that was the only visual clue (though clue to what?).

There’s a transcript of an interview with Mark Zuckerberg, from the early(ish) Facebook days. “I think that the goal that we went into it with,” he says, “wasn’t to make an online community, but sort of like a mirror for the real community that existed in real life.”

The thing is this: my generation is growing up with Facebook. I don't mean generation in the loose, age-independent sense that I often do - in this case I actually mean specifically people my age, give or take a few years (people who are close to Mark Zuckerberg's age, basically). And I am not saying we own this thing any more than anyone else does; just that it's easy, under the circumstances, for me to see the evolution of Facebook as a kind of corollary to the way we're getting older.

Look at it this way: as we get older, Facebook becomes more inclusive. As we go through university, graduate from university, get jobs, go to graduate school, get married, have families, have affairs, have breakdowns and breakthroughs, it expands to encompass our own expanding worlds. The connections we made at college seemed important at the time. “The real community that existed in real life” was firmly rooted on campus and in cramped apartment buildings, revolving around kegs and lecterns - or else it existed in hometowns and shared memories of high school. (The advent of Facebook Timeline has allowed me to travel back in time, and I notice that the first few posts on my wall were from high school friends - little scrawls, like yearbook messages, recollections of inside jokes that have long since ceased to mean anything to me, and presumably also to them, declarations of affection and affiliation).

Now those connections are only a small part of the larger social ecosystem in which we exist, one that includes co-workers, childhood friends, spouses, children, cousins, second cousins, one night stands, teachers, students. In an Atlantic piece on Mark Zuckerberg, Megan Garber quotes Jeff Jarvis declaring that Zuckerberg now, “sees Facebook as a next step in the net’s evolutionary scale toward humanity" - no longer a mirror, but the thing being mirrored, too.

3.

So the construction of a profile, an (online?) identity, becomes increasingly complicated. For a start, it begins to rely as much on what they have to say (or post) about us as what we have to say for ourselves. The photo of me, aged 19, wearing a deconstructed cardboard Budweiser box as a hat, is part of a long visual narrative that also includes images of me on the steps of the Supreme Court building, me wearing a cap and gown after earning my master's degree, me on a dhow off the coast of Kenya, me, aged 10, dressed up to play Robin Starveling in the school production of A Midsummer Night's Dream.

The profile is now an interactive thing. We don't list our interests anymore - perhaps because we're less sure of these things, perhaps because these things are no longer a good benchmark for anything (we've finally learned that having incompatible musical tastes doesn't make people incompatible partners), or perhaps because who we are is too tied up in how we want to appear to certain people. Multiple identities: I don't use Facebook very often - or, more accurately, I don't use it constructively (I use it voyeuristically on a daily basis) - because I'm not sure how to present a single version of myself to so many conflicting audiences. I haven't yet decided who the one person is that I can show to colleagues, family, close friends to whom my online presence is only a shadow anyway, distant friends to whom I want to appear objectively successful and sorted, even though nobody is ever really either of those things. Did I say my life was not divided into clear-cut categories? It turns out this doesn't matter: I'm still performing to different audiences.

Last week I came across this piece - "The Data Self (A Dialectic)" - by Nathan Jurgenson. “We cannot describe how a person creates their Profile without always acknowledging how the Profile creates the person,” Jurgenson writes. “Experience creates documentation and documentation creates experience," he concludes. So while I am deciding (or not deciding) how to present myself, what I have already presented, what I am selectively, actively presenting, is influencing that decision.

It’s easy enough to see how this might work in practical terms: Jurgenson uses the example of Spotify, “a streaming services that syncs with and publishes to one’s Facebook profile...because my Profile contains listening behaviors that I know are being judged by others, I may choose to listen to slightly different music to ‘give off’ the impression I wish to portray.” And it’s also not hard to imagine how the construction of the online self might influence the construction/perception of the offline self. The profile and the person create each other. Perhaps it's not just that the mirror has been turned on itself; it's that there is no mirror anymore.

4.

"That pleasant Pavolovian buzz of seeing that someone has responded to something I have posted somewhere is not merely pleasure at having gained some attention; it is also a moment that feels like control over an identity that has slipped away into the permanently public realm."

- Rob Horning, "Data Self Redux"

5.

There's another thing my generation (again in that very specific sense) has grown up with: Harry Potter. When the first book came out, I was almost exactly the same age as Harry (when the final book came out, of course, I was already into my 20s, spending a giddy summer in Oxford, but I still felt it was somehow significant that this story had unfolded over more or less the same span of time that we had gone through adolescence).

What strikes me about these two very separate things is what they seem to share: an inherent tension between reality (whatever we take that to actually mean) and fantasy, between security and freedom. There's the desire for familiarity, rooted-ness: in Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, for instance, there's a young boy struggling to fit in, and subsequently finding a world in which he does fit in; on Facebook, there's a desire to feel connected with people we've met - or, rather, a desire to strengthen or acknowledge the connection, to make it 'tangible', even if in an intangible way. But on the other hand there's also the freedom of possibility, the joy of unfamiliarity: a magical world where broomsticks fly and evil takes a physical form; an online identity emporium, the ability to build a self, the potential for endless iterations and incarnations.

I'm not suggesting that this is unique to my (or anyone's) generation (and I certainly recognise the awful arrogance - as well as the futility - of writing about "one's own generation", or anyone's generation). I'm suggesting that maybe some of these things that we like to point to as - what? symptoms and/or causes of a new breed of shallowness and short-sightedness? - are actually manifestations of a deeper, more timeless struggle. It's a struggle that Yi-Fu Tuan articulated in 1977, the struggle between place (security) and space (freedom) - "we are attached to the one and long for the other". Perhaps now the sense of struggle is heightened by the sense that security is harder to achieve, but so too is freedom. By Tuan’s definition, is “online”, which offers security and freedom in equal measure, and threatens both, too, a space or a place? Is it both? Is it something else entirely?

6.

I find myself thinking again of the mirror; the dissolving mirror, the mirror that no longer exists. Much has been written about the narcissism of my generation (and here I mean generation loosely: the narcissism of what I've seen called "the internet age", I guess I should say). And it is narcissistic indeed to spend too much time in front of the mirror. But does this change if the mirror is not a mirror?

I think of "the ways in which individuals are simultaneously being created by their digital presence," as Jurgenson puts it; and so the corresponding ways in which I might be different if my digital presence was something other than what it is. It does funny things to my sense of time: the before is also the after; the documentation of an experience prematurely takes into account the experience of documentation.

I think, too, of the Mirror of Erised - the mirror that shows the "deepest and most desperate desire of one's heart". Maybe this is what we see just before we start to construct our online identity(ies): the thing we want to be, not the thing we could be, or should be, or will be, or even have been.

❧

I. Christmas cards

This year, some are hand-delivered. At the farmers’ market, I run into some friends; they pull a card out of a coat pocket, but it gets lost amongst the leeks and the potatoes and I never end up taking it home, let alone opening it. Oh well, they say, when I tell them the fate of their offering. It was just a Christmas card; it said Christmas card things – and besides, I think, we’ve seen each other six times since; all the card contained, I suppose, was the representation of a relationship, while here we are, living that relationship. Later, drinking wine at a friend’s house late at night, she produces a card, and I’m vaguely ashamed to have nothing to offer in return, but then, I’ve never been good at this; even the cards I send to my family, back in California, arrive embarrassingly late if at all, little attempts to disguise the distance between us that only serve to magnify it.

Others arrive through the post, personal but to the point. Let’s see more of each other in the new year, one of them says, which I like; it’s an active card, an invitation of sorts. But people of my generation, maybe people in general, don’t send those long letters that my parents used to receive at Christmas – round-robins, sometimes, but not always, full of life updates: how little Susie is doing in middle school and how Howard is considering Harvard but he’s not sure he’s got the SAT scores for it and how even though Tom lost his job earlier this year because of downsizing or company restructuring or whatever the fashionable reason to lose your job is, they’ve picked themselves up, are doing well, even managed a family trip to the Grand Canyon this summer!

This kind of correspondence served conflicting purposes – to highlight both the banality of everyone else’s lives (they’re human too, just trotting along at the same speed as the rest of us) and the magnificence of everyone else’s lives (they’re doing all kinds of amazing things that I’m not doing!). Who didn’t feel a pang of jealousy, knowing that acquaintances were traveling further, making bigger decisions? Who didn’t, also, know that these kinds of details, the cheery attitude, the photo of the smiling family lined up on the edge of the Grand Canyon (the edge of the abyss!), were just fragments? Those notes contained nothing more or less than a series of clues, designed to add up, when pieced together by detective-friends, to a life grander than the life actually lived.

II. Curation

Now we don’t need to send end-of-year updates. We’re busy constructing and tending to our grander selves all year round. We broadcast the bits of the truth we want other people to see every day, primarily online, combing our public image, curating our personal histories.

I’m thinking about this when I come across this post by Cheri Lucas on Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Facebook Timeline. I’m struck by the connection Lucas draws between Lacuna, Inc. and “my curation of my own history” and am prompted to write my own rambling mini-essay in the comments:

“Maybe what’s interesting here is the collision between two kinds of curation – the curation of personal memory and the curation of one’s public self, or one’s public image, anyway. The former has always occurred – not as drastically, as literally, as it does for Joel and Clementine, but in little ways (misremembering the last months of a relationship, forgetting certain things, placing private but heavy emphasis on others, say). I know when I tell people I meet now about relationships I’ve had in the past, I’m not telling a whole story, or even a true (in the sense of factually correct) story – but I am, usually, at least telling a story which is emotionally true for me, based on my (curated) memory. But now, as you point out, “I am able to highlight what is important in my life—or what I want others to view as important—and fill in missing details”. We can not only present (and broadcast) a certain version of ourselves; we can also edit it, for an audience, we can do on paper (or Facebook, anyway) what we’ve always been able to do in our minds forever. I don’t know if this is a ‘bad’ thing, if any of it can be quantified, but I think it’s certainly raising questions about memory and identity that are fairly unique to our era.”

III. Casual Correspondence

I wrote a month or two ago about how the question of whether or not correspondence – in its grand sense, its life in letters sense – is dead, or dying, because of technology, doesn’t interest me. But the art of staying in touch – well, now, that’s different, that’s a rare art indeed these days, and “rarity…is the precursor to extinction,” as Darwin writes.

For me, casual correspondence is too difficult these days. Why write to someone (or even – the horror! – ring her), for no specific purpose other than to make contact, when you can track her movements (however heavily edited) online? And if she doesn’t broadcast any aspect of his her online, you hesitate: perhaps it’s deliberate, perhaps she’s hiding, perhaps your friendly advances are unwelcome. My inclination anyway, in an environment where we’re saturated with the details of other people’s lives, is to assume that the dissapearer has disappeared for a reason, has gone underground in order not to be found.

So we forget how to make contact, how to say hello, how are you, what have you been up to? There are plenty of people I want to say that to, but not only do I feel disinclined, I feel I lack the vocabulary – and also the medium – with which to do it. I don’t know how to say let’s stay in touch, but more than that, I don’t know how to stay in touch.

I do know this: staying in touch – or, rather, the art of staying in touch – is interactive. It is is not adding someone as a friend on Facebook so that you can passively observe; it’s not consuming the fragments, the breadcrumbs. It’s talking about the fragments and the breadcrumbs, filling the spaces in with conversation.

You could look at something like Facebook and think, how efficient! It’s saving so much time; people don’t have to write a million letters and emails anymore; all the necessary information is in one place; it’s never been easier to stay in touch! This is true, on the surface; but what it ignores is the possibility for different selves, different levels of revelation. I worry (probably needlessly, nearly all of my worry is needless) that if everyone sees precisely the same thing, we’ll forget how to tell different people different things – not in order to mislead, but in order to tailor relevant information, to revisit shared history, to retain a sense of dignity. And we’ll let this art, this tiny art, shrivel and become extinct.

❧

Oh, what a difference a year makes. And maybe that’s just it: maybe it’s circumstantial, maybe it’s related to the fact that a year ago I was there and now I am here, and everything, but also nothing, has changed.

But seriously, have you looked at the internet lately?

I know the internet is not just this Thing, this big mouth-breathing monster that sits in the corner and grunts occasionally and then looks back down at the keyboard. But indulge me for a moment. Pretend it is. And just look at the state of it! Greasy hair, stained t-shirt, dried spittle at the corner of a tea-stained mouth. It hasn’t been exercising enough; it hasn’t been realising its potential or even acknowledging it has worth.

Sometimes (okay, a lot of times) I don’t write rants on Sundays. Sometimes I don’t write anything, all day, which is not good when that is basically what I am supposed to be doing all day, every day. But honestly, a lot of the time I can’t actually pinpoint what it is I’m thinking, or what it is exactly that’s annoying me, even when I know something is annoying me. There’s so much noise. It’s like that scene in Arcadia (which I know I reference in every other blog post), when Valentine Coverly says “There’s just too much bloody noise!” and you aren’t sure if he means there’s too much noise around his data, or too much noise in the room, in general.

I am not going to do that thing I hate and blame the Internet Monster, and say that the reason I sometimes can’t write or sometimes can’t identify what it is that’s annoying me is that the Internet Monster has been mouth-breathing in my ear all day and I’m just so…wait, what was I saying? Because I still really, really hate that. I am not going to blame one of the greatest (for better or worse) technological and possibly sociological phenomenons of our age for the fact that sometimes I sit down at my computer and instead of banging out another 2,000 words of my book I look at photos of expensive chairs and impossibly beautiful women in Barbour coats on Tumblr. Because if computers didn’t exist and I was chained to a desk writing my book in my own blood with a stick I would still find ways not to write it. I can promise you that.

But. Part of the reason I don’t write, or I don’t know what’s bothering me, or I can’t figure out what the fuck my book is supposed to be about, is because lately – in the last year, or two, maybe – I haven’t been exercising that part of my brain that ignores everybody. Everything I read or see or hear that involves anything or anyone else in some way influences what it is I think I should be doing. Which isn’t right. And because I read and see and hear a lot, my sense of what I should be doing has been completely diluted by this sense that I’m not doing what they’re doing, how can I be more like them?

I am envious or jealous almost all the time because of what other people are doing. I don’t actually know what other people are doing, of course. The lives I see online are like little icebergs, and I will never collide with most of them, so I will never know what lies beneath. But I can extrapolate from an offhand comment – “what a great day”, for instance – and, because I like to invent things, and in a perfect world I would be inventing them on paper for an adoring public, not in my head for the sake of destroying my own self-esteem, imagine that what this means is that the person who had a great day is, at 24, already a bestselling author with a Booker nomination and a big house.

I guess the thing is, there’s just so much. Of everything. I’m drowning in everything. And it isn’t that I can’t shut it off and it isn’t that the Internet Monster is destroying the world. It’s just that I’ve lost my bearings. I’m stuck in a bad maze. I’m tired of a lot of things, which is fine, but I need to know how to find the things that excite me, rather than just encountering, again and again, in different incarnations, the things I’m tired of.

There’s just so much funny, for instance. There’s so much funny that none of it is funny anymore. It’s too near the bone, or else it means nothing at all. If I read one more girl’s clever blog about her slightly zany life (and, looked at from the right angle, whose life isn’t slightly zany?) that overuses capital letters, sentence fragments and exclamation points to drive home just how FUNNY! It all is! I will probably cry. (And am I guilty of doing this? Yes. Of course I am, sometimes. I’m as susceptible as everyone else, and I know it: that’s the point.).

Meanwhile, on Twitter, that medium for even more transient expression, there are all these jokes! These one-liners that, taken out of context, are mean or meaningless or both. And all this talk about television! Increasingly I wonder if Twitter is actually just a way for people who watch a lot of TV to feel like they’re part of a community. And they can #xfactor to their hearts’ content, and Caitlin Moran can make as many quips about the contestants as she wants, and other people can retweet Caitlin Moran’s quips about the contestants as much as they like (this is not a criticism of Caitlin Moran, by the way: she is a tremendous writer, both funny and poignant, and I have a lot of respect for her). But it’s still a Sunday evening and they’re all still sitting at home alone watching television and talking about how bad it is – or, even more depressing, how good it is.

Am I jaded? Yes, I am, a bit. I’m tired of smug people telling us what they ate and wore and accomplished today. I’m tired of self-referential Techcrunch pieces, self-referential Guardian articles, self-referential tweets. I’m tired of reading blogs about how to be more productive (why do these blogs never suggest “not spending your entire morning reading blogs about productivity” as a tip for being more productive?). I’m tired of feeling perpetually as if I’m not keeping up, even when I know that everyone else feels exactly the same way, because no one could ever keep up, even if they tried.

But I’ll say again: our imaginary Internet Monster, slobbering and abused in the corner, is not the cause of my angst. You know what the cause of my angst is? My self. My negativity. It takes a certain amount of energy and imagination to sift (or, perhaps, see) through a billion photos of well-dressed people standing in the middle of the street and a bunch of blog posts about that really awkward thing I did yesterday or that really funny thing that happened to me involving a bookcase, a dildo and a dwarf, but it can be done. No one says that books should be abolished because there are some really bad authors out there (maybe some people do say that, but they’d be wrong). And no one is standing over me forcing me to spend a few hours every day looking at things that, fundamentally, are making me depressed. I’m doing that all on my own.

What is making me angsty, therefore, is not that there is so much shit: it is that I am allowing myself the luxury of getting down about all the shit, instead of ignoring all the shit. I don’t have to read the things I read, and, more importantly, I don’t have to react negatively to them.

I think maybe a year ago I was too excited about everything to ignore anything, if you see what I mean. I think a lot of us were. But now we have the greatest freedom of all: the freedom to choose what we engage with.

So welcome to the era of accountability: in which the Internet Monster stops doing the work for us, and we have to be discerning enough to discover and promote the content we actually care about, instead of being forever mired in the content we resent. No one said it would be easy.

❧

The other day, or maybe this morning, I sat down to work – not, as it happened, for a client, but for myself. A month in to my freelance life, I am finally able to give myself permission to call the act of sitting at my desk and looking out at my overgrown garden and typing (or not typing) things “work”, even though it feels more like “fun”, like “skiving,” even. I was eating toast, and it occurred to me that as long as I was eating toast, I was under no obligation to work. It was like when I would bring a sandwich up to my desk at the office and eat lunch over my laptop. I could still check emails and re-load websites and report bugs, but because I was on my lunch hour, it was not necessary to do these things. If my mind began to wander and I found myself adding a dozen books to my Amazon wishlist, that was okay.

So the other day, or this morning, eating my toast, I decided to browse the internet for awhile. That’s not true, of course: no one decides to “browse the internet”. What I decided to do was look at my Google Reader. Which inevitably led me to open five or six new tabs – things, I told myself, I was, or should be, interested in, essays about the decline of culture or the rise of intellectualism, sparse hipster prose bemoaning the state of politics, erudite descriptions of scenes from some cop drama or other. I kept chewing on my toast, but none of these things seemed like the sort of thing I wanted to read over breakfast; they were the sorts of things you had to concentrate on. I was eating toast; the whole point of eating toast was that for the period of eating it, I did not have to concentrate if I didn’t want to concentrate, and I didn’t want to concentrate. I hadn’t even had a second cup of coffee or a first cup of tea.

I looked at Twitter. Incidentally, I also finished my toast, but as I was now determined to find something lighthearted enough to be an appropriate accompaniment to toast, I decided that I was still not obliged to do any actual work, and that, in fact, the only thing I was obliged to do was to continue to take advantage of my lack of obligation.

On Twitter people were mostly saying “good morning”, as if announcing their presence validated their existence; or was it the other way round, was it that their existence validated the act of announcing their presence? But some people were also posting links to things. I have to click on links to things because I’m paranoid I might miss something. I hate being out of the loop, which is unfortunate because I’m nearly always out of the loop, mostly because I don’t know what loop, exactly, I want to be “in”. My attention is spread too thinly, in other words. Anyway, usually I’m not missing anything, but a few of the links were interesting enough, a few of them were, as it were, worth clicking. For instance, I found a photo essay on shipwrecks, with which I am visually fascinated. I have no compulsion whatsoever to find anything out about them, but I could look at photographs of them for hours, enjoying the sensation of vertigo I get when I see a dead ship still half-floating on the water, or “dash’d all to pieces” on the shore.

Having spent ten minutes or so considering how simultaneously beautiful and futile all human endeavors are (we build these, ships, these great big ships, and then we can’t even stop them running aground, perishing, rusting, disintegrating!), I felt appropriately morose. I decided I was ready to tackle some of the other open tabs, the longer essays, the things that might make me mad, or might at least make me think. One of them, as it turns out, was this piece by Dani Shapiro. As soon as I started reading it, I knew I would finish it. I must say, I’m very good at predicting whether or not I’m going to finish a piece of writing. And of course, as soon as I realised I was going to not only finish it but also enjoy it, I wanted to know how I had come across it. Had someone I know tweeted about it, or linked to it in a blog post? Had it been referenced elsewhere? Had I even meant to click on it? Maybe my hand had slipped and I had accidentally tapped a link I hadn’t even noticed. Discovering exactly how it had come to be open in my browser began to obsess me (though not enough to try to retrace my steps): what was the path between toast and this moment?

I came, eventually, to this:

And so I googled Beidermeier. The first thing I discovered is that I was spelling it incorrectly. The i comes before the e. Biedermeier. Next, I found myself on the website of an antiques dealer in Paris. Lovely stuff. Unaffordable. Which reminded me that I hadn’t paid the deposit for my son’s summer camp. I clicked away from the antiques dealer and onto the camp’s website. I filled out all the forms—this took about twenty minutes, and involved going through my iphoto folder to download a recent photograph of my son, which led me to relive this past year, our trips and dinner parties and weekend visitors, our bike rides and hikes and visits with his cousins—until I finally typed in the credit card number and enrolled him in camp for the month of July. Which led me to be worried about how we’re going to afford to send him to camp, to private school, hell, to college, even though he’s only in the sixth grade. I reflexively checked Twitter. I hardly even knew I was doing it. I had forgotten to respond to that person who DM’d me. And while I was on Twitter, I figured I might as well tweet.

That was exactly my path, too, I realized: that was exactly how I had come to be reading this essay. For a moment I despaired, though the essay is not despairing in tone: how could I ever write anything if I spend all my days as an amnesiac, wandering through the forest of curiosities, marveling at everything, discovering and rediscovering, but unable to remember what I had set out to do in the first place? If my sense of purpose morphed with every new sentence consumed or photograph viewed, how could I ever devote the proper amount of time to any one project?

I decided not to look at the rest of the open tabs, and not to make myself a cup of tea to justify another two-hour lacuna (tea, as opposed to coffee, signifies a break, a mental space in which, as with toast, you’re not obliged to do anything you don’t, on a whim, decide you want to do). I decided to write about my despair and my curiosity.

So I sat down and began to write about this. I wrote for some time – an hour, maybe, or two, or three. It hardly matters; what matters is that during that hour or three I did not click on anything else, I had no compulsion to tweet, or find out via Facebook which of my college acquaintances has recently got engaged, or look online for the right pair of black leather heeled ankle boots, or play with Google maps, planning out the perfect round-the-world route. And then, eventually, I had a small essay.

That is to say, I had, inadvertantly, without meaning to (in fact, meaning to do quite the opposite), done some work. The quality of work is irrelevant: that is the other thing I am teaching myself to do, along with calling it “work”. I am teaching myself not to care if, at the end of the day, all I have produced is a small essay that may or may not leave any lasting impact on anybody, even myself. And the way I do this – which may be different from the way you do this, or the way he does it, or she does it – is by treating each morning as a journey without map or meaning. There is no purpose, there is no right or wrong: there is only the possibility, if you don’t try nearly hard enough, of learning something, and then, eventually, of making something.

❧

1.

I keep thinking about all the time I spend online looking at things (photos, writings, memories, ideas, intimacies) that belong to other people, to people, more specifically, that I don’t know. Sometimes I have a connection with these people, but often I don’t. That word connection is interesting anyway. Sometimes it’s just a chain of seven or eight people. Where does “connection” end, nowadays? I’m connected in some way or other, if you look hard and creatively enough, to lots of people that I have really no actual connection with.

So what does it mean, to look impartially (or not impartially) upon something that means something to someone you’ve never met and maybe never will meet but means nothing to you, on a personal level at least, and feel something anyway?

(I mean very mundane, personal things here, by the way: photos from a trip to the coast, a snapshot of a lunch or a bedspread or an outfit, a tweet about a commute or a commentary about a cup of tea.)

2.

Maybe it doesn’t matter after all: it’s just stories, it’s all just stories, it’s all about the spaces in between a text and a reader, where there’s room to interpret and build.

The other day I had this thought, that the way I write and the way I think about story are completely different things. The story in my head is very messy, very alive. But the story on the page must be restrained, very disciplined and dignified, to allow for a reader. The best part of any piece of writing really, in my opinion, is the space in between: that is to say, the spaces the author leaves for a reader to contribute to the creation of a story. When I was little this is how I used to read: by putting down the book and adding to the story in my own head. What I enjoyed most was this process of silent contribution, of placing my own thoughts, my own interpretations, into the text. I would take my book outside with me and walk in circles around a pile of rocks left over from the construction of some bit of the house. It was not a very large pile, so the circles were small but I never got vertigo and every once in awhile I would open the book to a random page and sniff. If we hadn’t lived on a ranch, quite far removed from other people, people would probably have driven past and looked at me making circles and sniffing books and thought I was crazy. A crazy little girl with dusty scuffed shoes and too much time to think.

3.

Anyway other people have written much more elegantly than I ever could about interpretation and influence and intertextuality, but what I really feel is that where anything comes to life is the place where it overlaps with your own experience.

4.

It works best with intimate objects, when you feel you have a window into something. Maybe this is why I feel like I am always looking for the non-stories. A photograph from a war zone or a tweet about a celebrity encounter is too far removed from my own experience, too much like the fictions I already know. But to see someone else write about a trip to the farmer’s market, to see a snapshot of someone else’s shoelaces, makes me think about the stories (or the non-stories?) of how people are connected: how did I arrive at this moment, this image, this blog, this point of re-distributing or re-purposing content? It would be interesting to look at the story in great detail, the list of connections, the path I followed. Sometimes, of course, it’s very simple – this person, who I know (online or offline or both), recommend/linked to/mentioned this thing, and now here I am, arrived after following a direct path. But sometimes, oftentimes, it’s much more convoluted. And other connections start to appear, start to seep into the story. This is really the thing I like about the internet, maybe: the endless possibility for quiet human drama (where drama means only connection, in some small way, any way).

5.

Which is why to look at someone’s holiday snapshot, to see a photo (for example) of a boat bobbing on the water in Devon, is so interesting. I have never been to that town in Devon, I have never seen that boat, I do not know the person who took the photograph and posted it online, I don’t even know someone who knows that person (though it may be that I know someone who knows someone who knows that person). And so I am looking at a piece of fiction. I am allowed to be a part of the creation of that piece of fiction. The gap between my experience, my own self, and the creator of the content, the anonymous or nearly anonymous girl on the beach, is large enough to allow for an entire story to fit comfortably, to settle and grow.

❧