Things that my break has shown me...
Jun. 6th, 2010 07:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kitewithfishExperiments in Delinkification, by Nicholas Carr
The link is, in a way, a technologically advanced form of a footnote. It's also, distraction-wise, a more violent form of a footnote. Where a footnote gives your brain a gentle nudge, the link gives it a yank. What's good about a link - its propulsive force - is also what's bad about it.
This article is thoughtful and fairly convincing. My last post actually suffered from link-distraction in just putting the damned thing together- I had to go find links to the post where I responded, and so I took about five minutes out of writing to hunt it down from all the email notifications I get from LJ and find the post. So, I am considering, briefly, adding all the links I would normally pepper throughout a post in a footnote-y section at the end. It would certainly streamline the process.
Puppeteer extraordinaire Liam Hurley (of The Royal City Band) conceived, directed and produced this mesmerizing vision set to Josh Ritter's song "The Curse."
Videography and editing by Marie Le Claire. Puppeteering by Liam Hurley and Kevin White. Production Assistant was MacKenzie Pause.
This video was haunting and a little bit creepy, but the story the song is telling is itself a bit creepy, so there's no damage done to the song by the video.
There are several shots where the two characters are dancing alone in a dark room, and I thought that was a wonderful way of showing the ambiguous nature of their relationship as it changes through time. In a way, they are still together in that first moment when they fell in love- that doesn't change because the moment in which it happened is past and cannot be altered. But at the same time, as their relationship grows more distant as the woman grows older, the darkness that surrounds them is a difficult contrast to their present relationship- the darkness seems to threaten them both, and their dance together seems a small act of defiance that's preordained to fall apart (since we, the viewers, have already seen that it has fallen apart.)
In way, it makes me think of a recent Something Positive comic, in which the Vanessa is worried about whether Davan, her boyfriend and the main character, is looking at their relationship as long-term. They don't promise anything but the fact that they love each other in the moment and that that love is valuable.
I'm kind of feeling like I'm in a similar stage with my own personal life, where I'm feeling like the relationship I'm in may well be on its way to being "long-term" but I don't know what that means and how long it's going to last. And even if I were promised that things would last forever, that's a really hard promise to make- I'm not sure I could trust it, because people fall out of love all the time, and it's not entirely under your control. The best I can get is "I love you now," and to be quite honest, that's a lot more than I thought I might ever get. By an act of will, I am making it be enough.
LINKS
Experiments in Delinkification
Josh Ritter's "The Curse" set to puppets
Something Positive: May 23, 2010
The link is, in a way, a technologically advanced form of a footnote. It's also, distraction-wise, a more violent form of a footnote. Where a footnote gives your brain a gentle nudge, the link gives it a yank. What's good about a link - its propulsive force - is also what's bad about it.
This article is thoughtful and fairly convincing. My last post actually suffered from link-distraction in just putting the damned thing together- I had to go find links to the post where I responded, and so I took about five minutes out of writing to hunt it down from all the email notifications I get from LJ and find the post. So, I am considering, briefly, adding all the links I would normally pepper throughout a post in a footnote-y section at the end. It would certainly streamline the process.
Puppeteer extraordinaire Liam Hurley (of The Royal City Band) conceived, directed and produced this mesmerizing vision set to Josh Ritter's song "The Curse."
Videography and editing by Marie Le Claire. Puppeteering by Liam Hurley and Kevin White. Production Assistant was MacKenzie Pause.
This video was haunting and a little bit creepy, but the story the song is telling is itself a bit creepy, so there's no damage done to the song by the video.
There are several shots where the two characters are dancing alone in a dark room, and I thought that was a wonderful way of showing the ambiguous nature of their relationship as it changes through time. In a way, they are still together in that first moment when they fell in love- that doesn't change because the moment in which it happened is past and cannot be altered. But at the same time, as their relationship grows more distant as the woman grows older, the darkness that surrounds them is a difficult contrast to their present relationship- the darkness seems to threaten them both, and their dance together seems a small act of defiance that's preordained to fall apart (since we, the viewers, have already seen that it has fallen apart.)
In way, it makes me think of a recent Something Positive comic, in which the Vanessa is worried about whether Davan, her boyfriend and the main character, is looking at their relationship as long-term. They don't promise anything but the fact that they love each other in the moment and that that love is valuable.
I'm kind of feeling like I'm in a similar stage with my own personal life, where I'm feeling like the relationship I'm in may well be on its way to being "long-term" but I don't know what that means and how long it's going to last. And even if I were promised that things would last forever, that's a really hard promise to make- I'm not sure I could trust it, because people fall out of love all the time, and it's not entirely under your control. The best I can get is "I love you now," and to be quite honest, that's a lot more than I thought I might ever get. By an act of will, I am making it be enough.
LINKS
Experiments in Delinkification
Josh Ritter's "The Curse" set to puppets
Something Positive: May 23, 2010
no subject
Date: 2010-06-08 06:05 am (UTC)Lest you think Nicholas Carr is the end of the story. I think the existence of tabbed browsing today makes the argument largely obsolete: I do an enormous amount of reading on the internet, and rarely do I find that my reading follows a link trail with the meandering style Carr describes. I open a link with ctrl+click, then read the rest of the article I'm on, then move to the article that was opened, etc. If I'm focusing on a specific blogger, I'll maybe ctrl+click twenty times before moving to the linked content; Nicholas Carr is describing a manner of reading on the internet which is foreign to my, and most people's, I think, experience.
no subject
Date: 2010-06-08 06:31 pm (UTC)Personally, I kind of like adding links at the end because I don't have a particular comfortable method of formatting them without losing my stride in writing. I can add them in at the end, but you're probably right in the reader's terms, that tabbed browsing renders the issue much less problematic and that I can just make myself a note to add a link later.
no subject
Date: 2010-06-08 11:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-09 04:40 am (UTC)By the by, do I know you?