Marcus Speh — Nothing To Flawnt

“Te Nave Nave Fenua” (The Delight­ful Land) by Paul Gau­guin, 1892

I have [P]interests, too. Mostly, I pin things to my Lit­board and write a few lines about them. Some­times, these dif­fer­ent Inter­net places where I’m invested strike me as tiny par­al­lel uni­verses. They’re too tiny to be fully grown or able to do much for you. They never assume full respon­si­bil­ity for their con­tent. You spend per­haps only sec­onds or a few min­utes in each of them, but all of them together (Face­book, Google+, Pin­ter­est, Fic­tio­naut, Twit­ter, Scoo­pIt, Storify, Word­Press, Tum­blr, Pos­ter­ous, Wee­bly etc.) man­i­fest some­thing more than just a bunch of sites. I don’t really know myself yet how exactly this works, but the total­ity of alter­na­tive elec­tronic worlds is sub­ject to an evo­lu­tion­ary process not unlike the phys­i­cal uni­verse as such: these plat­forms can be grafted upon one another (mash-up, merger) or com­pete with each other (Face­book, Google+) and so on, with a pro­found dif­fer­ence to the bio­log­i­cal arena being that we, lit­tle me and lit­tle you, are not just stand­ing by but we play with them and inside them (always the dan­ger of los­ing our­selves in the process), we worry about them, we rec­om­mend them, we kick them like dirty old habits. This means that we’re like gods in the midst of these infor­ma­tional uni­verses that we’ve made (and I mean all of us, because only where peo­ple to go play and pin and post and palaver will there be life). Maybe this is also what other, larger, invis­i­ble gods do to our planet and all the other plan­ets. Per­haps the green trees, all of them that I see and can’t see, the whole plan­e­tary net­work of trees, is a com­mu­nity plat­form of divine gardeners.

When I was a boy, I had this idea first, as soon as I’d grasped the unreal real­ity of atoms: what if there was a giant child some­where within, our world noth­ing but an atom in the lit­tle fin­ger of this giant child. Just like per­haps an atom in my lit­tle fin­ger was a com­plete world with a child look­ing up at me in this moment hav­ing the same thoughts. Dr Seuss must’ve had this thought, too. It’s the Cos­mic Tur­tle for beginners.

This whole linked chain of thoughts makes me feel like a spark with notions of my own divin­ity. It was set in motion really when I pinned a lovely post by anony­mous blog­ger and writer Beach­sloth to my Lit­board: it reminded me that I’m a physi­cist by train­ing, some­thing that lingers in my mind like a mirage on a desert road behind me rather than ahead of me. I’ve not used this fact much in my writ­ing but per­haps I’ll do more of that. Right now I’m work­ing on a lit­tle story that involves Ein­stein and I’m happy to feel just a lit­tle closer to him than if I wasn’t a physi­cist. Not that it’s really pos­si­ble to feel close to a cul­tural icon: they hang on the wall. They’ve been pinned there by his­tory (did you know there’re more than 116 Mil­lion images of Ein­stein on the Web?). To close, let’s remem­ber that we’re sparks and gods at the same time. We’ve cre­ated this dig­i­tal Gar­den of Eden and we cop­u­late in it at the same time. We put our­selves here and we toy with ban­ning our­selves from it, at least I do, all the time.

Ear­lier in the week, a group of stu­dents asked me a ques­tion that I’m often asked: how do I find the time to do all that I do?I told them that I try to be effi­cient on a day-to-day basis (as I’m sure we all do), and that I only sur­vive in dig­i­tal Eden because every once in a while I take a solid break from it. Usu­ally, this cycle fol­lows my teach­ing term. When I’m on a media break, I pay a lot more atten­tion to my body. I look at my hands and I notice new lines on them. I sit with my hands in my lap rather than on my lap­top and look out the win­dow. I read to my loved ones. I roll words around in my mouth and swal­low them whole, or I chew them for long peri­ods. At the end of it I can do all kinds of things with words that I couldn’t do before. And that’s only a frac­tion of it. When I’m done with that, I res­ur­rect myself and return to the Delight­ful Land to play some more with you guys.

I have interests, too. Mostly, I pin things to my Litboard and write a few lines about them. Sometimes, these different Internet places where I’m invested strike me as tiny parallel universes. They're too tiny to be fully grown or able to do much for you. They never assume full responsibility for their content. ...