Marcus Speh — Nothing To Flawnt

1. Per­am­bu­lat­ing. This is not at all the post I meant to write when I began to think about it this morn­ing. Only half way through the orig­i­nal post I realised that my atten­tion was elsewhere—probably because of a talk about online iden­ti­ties I had to give in the fol­low­ing week (in Berlin in Ger­man) on the way the Web has changed the way we do sci­ence, a talk that I’ll give again (dif­fer­ently) in Lon­don next month and yet again (dif­fer­ently) to an audi­ence in Stock­holm. This habit of con­ti­nously chang­ing lanes of thought, mov­ing in and out of ideas is one way in which my think­ing has changed. Or rather, I’ve always done that—in a recent inter­view for Flash Fron­tier I admit­ted that “I’m a lat­eral thinker and writer and it takes strength to keep the reins and carve out tracks deep enough so that oth­ers can fol­low my crabbed path later.”

The Internet’s not mak­ing it eas­ier to keep a tight rein on one’s thoughts or lines…

What helped me to the insight of what I really wanted to write about (which is this what I’m writ­ing about now in case you were won­der­ing about my mean­der­ing…) is the way in which I sit here and write while weav­ing in and out of the Web. My brows­ing his­tory in the past few hours include sites related to my research on vir­tual iden­ti­ties (Wikiver­sity, Google Books), social media sites (Twit­ter, Blog­ger), sta­tis­tics infor­ma­tion and gen­eral ref­er­ence (dic­tio­nary), cov­er­ing the broad areas of: learn­ing, shar­ing and van­ity. All of it while try­ing to write a blog post (shar­ing, van­ity) about some­thing that I’m curi­ous about (learning).

2. Mod­el­ing. Now, if this was an MBA course, I’d draw a tri­an­gle (see fun and Freud in the fig­ure) with ‘learn­ing’, ‘shar­ing’ and ‘van­ity’ in its cor­ners, and per­haps I’d draw another tri­an­gle with the cor­re­spond­ing Freudian spaces ‘id’ (shar­ing), ‘super-ego’ (learn­ing) and ‘ego’ (van­ity) next to it, because I’m so fond of all things Sig­mund (in part because the man wrote so damn well). But this is not an MBA course and I must get back to my orig­i­nal ques­tion and to writing.

How then is the Inter­net (or rather, the Web, which is what most peo­ple, although it is tech­ni­cally incor­rect to do so, iden­tify with the Inter­net) chang­ing the way I write?

W. Daniel Hillis, in an intro­duc­tion to the sim­i­lar EDGE ques­tion, calls our time “the dawn of entan­gle­ment”. We’re per­haps not more entan­gled than we ever were (one of the priv­i­leges of get­ting older besides los­ing your teeth is the insight into how ter­ri­bly and beau­ti­fully con­nected we all are at all times) but there’s a greater con­scious­ness of this fact in the world.

I’m going to leave the plane of abstrac­tion now and tell you some things that actu­ally happened:

3. Writ­ing. A cou­ple of days ago, I saw a pic­ture of Fritz Thyssen, a Ger­man indus­tri­al­ist who helped bring Hitler to power and later fell from the Führer’s grace, on Jür­gen Fauth’s Tum­blr site “Tulpendiebe”.

The next morn­ing I woke up with a story on my mind focus­ing on how Thyssen vis­ited Her­mann Göring in his Nurem­berg prison cell in 1946 (some­thing that never hap­pened as far as I know).

I spent some time research­ing the facts sur­round­ing Göring on the net. I found stuff out and I got excited, hop­ping from page to page like a rab­bit, pen and mouse in hand (I do take notes in long­hand, too).

I had started with one sen­tence that had bub­bled up from my uncon­scious. After half a day or so I’d arrived at a pretty clear idea for a story link­ing the 1946 Nurem­berg tri­als, the Beer-Hall-Putsch of 1923 and my desire to take a dif­fer­ent look at fas­cism and its char­ac­ters (which is one of my long-running secret projects, at least until this post).

I sat down and wrote my short story, going back to some of the web pages I’d saved and find­ing new ones along the way. This find­ing of new infor­ma­tion and new ideas set in motion a more com­pli­cated process because I now had to defend my cho­sen course while the Web con­stantly whis­pered in my ear.

The tale itself is a story of entan­gle­ment. It could prob­a­bly have been writ­ten between library vis­its, but my muse at least is a beau­ti­ful, moody cow: when she calls, I need to milk while the juice’s warm. I might never have writ­ten this story oth­er­wise, not this one anyway.

4. Trans­lat­ing. A third dimen­sion, dis­cussed in the afore­men­tioned recent inter­view is the going back and forth between Ger­man and Eng­lish which, in this case, never left the level of indi­vid­ual words: I tend to look up a lot of words even if I know them; I don’t do this con­sciously while I do it. In hind­sight, I think it helps me broaden my base of choices—something that every lit­er­ary writer likes to do—avoid rep­e­ti­tion or cliche.

As an early user (since 1990) I’ve not really been with­out the Web ever. As a writer, doing seri­ous work since about 10 years, I’ve ben­e­fit­ted enor­mously from the grow­ing den­sity of infor­ma­tion. This rich­ness comes at a price: it is harder at times to find one’s way. First there’s a bil­lion roads inside your head and then there’s another bil­lion Inter­net high­ways out­side your head. “We’re not in Kansas any­more,” says Toto to Dorothy. On the Inter­net nobody knows you’re a dog.

The Web oper­ates like an exter­nal mem­ory bank. It has become an ocean whose waves qui­etly lap at the back of my brain while I think and while I write. It con­tains all man­ner of crea­tures. I’m excited to see which ones will crawl out of this “Urschleim”, this pri­mor­dial soup and find their way into the pages of my writing.

5. Ask­ing. Now, all this was writ­ten in smoothie mode: put it all in, turn on the mixer, pour out the slush. There’s so much more to be said about how the Inter­net changes the way one writes, but I can’t get my four hands around it yet. I only wanted to get the ball rolling.

Here are a few recent wit­nesses from my blog roll: Alt Lit (like Noah Cicero on Amer­i­can lit­er­a­ture in the absence of “honor” and “duty”); sad true habits of highly effec­tive writ­ers (like the com­mit­ment of Rox­ane Gay and oth­ers); peo­ple cre­at­ing all over the place (like my 11-year old daugh­ter Taffimai’s ambition-free web art exhibit); writ­ers won­der­ing why they do what they do (like Jim Davis & friends on Fic­tio­naut); remixes and mash-ups (like Jür­gen Fauth’s Tulpendiebe). So much to digest, read, digest, read.

How has the Inter­net changed the way you write?

1. Perambulating. This is not at all the post I meant to write when I began to think about it this morning. Only half way through the original post I realised that my attention was elsewhere—probably because of a talk about online identities I had to give in the following week (in Berlin in ...