Then the third of today's articles in the NYTimes that forwards its Technology and its Discontents series, there comes the essay from the backpage of the Sunday Book Review, Only Disconnect. I can highly recommend the essay by Gary Shteyngart. And you just received bonus points for remembering that, earlier today, I posted an interview w/ Shteyngart that ran in today's Sunday New York Times. That means that the NYT's awarded Shteyngart SuperHero status an is letting us know that, for this week, he's the one to watch. Observe:
As of two weeks ago, I am a Facebooking twit. With each post, each tap of the screen, each drag and click, I am becoming a different person — solitary where I was once gregarious; a content provider where I at least once imagined myself an artist; nervous and constantly updated where I once knew the world through sleepy, half-shut eyes; detail-oriented and productive where I once saw life float by like a gorgeously made documentary film. And, increasingly, irrevocably, I am a stranger to books, to the long-form text, to the pleasures of leaving myself and inhabiting the free-floating consciousness of another.
I am sitting underneath a tree beside a sturdy summer cottage rebuilt by an ingenious Swedish woman. The birds are twittering, but in a slightly different way than my New York friends. I open a novel, “A Short History of Women,” by Kate Walbert, a book I will grow to love over the coming week, but at first my data-addled brain is puzzled by the density and length of it (256 pages? how many screens will that fill?), the onrush of feeling and fact, the surprise that someone has let me not into her Facebook account but into the way other minds work. I read and reread the first two pages understanding nothing. [more]
