John Freeman: Not so Fast! A Manifesto for Slow Communication (WSJ)

bwo Wall Street Journal (August 21, 2009)
original at: http://tinyurl.com/ndokgn

Not So Fast
Sending and receiving at breakneck speed can make life queasy; a manifesto
for slow communication

By JOHN FREEMAN

The boundlessness of the Internet always runs into the hard fact of our
animal nature, our physical limits, the dimensions of our cognitive
present, the overheated capac­ity of our minds. "My friend has just had
his PC wired for broadband," writes the poet Don Paterson. "I meet him in
the café; he looks terrible—his face puffy and pale, his eyes bloodshot. .
. . He tells me he is now detained, night and day, in downloading every
album he ever owned, lost, desired, or was casually intrigued by; he has
now stopped even listen­ing to them, and spends his time sleeplessly
monitoring a progress bar. . . . He says it's like all my birthdays have
come at once, by which I can see he means, precisely, that he feels he is
going to die."

We will die, that much is certain; and everyone we have ever loved and
cared about will die, too, sometimes—heartbreakingly—before us. Being
someone else, traveling the world, making new friends gives us a temporary
reprieve from this knowledge, which is spared most of the animal kingdom.
Busyness—or the simulated busyness of email addiction—numbs the pain of
this awareness, but it can never totally submerge it. Given that our days
are limited, our hours precious, we have to decide what we want to do,
what we want to say, what and who we care about, and how we want to