i have the sensation, as do my friends, that to function as a proficient human, you must both “keep up” with the internet and pursue more serious, analog interests. i blog about real life; i talk about the internet. it’s so exhausting to exist on both registers, especially while holding down a job. it feels like tedious work to be merely conversationally competent. i make myself schedules, breaking down my commute to its most elemental parts and assigning each leg of my journey something different to absorb: podcast, instapaper article, real novel of real worth, real magazine of dubious worth. i’m pretty tired by the time i get to work at 9 am. in-person communication feels binary to me now: subjects are either private, confessional, and soulful or frantically current, determined mostly by critical mass, interesting only in their ephemeral status…

it’s also about the primitive pleasure of constant and arbitrary stimulation. that’s why the facebook newsfeed is no longer shown chronologically. refresh facebook ten times and the status updates rearrange themselves in nonsensical, anachronistic patterns. you don’t refresh facebook to follow a narrative, you refresh to register a change—not to read but to see. and it’s losing track of this distinction—between reading and seeing—that’s so shameful. it’s like being demoted from the category of thinking, caring human to a sort of rat that doesn’t know why he needs to tap that button, just that he does.