Web 2.0 Social Networking Is A Giant Time Vortex?

I am not sure if Milan Kundera has ever heard the term “Web 2.0”, but in his book (though, he was likely writing it before the term was coined anyway) The Curtain: An Essay in Seven Parts (that I first wrote about here) there is a quote that strikes me as related.

Kundera is referring to a “long forgotten” 1930s Czech novel called The Internal-Combustion Monster by Jaromir John. Kundera says that John’s story is about the maddening sound of cars when they first appeared on the scene (of course, a fraction of today’s cars that we don’t even really hear anymore).

Using this story as a starting point, Kundera points out:

We can deduce a general rule: the existential import of a social phenomenon is most sharply perceptible not as it expands but when it is just beginning, incomparably fainter than it will soon become. (121)

He goes on to give an example from Nietzsche and then writes:

Bureaucracy in Kafka’s time was an innocent babe compared to today, and yet it was Kafka who revealed its monstrous nature, which since then has become routine and no longer commands anyone’s interest. (122)

Kundera is writing about “social phenomenon” in the context of art in general with the novel as the centerpiece specifically. I am not aware of a novel that uses Web 2.0 as a backdrop, but Kundera’s observation made me think about “Web 2.0 social networking” as a phenomena that is just beginning. How is it different from what came before?

When the Web browser was invented a lot changed, but one of the characteristics was that the Web made many economic activities more efficient and time more productive. Granted, “surfing” used up a lot of time and instant messaging was a time black hole for sure (though, a pale comparison to the time black hole that is Twitter), but, for the most part, the “broadcast Web” and many of the first applications saved time.

Last Fall I attended the Web 2.0 Summit. At the Summit they had a panel of late teens and early twenty-somethings talking about their Internet-related habits. A number of the participants claimed that they spent about 4 hours per day on mySpace. I mentioned this comment to several people that I know and the reaction was “what do you do for 4+ hours?” Someone responded with, though in jest, what is probably pretty telling “oh, they are making purple ponies fly across their page”.

So, there is the rub: Web 2.0 takes a lot of time (more than television?). Endless bookmarking and blogging and futzing with mySpace or Facebook, takes a lot of time. But, it isn’t really productive time. It is truly “social” time.

From a literary perspective, I wonder what the novel would say about Web 2.0 here at the beginning of this social phenomenon. For that matter, what would it say about the Web in general?

A last thought for this post, Kundera writes:

The novelist’s ambition is not to do something better than his predecessors but to see what they did not see, say what they did not say. (15)

What has not been revealed?

Identity

Milan Kundera is a genius. His books are nearly perfect. Identity is a quick, but brilliant, read and is filled with many interesting quotes. Ultimately, it is a love story, but it is also a view of external events via the interior world.

Some of the quotes are short, and interesting (even out of context):

The pervasive rose fragrance: a metaphor of adventure. (39)
What to attach to, if his inner self should keep as silent as it had before? (68)
You’re living out the destiny I escaped by chance. (85)
Is having two faces such a triumph? (115)
She has the impression of being drawn along by a conspiracy of coincidences…(131)
…our only freedom is choosing between bitterness and pleasure. (146)

And, then, there are dozens of longer quotes that are terrific like:

Their problem is time – how to make time go by, go by on its own, by itself, with no effort from them, without their being required to get through it themselves, like exhausted hikers, and that’s why she talks, because the words she spouts manage inconspicuously to keep time moving along, whereas when her mouth stays closed, time comes to a standstill, emerges from the shadows huge and heavy, and it scares my poor aunt, who, in a panic, rushes to find someone she can tell how her daughter is having trouble with her child who’s got diarrhea… (79)

For sure, there are many more, which, ultimately, if I collected them all, would actually be the entire book reprinted.

But, I do have a favorite:

When he did that, I understood the sole meaning of friendship as it’s practiced today. Friendship is indispensable to man for the proper function of his memory. Remembering our past, carrying it with us always, may be the necessary requirement for maintaining, as they say, the wholeness of the self. To ensure that the self doesn’t shrink, to see that it holds on to its volume, memories have to be watered like potted flower, and the watering calls for regular contact with the witnesses of the past, that is to say, with friends. (46)

I wonder, has anything more accurate been written?

Next up by Kundera, Slowness (finally going to deliver on the time travel).

Some Of The Best Of Immortality

Milan Kundera published a work of non-fiction called The Curtain: An Essay in Seven Parts.

Let me start by making it clear that I love every word Milan Kundera has ever written. I think he is brilliant and his books (since the ones that I have read are translations) are almost enough for me to devote a large part of my day to learning Czech (almost).

I do have a friend who learned to read German so that she could fully appreciate and enjoy the writings of Franz Kafka. After reading The Castle, I decided that she must be partially insane, because it must be even worse in its original form. Or, at least, make the reader more nuts.

Anyway, back to Kundera, The Curtain is a non-fiction book about the art (or the place?) of the novel (I won’t regurgitate the synopsis here, but it sounds great) and I will read it in short order.

In the meantime, I will provide a couple of my favorites from Immortality (over the next weeks or maybe months, I’ll quote the others, but, for no particular reason, I am starting with Immortality).

On burning old letters and diaries:

Imagine yourself in her place: it isn’t easy to burn intimate documents that are dear to you; it would be like admitting to yourself that you won’t be here much longer, that tomorrow you may die; and so you put off the act of destruction from day to day, and then one day it’s too late. Man reckons with immortality, and forgets to reckon with death. (74)

On politics, terrorism and lines:

He never expressed his opinion about Palestinians, Israelis, the October Revolution, or Fidel Castro, or even about terrorists, because he knew there existed a border beyond which murder is no longer murder but heroism, and that he would never be able to recognize just where that border lay. (105)

On self-perception:

He suddenly realized, too, that people saw him differently from how he saw himself or from how he thought he was seen by others. (124)

On perceiving others:

She was therefore certain that she knew him by heart and that nobody had ever known him as well as she. The emotion of love gives all of us a misleading illusion of knowing the other. (132)

Another on self-perception:

As for her, she saw her inappropriate behavior and rash words as marks of her personality, as the charm of her self, and she was happy. (147)

On history and death:

I refuse to die with this day and its cares, I wish to transcend myself, to be a part of history, because history is eternal memory. (164)

On time and youth:

When someone is young, he is not capable of conceiving of time as a circle, but thinks of it as a road leading forward to ever-new horizons (275)

One that is just plain interesting:

Episodes are like land mines. The majority of them never explode, but the most unremarkable of them may someday turn into a story that will prove fateful to you. (305)

Next up, quotes from Identity.