Blog Lag

I haven’t been writing much on this blog for quite some time. I’m sorry about that. Here are some of the reasons.

Printculture began as a kind of conversation among five or six people. Some knew each other, some didn’t. Eric, I think, was the one friend common to us all. Our postings, in the form of little essays and reflections, were offered the way people contribute to a conversation: sharing a piece of knowledge, riffing on something someone had said, making a joke. At the back of it all was a feeling that conversation was intrinsically rewarding and that this conversation in particular was rewarding enough to hang it up for the public to see.

I still live for conversation but I’m increasingly disappointed in it. The people I know often seem deaf to one another. Their curiosity about the world has yielded to confirmation bias. They deliver identity monologues, infotainment, talking points, questions with an already known answer. Even the people I like and agree with are melting into their mission statements. All this is perfectly adapted to social media, where we are perpetually curating our personal brands. If those are the terms, I lack the desire to participate.

Reading the news, as I’ve been doing forty times a day for the last few years (the nervous pulling of phone from pocket having replaced the newspaper at the breakfast table), doesn’t make it seem that rational persuasion has much of a future, or that such persuasion as I have to offer has much of an audience.

I like solving intellectual puzzles. How to better understand history and nature? How to confront the unexpected? How to make it possible for more people to live long, free, and perhaps happy lives? I don’t like comic books, beauty pageants, name-calling, blame, or trolling. The interests that make those things vital to the cultural life of this moment in my country leave me cold. Thus there is less and less to say to people in general. (I am always up for a chat about Tangut script or the authenticity of poems ascribed to Su Dongpo.)

But I continue to renew hosting agreements and SSL certificates in the hope that something will bring me back.


(The above was written after an eight-month break from social media. Try it yourself: when you log on again the quality of communication, in contrast with the most banal words exchanged on the street or at the cash register, will jar you.)

2 thoughts on “Blog Lag

  1. ” Or have we simply left another mess for Haun to clean up?” The above arguments sound like reasons to shut Prntculture down in all its buggy whippedness; contributors have gone to other forms of social media, some of which flip the dopamine switch with instant response. We post here, and it is for the ages. If it weren’t for the server bills and the continued obsolescence of technology, the ages would sneak up on us and compare the ancient Bush administration and the ancient Trump administration, marvels of kakistocracy as outlined in our posts. Here, we post without much thought of readership, and it is a useful alternative to instant response. But it also means writing into a vacuum, and that is hard to take.

    Go, litel boke, go, litel myn tragedye,
    Ther god thi makere ȝet, er that he dye,
    So sende myght to make in some comedye;
    But litel book, no makyng thow nenvie,
    But subgit be to alle Poyesye,
    And kis the steppes where as thow seest space…

  2. Writing into a vacuum doesn’t sound so bad after all. The fact that Printculture does something different, and at a different pace, is a reason for keeping it going. But one does get discouraged at times.

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