Techogeekery

Since I started reading Pitchfork five or six years ago, the site has gone from sneering arbiter of high class indie punk aesthetic to subculturally dominant pusher of ever stranger and more baseless whims of taste, often in the form of head scratching prose. But every now and then, one of the forkers still manage to get something right: Chris Dahlen, for example, in his recent column. It argues that great, dominant writing about pop culture--games, music, and film--has struggled because "pop culture today is primarily a technology story. And we don't know how to write about technology."

He analogizes today's tech culture to the 60s drug culture that produced Hunter S. Thompson, and, hilariously, decries the decline of Wired:

Tech magazines are digging deeper ruts in fallow soil. Wired's devolving into Cosmo for geeks: It hypes and glosses over tech the way Cosmo turns the most spectacular human experience, the orgasm, into bulletpoints.

A longtime nerd friend and I were grumbling over the magazine's downslide (as nerd friends are prone to do), and I noted that where the magazine used to give us consistently fascinating stories about the way technology is changing lives and creating the future as we watch, it now seems content to deliver little more than a shallow selection of product reviews and hype-laded features about porn and global warming. Maybe the smart money these days says that porn and global warming are the future, or at least the future of technology. But when I want apocalyptic visions I'll read Revelation, or maybe Mother Jones.

Anyway. Part of me thinks that Dahlen is right, that we lack the vision to see beyond our LCDs, to hear beyond our cellphones and iPods, to think beyond a Google search. We haven't learned to articulately communicate about the experience of technology because technology and communication and thought have all merged into the same thing. I've surgically replaced my hand with a Blackberry. My life has a personal soundtrack, on shuffle. I blog, therefore I am.

But maybe it’s more complicated than that. Maybe Dahlen and others are looking at it from the wrong perspective. In the old, pre-tech revolution world, we relied on individual writers to provide those powerful voices of experience Dahlen is seeking. In tech-saturated modernity, though, maybe it’s no longer the writers who communicate, but the mediums themselves. No single voice can--or even needs--to capture the digression-filled infoglut of the blogosphere or the digital overload of the iPod and Xbox life, because the technology is the experience and the expression of it. The widespread availability of technology means that it’s no longer necessary to crudely (if sometimes excitingly, memorably) convert an experience into words to disseminate it to the masses; everyone can tap in directly. Plug in. Turn on. Power up. Don't just read the experience, live it.