Context, Criticism, and American Horror Story
My relationship with technology is mixed. In my comment on Lindsey’s post on her own technology usage, I mostly focused on the pitfalls of internet research. It is fairly easy to lose control of my time online, especially with a topic as interesting as mine!
With so many directions to turn, I found myself abusing rather than actually using the powers of technology for my research needs. However, my online endeavors began innocently enough. As per this post’s title, online resources such as eBooks, articles, and even Wikipedia helped my formulate a context for the literary and cinematic periods I am working in. I could start anywhere-Wikipedia, NYPL, Google-and make all these connections between a single keyword and scores of helpful books and articles that helped my to focus my research. In fact, if it weren’t for my late night NYPL search frenzies, I would not have found many of the prized anthologies that propelled my research in the right direction.
But there the pitfalls lay. Too many options! Too many places to look!
Although I value saved searches, Bookmarks, Zotero, Google Docs, etc. for keeping my sources organized and in place, I feel guilty to acknowledge how many weeks worth of precious writing time have been lay to waste for the sake of “research”. For those wasted days I could excuse my online habits saying it was all to make my paper more interesting and developed. But did I really need to listen to five audio versions and watch several student films of Poe’s story “Berenice”. Will my in-depth research on serial killers like Ed Gein and John Wayne Gacy really help me write about Norman Bates? No, not really, but in that sudden urge to Wiki it felt like it needed to be done.
Lastly, and I’m sure we’re all guilty of doing this at some point or another, I binge watched countless TV shows because I felt like I deserved it. If I can credit anything with sabotaging my productivity (in terms of this paper and other personal projects I put off for January), it would be Netflix! It is an amazing subscription service that my film professor recommended to the class so that we could build up awareness of the film genre we were studying (horror, obsviously). Yet, during the fall semester, I was tempted by the innumerable films and TV shows recommended to me by friends, family, and colleagues. Doctor Who, American Horror Story, and several nostalgia inducing nineties cartoons replaced drafting and revising a paper that needed all the love it could get after a slow start.
During this time I became subject to a newfound phenomena altogether unfamiliar to me: FOMO, or fear of missing out. Here’s a neat NYTimes article about it. If I didn’t watch every episode of Doctor Who or AHS I thought I’d be missing out. Well, now I’m nearly caught up and FOMO has been replaced with anxiety. It’s crunch time again and I don’t have another month off.
Now, I do most of my writing with a pen and paper, stacks of books, and a ratty thesaurus nearby. I’ve almost regressed in a sense, turning back to what feel like archaic writing methods (keeping a written Bibliography?! gasp!) in order to avoid the websites and search engines that spurred my research in the right direction, at first.
1 Comment
L. M. Freer
February 4, 2014FOMO is a real thing, and I’m glad you brought it up, because I was definitely thinking of it as I wrote my post but I couldn’t remember the acronym.
In both this post and your comment you basically trend towards technology avoidance as a means of being more productive. I don’t disagree with that philosophy but I think it works as well as it does because breaking the connection with the device (be that phone, laptop, tablet, whatever) cuts off that particular flow of anxiety.
In addition to finding wi-fi-free spaces, I’ve been experimenting with shutting off my home’s wi-fi router for a few hours at a time. Breaking the link is very much like trying to break a bad habit–maybe even an addiction. There are cravings, you slide back into old behaviors–it has all the patterns of addiction, in any case.
I wonder about a generational divide here. Specifically, because the internet became part of public consciousness when I was in my early teenage years. I didn’t have a cell phone until I was 22. I wonder if it’s actually harder for me to cut myself off than it might be for someone younger, who has never known life without the net. I can remember my first e-mail account, and maybe you can too. But I’m pretty sure I’m the only person in our class who can remember life without e-mail. That distinction makes me wonder: Who has a harder time cutting the cord?