Theory of Boredom
Posted on January 19, 2010 | posted by:
A colleague recently alluded to the Manifesto for Slow Communication, a cry for help coming from–who would have guessed it–the pages of the Wall Street Journal. Written by John Freeman in August 2009, the Manifesto explores the onslaught of information and the effect it has on our ability to think critically and make connections. As Freeman puts it,
We need context in order to live, and if the environment of electronic communication has stopped providing it, we shouldn’t search online for a solution but turn back to the real world and slow down. To do this, we need to uncouple our idea of progress from speed, separate the idea of speed from efficiency, pause and step back enough to realize that efficiency may be good for business and governments but does not always lead to mindfulness and sustainable, rewarding relationships.
It’s interesting to see Freeman make the connection between speed and sustainability, particularly as it relates to our ability to reflect upon our own context. The paradox that confronts us all at the moment is the dazzling ability to put our hands on so much information and so many connections combined with the need to make slow, thoughtful, and hard-to-see connections between these bits of information. We can make so many superficial and tangential linkages, but do we still have the patience to make the more obscure ones? When I was in graduate school I had a lot of time on my hands…I think that was about 100 years ago. It was then that I developed a theory of boredom: we need to aggressively protect our sense of boredom if we are going to maintain our ability to make deeper connections. True insight–context changing insight–requires the space to think and the time to think. Without it, we’re relegated to making weak links between associated facts, but that doesn’t really add up to seeing the world differently.
But times have changed since my graduate school days, and the vast expanses of information that are available to us now weren’t around then, or at least weren’t as immediately accessible. If we are to tackle the profound challenges of our time, we need to be limber enough to think in two different modes: the quick and furious amassing of what Hugh Dubberly calls “big data” combined with a slow and deliberate means for teasing new significance from it. I feel this on a daily basis, as I try to carve out time to think from the onrush of email, links, blogs, tweets, rss feeds, and so on. Freeman, I believe, misses the importance of both temporal modes of knowledge production. We have to seize the opportunity of the lateral while at the same time preserving our ability to reframe our context through a more deliberate, and deep reflection.
All this reminds me of an extraordinarily slow and inspiring experience I had recently. Cynthia Lawson, a colleague at Parsons, showed a startling new video piece of hers entitled Trianon (Cabelo) 2009 that forces us to move at its speed. Do yourself a favor: sit back, watch it full screen, don’t quit early. And if you can, visit Jenelle Porter’s exhibition entitled Dance with Camera at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia and take the time to watch the film of Merce Cunningham performing John Cage’s 4’33”. Profoundly boring.
And please, no snide comments about how this post fits right in with my theory of boredom…