Smooth Space

You don't want friction or slow technology, you want *stuff*

In his review of a new Arthur Russell biography, Ian Penman appreciates the paper trail that made the book possible:

“One of the nice things about Travels over Feeling is that its artefacts all belong to a recent but now distant world of tactile communication: pens, paper, postcards, foxed music scores, hastily scribbled notes pinned to the doors of flats. Life before the mobile phone and its treacherous wand power.”

The passage raises questions about the biographies to be written of more recent lives, which will of course depend heavily upon the digital archives created by the waving of that wand—emails, text messages, social media posts, anything we would consider data. In most cases, these records will be more complete than the paper-stuffed file cabinets of old, but also less so: Contemporary communication leaves its indelible footprint, surviving in a database somewhere, never trashed or eaten by moths or otherwise physically degraded, but it still eludes us in other ways: So much is deleted, locked behind passwords, or simply fades into obscurity, needles in the vast haystack of data generated over a lifetime that no one would ever think existed, much less be able to find.

More importantly—for a biographer or anyone trying to tell a good story—the digital version of a hastily scribbled note pinned to the apartment door is less tangible and thus harder to romanticize. Text messages still don’t evoke adventure, even if they are the invisible engine behind most of what happens. They inherently violate the “show don’t tell” rule; they are all telling and no showing. “Treacherous wand power” is too generous a metaphor, sounding more exciting than the mundane reality. We don’t even wave the wand.

Analog media may not convey information as efficiently, but it has other benefits that may be easier to appreciate in hindsight. It is more decorative. It furnishes the physical environment in a way that digital technology—always evolving toward smaller, smoother, and lighter—does not. Or to put it another way: When digital technology is visible it’s usually because it failed to be invisible. The exception to this is the ever-present screen, which remains visible by definition, obviously; screens now account for nearly all of a computer’s tangible presence in the world. And screens are the exception that prove the rule because, as Byung-Chul Han has noted, we look through them rather than at them. Screens don’t decorate the physical environment so much as they invite us to stare through a window into a different kind of non-place.