We don’t always recognize or appreciate intelligence when it appears in unusual or nontraditional forms. There is a corollary proposition, namely that, for cognitive reasons, we also tend to miss unfamiliar forms of beauty. Many of the world’s majesties are hidden to us because they are hard to see from the outside looking in. But if we understand this idea of creating our own economy, we will be better suited to appreciating and also to creating beauty in today’s rapidly changing culture.
I would like to consider three stylized facts about today’s world and put them together into a single coherent vision. The facts are the following: Culture is much cheaper and more accessible than before; we engage in more and more cultural sampling; and many intelligent people complain about how ugly contemporary culture has become. Those may sound like separate phenomena but they can be tied together with some basic, intuitive economics. When that unified picture is complete, we will see that our modern world is just a bit more glorious than it is usually given credit for.
For this discussion, I’m using the word “culture” to refer to some commonly accepted cultural products. The short list for this concept of culture includes books, movies, music, and the visual arts, among other candidates. But the argument is quite general and it can apply to broader conceptions of culture as well. The key development is that we now have unprecedented access to small bits for our learning, entertainment, and inspiration. If we want to understand the big picture of how the world today is changing, we need to start small.
To start with the economics, the difficulty of access influences what kind of enjoyments we pursue. For instance, when it comes to romance not so many people are willing to fly across the country for a peck on the cheek. When the cost of a trip is high, usually you want to make sure it is worth your while. Otherwise why not just stay home? You might drive across town for a kiss if your town isn’t too big, or if the traffic isn’t too bad.
In the early nineteenth century, it was common for a classical music concert to last five or six hours. If people were walking long distances or arriving by slow coach, the trip had to be worth their while. A concert wasn’t just about the music, it was an entire social occasion, involving drinking, the playing of cards, and a big night out. Today the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., puts on popular and free “Millennium Stage” concerts for no more than an hour. The hope, which so far has been borne out, is that enough people are nearby, or can get there quickly by cab, car, or Metro, to make the concerts a success. You go hear the music and then you head off to somewhere else.
Some people leave before the hour-long show is over so they can make a quick escape. They’re busy and they have somewhere else to go.
If I’m going on a long trip to Brazil, which doesn’t have many good English-language bookstores, the cost of getting another book to read can be pretty high. So maybe I’ll bring Moby-Dick to reread or these days I’ll bring my Kindle, stocked full of classics. The read will take a long time and I am sure it will be gripping, so that book is a good choice for a trip where access to further books is difficult. If I’m at home, access to books is quite easy. I’ll grab a huge pile of (free) books from the public library and browse them. If the first nine picks off the shelf are no good it is no big deal; I can easily put them down and find some more, not to mention raid my spare books pile sitting in the dining room. There are five good public libraries within a twenty-minute drive of my house.
The general point is this: When access is easy, we tend to favor the short, the sweet, and the bitty. When access is difficult, we tend to look for large-scale productions, extravaganzas, and masterpieces. Through this mechanism, costs of access influence our interior lives. There are usually both “small bits” and “large bits” of culture within our grasp. High costs of access shut out the small bits—they’re not worthwhile—and therefore shunt us toward the large bits. Low costs of access give us a diverse mix of small and large bits, but in relative terms, it is pretty easy to enjoy the small bits.
The current trend—as it has been running for decades—is that a lot of our culture is coming in shorter and smaller bits. The classic 1960s rock album has given way to the iTunes single. The most popular YouTube videos are usually just a few minutes long and most of the time the viewer doesn’t stay for longer than the first ten seconds. The two-hour weekday lunch is losing ground even in Spain and Italy. Some radio ads are three seconds or shorter. In the last twenty-five years, virtually all print media have drastically reduced the length of their articles. The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books still run long pieces, but the most popular magazines—such as Maxim or the bestselling women’s magazines—focus on articles of a thousand words or less. There are web links that direct the reader to five-word movie and song reviews, six-word memoirs (“Not Quite What I Was Planning”), seven-word wine reviews, fifty-word minisagas, and Napkin Fiction, which as the name indicates is written on a napkin. In Japan many of the bestselling novels are written to be read on cell phones, and as you might expect they are served up in small bits.
To be sure, not everything is shorter and more to the point. The same wealth that encourages brevity also enables very long performances and spectacles. In the German town of Halberstadt a specially built organ is playing the world’s longest concert ever, designed to clock in at 639 years. This is also the age of complete boxed sets, DVD collector’s editions, the longer director’s cut of a movie, and the eight-year or sometimes even ten-year Ph.D. There is an increasing diversity of length, but, when it comes to what is culturally central, shortness is the basic trend. How many of us have an interest in hearing more than a brief excerpt from the world’s longest concert? Morton Feldman’s String Quartet Number Two fills five discs with splendid music but hardly anyone buys it or listens to it. I do, but, sadly, not always straight through.
So what is going on with these “small cultural bits”? What difference do they make to our inner lives?
The trend toward shorter bits of culture makes it easier to try new things. If you are taking items in bit by bit the tendency is to indulge your desire to sample. It’s hard to sample if you’re committed to reading a ten-volume history but easy to sample if most of your cultural experiences are short or small. Small cultural bits have never been easier to enjoy, record, store, and order, and as I have stated we have become infovores who love to try out and experience new bits of information as much as we possibly can.
The very pleasure of anticipating and trying—for its own sake—further encourages the new culture of small bits. When it comes to culture, a lot of the pleasure comes from the opening and unwrapping of the gift, so to speak. So you want to be trying new things all the time so you have something to look forward to and so you have the thrill of ongoing discovery.
One of the great appeals of blog posts is the expectation of receiving a new reward (and finishing off that reward) every single day. You can “start a new book”—albeit a very short one—pretty much on demand. You can finish it off not only in the same day but usually in the very same sitting. How’s that for a feeling of accomplishment? The blogosphere, and many other forms of web consumption, keeps you interested by giving you pleasure from the process itself. The supply of these bits is replenished on a periodic basis, much like receiving the serial installments of a nineteenth-century novel but at a more rapid pace. It’s an extreme version of one aspect of postmodernism—synthetic cultural construction by the consumer—accelerated by technology and the ease of cultural access.
Usually a blog will fail if the blogger doesn’t post every day or at least every weekday. People don’t like the idea of visiting the blog and coming away empty-handed, so to speak. It only seems like a visit to the blog is costless; in reality we get a brief pang of pain from “coming up empty.” And once a blog disappoints I classify the site as a “NO.” The site is still only a click away, but for most practical purposes the cost of revisiting the site is now virtually infinite. In my emotional universe that site no longer exists for me and it holds a status lower than the proverbial needle in the haystack.
I can get some free gifts, pretty much any time I want, just by visiting the website of the Guardian newspaper (published in the U.K.). I don’t go there every day (I don’t have enough time), so usually most of the content is fresh to me. And it is well written, even if I sometimes disagree with the editorial perspective. While most of these presents are pretty small in terms of practical value, the reward center of my brain is activated and the mere prospect of getting something of value for free—at zero direct cost—shapes my behavior.
It can be said that the fundamental currency of the web is not money but rather squibs of pleasure and disappointment. That sounds pretty simple, but it’s fundamental for understanding how the internet is reshaping our interior lives and in turn the content of our culture.
The squibs are one reason why so many people become addicted to email or other web-based activities. If you’re an email addict, the arrival of each email brings a small jolt to the pleasure center of your brain and promises some prospect of a reward.
One list (on www.alexa.com) of the most popular websites in the United States, circa 2008, offers the following sites for the top thirteen:
Of course these sites have important content but every one of the sites presents that content in a very particular way. The sites offer visitors a steady series of the equivalent of new Christmas presents. These sites have credibly established in advance that, if you visit the site, there will be some new gifts and presents waiting for you. Through a kind of operant conditioning, we associate those sites with pleasure and so we are usually excited about visiting them, and the good sites deliver and satisfy that expectation. You can look at the top websites in just about any country—including Kazakhstan and even Cuba—and they will follow these same basic principles of a steady supply of new bits of information and pleasure each day.
We also tend to prefer websites, and cultural media, that give us lots of little squibs of pleasure up front. It’s common to note that on the internet everything is “just a click away,” but this isn’t quite true. A lot of what you want is two or three clicks away, or maybe more if the website designer wasn’t well trained. “What does a click or two matter?” you might be thinking, but the number of clicks very often makes for the difference between happiness and frustration.
Sometimes it is we, as consumers, who turn larger items into smaller bits, and this provides an analogy to what is happening on the web every moment. Last year I bought a collection of five Eric Ambler mystery and espionage novels, in one volume, and ripped it into five separate, easy-to-transport pieces. I literally tore the book apart with my hands and fortunately the binding enabled each part to remain intact and readable. I’ve now read and discarded all of these separate “books.” I did this disassembling for two reasons. First, I can travel and bring one of the novels without having to carry the whole big volume. The subtler and perhaps more embarrassing reason is that I get a kick from starting a book and I also get kick from finishing a book. I want to start and finish more books. We like arbitrary markers of progress and psychological reinforcements, so successful media for delivering culture must offer both of these.
One reader of my blog expressed a common attitude: “I am guilty of never having read Anna Karenina, because it’s just so long. I’d much rather read two 300-page books than one 600-page book.” Leaving a bookmark in the middle and claiming a partial achievement doesn’t generate much of a charge. So the quest for the pleasures of starting and finishing again cause us to seek out the smaller cultural bits. For similar reasons, many other people seem to prefer reading book reviews to reading the books. The book review takes only a few minutes and by the time you are done you feel, rightly or wrongly, that you have learned something or that you are able to talk about the book. If newspapers are cutting back on their book review sections, in part it is because readers are seeking out the even shorter reviews on the web.
It’s often debated who has offered the best or most seminal account of how the internet and web really work and hold our attention. Some people suggest it is Esther Dyson, while others mention Sherry Turkle or Neil Stephenson. I don’t mean to take anything away from these very interesting thinkers, but I have two alternative nominations, more or less from left field, neither of whom wrote about the web at all.
It is two economists, namely Armen A. Alchian and William R. Allen, both of whom taught at UCLA in the 1960s and ’70s. Alchian is an underground hero to many people in the economics profession. He published a relatively small number of articles in his career but each one was significant, especially when he wrote about the importance of information for understanding modern economies. He favored simple arguments that had an immediate intuitive appeal. Most of all he was renowned as a teacher and for not suffering fools gladly in the classroom. The use of a sloppy or ill-defined concept was certain to bring the student a stinging and intimidating rebuke. Allen, the junior partner of the two, ran the Midnight Economist syndicated radio show for many years.
In their 1972 textbook University Economics they presented a theorem that later became known, appropriately, as the Alchian and Allen Theorem. In technical language the theorem claims that if a fixed charge is added to the prices of two substitutable goods, such as high-quality apples and low-quality apples, the charge will increase the relative consumption of the higher-quality good. In less technical terms, that simply means that most people won’t fly across the country for a mere peck on the cheek. If access is difficult, you bother only if a special someone or special apple makes it worth your while. When access is easy and nearly free of charge, many of the low-quality apples or small bits seem acceptable and thus they do not get filtered out.
The Alchian and Allen Theorem was far ahead of its time but neither Alchian nor Allen understood its full importance. Both their writings, and the small literature surrounding the claim, struggle to find significant real-world examples. Alchian and Allen themselves wrote of “shipping the good apples out.” Their claim—which I do not accept—is that people who live far from apple orchards will eat tastier apples (though fewer apples) than people who live close to the orchard. In their view if you live far from the orchard you won’t bother to pay the apple shipping cost unless you want a really fine apple. Maybe that’s true but I think it’s more important that the people who live near the orchards get their apples fresher and thus tastier, and so Alchian and Allen’s main example does not really illustrate the workings of the theorem.
For the Alchian and Allen Theorem to apply in a simple and intuitive fashion, we need examples where the costs of access to a product fall rapidly and visibly. That’s exactly what the internet has done and that is why the web and other innovations are bringing us what I call a culture of small bits. The internet has turned the Alchian and Allen Theorem from a curiosity in search of applications into a driver of our culture.
OK, so we have a culture of ever smaller and ever more numerous bits; what does this mean? The typical answer is that we are experiencing information overload and a knowledge glut. Haven’t you seen all those people hooked up to BlackBerries while typing IMs, reading cell phone text messages, and eyeing the television (I won’t say “watching”) all at once? There is a lot of this going on.
Nonetheless, while it is easy to observe apparent overload in our busy lives, the underlying reality is subtler. The common word is “multitasking” but I would sooner point to the coherence in your mind than regard it as a jumbled or chaotic blend. The coherence lies in the fact that you are getting a steady stream of information to feed your long-run attention. No matter how disparate the topics may appear to an outside viewer, most parts of the stream relate to your passions, your interests, your affiliations, and how it all hangs together. At its core it’s all about you and that is indeed a favorite topic for many people. Now, more than ever, you can assemble and manipulate bits of information from the outside world and relate them back to your personal concerns.
My daily self-assembly of synthetic experiences usually involves music, reading, and periodic glances at the web, with an email check every five minutes or so. Given how much I enjoy music, I don’t like to add TV to the blend, unless it is a show I can glance at, and care about, with the sound turned off. That pretty much boils down to the NBA playoffs. Note that often I don’t want to pick apart those distinct modes of interacting with the world and focus on them one at a time for extended hours. I like the blend I am assembling for myself and I like how much I learn from it.
I think of my blend as one very good way of absorbing information from the outside world, but it would be a mistake to elevate the informational purposes of the blend (however important) over the emotional import and the sense of connection. Most of all I think of my blend as an assembled set of stories and an assembled set of information packages. The blend is about the writers I read, the public figures I read about, broader intellectual narratives about the world, and indirectly stories about my own self-discovery. To me the blend offers the ultimate in interest and suspense. Call me an addict if you wish, but if I am torn away from these stories for even a day I am keen to get back to “the next episode,” so to speak.
A lot of critics charge that multitasking makes us less efficient; I’ve read that periodically checking your email lowers your cognitive performance to the level of the inebriated. If these claims were true in general, multitasking would disappear pretty rapidly as a way of getting things done. When it comes to enjoying and assembling small cultural bits, multitasking is remarkably efficient. It is very often a dominant method of (interior) production and of course that is why it is so popular. The emotional power of our personal blends is potent, and they make work, and learning, a lot more fun. Multitasking is, in part, a strategy to keep ourselves interested.
If you look at measured IQ scores, they are rising over time, with each generation, in a phenomenon known as the Flynn Effect. There is no particular reason to believe that multitasking is driving this phenomenon but this does belie the common impression that people are getting more stupid or less attentive over time. Contrary to a lot of the complaints you might hear, a harried, multitasking society seems perfectly compatible with lots of innovation, lots of high achievers, and lots of high IQ scores. There are also plenty of lab experiments that show that distracting people lowers the capacity of their working memory and thus lowers their capacity for intelligent decision-making. It’s much harder to show that multitasking, when it results from the choices and control of the individual, is doing us cognitive harm. Individuals can learn to improve their productivity at multitasking and task-switching, and that is exactly what is happening today.
The charge of lower attention spans has been leveled across the ages at most new cultural media—at the novel (in the eighteenth century), at the comic book, at rock and roll, and at television. Note that there has never been a “golden age” of long and earnest attention spans. Recently intellectual activity has moved onto the web—thus jumping media—at a rate that is unprecedented in human history. This is because, quite simply, the web is such a good medium for storing, communicating, and manipulating information and the end result is that we are paying more attention to information. It is easy enough to find examples where we leap from one bit of information to another, but the more important result is that information holds a stronger place in public consciousness. Information is also far more readily available to the scientific community.
Sometimes we can access and absorb information more quickly and as a result we may look less patient. But still we’re putting more thought into broad ideas about society, politics, and philosophy. If you use Google to look something up in two seconds, rather than spending five minutes searching through an encyclopedia, that doesn’t mean you are less patient. In fact you’ll have more time for some of your longer-term endeavors, whether it be writing a treatise, cultivating your garden, or creating your own economy.
Our cultural focus on small bits doesn’t mean we are neglecting the larger picture. Rather, small bits are building blocks for seeing and understanding some larger trends and narratives. The stereotypical web activity is not to visit a gardening blog one day, visit a Manolo shoes blog the next day, and never return to either. Most online activity, or at least the kinds that persist, is investment in sustained, long-running narratives. That is where the suspense comes from and that is why the internet so holds our attention.
Nicholas Carr, in a 2008 article in The Atlantic, asked, “Is Google making us stupid?” and basically he answered that yes, Google is making us stupid. He argued that internet culture shortens our attention spans and renders us less likely to think deep thoughts. But he missed how people can construct wisdom—and long-term dramatic interest in their own self-education—from accumulating, collecting, and ordering small bits of information. What we’re growing impatient with is bits that are fed to us and that we do not really want.
Contrary to Carr, we still have a long attention span when it comes to the broader picture, and if anything Google lengthens our attention span by allowing us to follow the same story over many years’ time. For instance if I wish to know what is new with my favorite athlete, or for that matter with a favorite economist, or if I wish to know how the debates on global warming are going, Google gets me there quickly. Formerly I needed ongoing personal involvement to follow a story for years but now I can follow long-running stories quite easily and at a greater distance. Sometimes it does appear I am impatient in discarding a book that twenty years ago I might have finished. But once I put down the book, usually I am turning my attention to a long-running story that I follow on the web. If our searching is sometimes frantic or pulled in many directions, that is precisely because we care about some long-running stories so much. It could be said, a bit paradoxically, that we are impatient to return to our chosen programs of patience.
Google lengthens our attention spans in yet another way, namely by allowing greater specialization of knowledge. We don’t have to spend as much time looking up various facts and we can focus on particular areas of interest, if only because general knowledge is so readily available. It’s never been easier to wrap yourself up in a long-term intellectual project, yet without losing touch with the world around you.
As for information overload, it is you who chooses how much “stuff” you want to experience and how many small bits you want to put together. If you wish, you can keep information at bay as much as you need to and use Google or text a friend when you need to know something. That’s not usually how it works—many of us are cramming ourselves with web experiences and we are also buffeted by a steady stream of messages. But the resulting time pressure reflects the fun of what we are doing. Our new ways of ordering our internal mental realities are very, very appealing. You have enhanced the meaning and the importance of the small cultural bits at your disposal and thus you want to grab more of them and organize more of them, and you are willing to work hard at that task, even if it means you sometimes feel harried.
The quantity of information coming our way has exploded, but so has the quality of our filters. It’s not just Google and blogs. Digg lists popular news stories, based on reader votes, and Technorati helps you trace the influence of blog posts; most importantly these services will be replaced by superior competitors in the years to come. As Clay Shirky points out, when it comes to the web there is no information overload, there is only filter failure.
The self-assembly of small cultural bits is sometimes addictive in the sense that the more of it you do, the more of it you want to do. But that kind of addiction doesn’t have to be bad. Anything good in your life is probably going to have an addictive quality to it, as many people find with classical music or an appreciation of the Western classics, or for that matter a happy marriage. Shouldn’t some of the best things in life get better the more you do them?
A lot of people “unplug” and take a few days off from their email, their cell phones, their BlackBerries, and their other electronic connections to the outside world. Food writer Mark Bittman wrote a New York Times article about his time unplugged, free of the web and all other electronic connections to the world. The funny thing is, he presented a day of being unplugged—that’s right, one day—as if it were a major achievement. But of course he is right: Even a day can be hard to do. I find myself sneaking back to check messages and read my favorite websites, or I decide I have to perform a few simple tasks. In part that’s because I feel, rightly or wrongly, that other people, whether at work or among friends and family, need me. It’s also in part because I find the self-assembly of small cultural bits to be so intoxicating and exciting. It appeals to a sense of personal control and there are far more available interesting bits than before. Whether it’s the latest analysis on espn.com or the web analysis of what the last episode of Lost really meant, I want to know what is coming next.
That we are doing more mental ordering of culture doesn’t mean we have a more ordered existence overall. The dirty dishes are still in the sink. We still have lots of chaos in our lives, lots of unperformed tasks, and lots of uncompleted missions. And, oddly enough, all the ordering is one force driving the broader chaos. Ordering has become so much fun that we specialize in ordering where it is easiest and most potent. For most of us that’s on the web and the multitasking is part of the resulting order, not part of the chaos. The chaos is everywhere else, most of all in your sink. Maybe the rest of our lives is seeing less care and attention. Don’t expect that chaos to go away any time soon.
There is again a connection between how we are using the web and autistic cognitive strengths and weaknesses. It was never the case that autistics put everything in order either. Instead autistics tend to specialize in mental ordering in favorite areas, often to the neglect of other duties and tasks. The observed autistic tendency is to be either very orderly or very chaotic, depending on the sphere of life under consideration, and that is the direction that the rest of us are moving in as well. You can credit (or blame) computer technology. We’ve had one sector of the economy grow at a supernormal pace, namely the web, and that unbalanced growth is feeding back into our personal and emotional lives. We take advantage of productivity improvements where we find them and we let many other areas of life lie relatively fallow. For autistic lives the uneven distribution of order stems from cognitive sources; for non-autistic lives the growing imbalance in the distribution of order stems from technology, namely the immense recent growth in the productivity of the web.
A good way to understand the self-assembly of cultural bits and how it creates an ordered, synthetic mental world is by way of contrast. Consider Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni. The music and libretto, together, express a wide gamut of human emotions, from terror to comedy to love to the sublime, and more in between. The opera represents what is most powerful about the Western canon, namely its ability to combine so much in a single work of art. The libretto, even taken on its own, is worthy of high praise but its integration with Mozart’s music brought Enlightenment culture to new heights.
Today, we don’t usually receive comedy, tragedy, and the sublime all in ready-to-consume, prepackaged form. As I’ve stated, we’re more interested in this idea of assembling the bits ourselves. For all its virtues, it takes well over three hours to hear Don Giovanni straight through, perhaps four hours with intermission. Plus the libretto is in Italian. And if you want to see it live, a good ticket can cost hundreds of dollars plus travel costs.
So we instead pick up the cultural moods and inputs we want from disparate sources and bring them together through self-assembly. We take a joke from YouTube, a terrifying scene from a Japanese slasher movie, a melody from a three-minute iTunes purchase, and the sublime from our memories of last year’s visit to the Grand Canyon, perhaps augmented through a photograph. The result is a rich and varied stream of inner experience.
If you read what many critics say about the arts of the Renaissance or the seventeenth century, it is that human creativity then had a fierceness, a resonance, a brilliance, and a strength that it has not since attained. In the seventeenth century we have Velázquez and Rubens and Rembrandt and Brueghel and Caravaggio painting, Monteverdi composing, and Shakespeare and Milton and Cervantes writing. That’s an impressive lineup. It’s all so strong and so real. Most of those creations are still available to us in one form or another, at least with a bit of travel or a tolerance for digital reproductions. But in reality this older culture is losing out, in relative terms, to the competition with the internet and the iPod, and thus it is losing out to assembled small bits.
Let’s say that you could carry around a perfect copy of a three-dimensional realization of a Caravaggio painting (or if your tastes are more modern make it a Picasso). You would carry a small box in your pocket, and whenever you wanted, you could press a button and the box would open up into life-sized glory and show you the picture. You would bring it to all the parties you attended. The peak of the culture of the seventeenth century (or say the 1920s if you prefer Picasso) would be at your disposal.
Alternatively, let’s say you could carry around in your pocket an iPhone. That gives you thousands of songs, a cell phone, access to personal photographs, YouTube, email, and web access, among many other services, not to mention all the applications that have not yet been written. You will have a strong connection to the contemporary culture of small bits. And the iPhone is itself a thing of beauty.
Most people would prefer to carry around the iPhone, and I think they are right.
This preference has led to a corresponding shift in the meaning of cultural literacy. What cultural literacy means today is not whether you can “read” all the symbols in a Rubens painting but whether you can operate an iPhone and other web-related technologies. The iPhone, if used properly, can get you to a website on Rubens as well. The question is not whether you know the classics but whether you are capable of assembling your own blend of small cultural bits. When viewed in this light, today’s young people are very culturally literate indeed and in fact they are very often the cultural leaders and creators.
Outside the window, down the street, stands a Wal-Mart, a symbol of modern America. The store seems ugly and many of the goods inside it seem ugly. I am not a Wal-Mart hater, but still it doesn’t compare to Don Giovanni or to the lovely buildings in Prague or Vienna, and so modernity has an aesthetic burden to bear. Yet internally, our lives have never been richer. Our growing preference for small cultural bits enhances our understanding of the beauty of the broader human story, even though not every part of the outside world looks so pretty. Our new internal beauties are harder for outsiders to spot than are the fantastic cathedrals of old Europe.
So to understand contemporary culture better, let’s return to our analogy with romance. Remember the claim that opened this chapter, namely that most people will not fly across the country for a peck on the cheek. Yet many long-distance relationships survive, so clearly those relationships offer some very real values. If we understand the strengths and weaknesses of these relationships, we can get a little insight into where culture today is headed. Culture doesn’t analogize to relationships in every way but we can observe some basic common tendencies about the distribution of intense and ordinary pleasures, respectively.
When you travel far to meet up with your loved one, you want to make every trip a grand and glorious one. Usually you don’t fly from one coast to another to just “hang out” or experience “downtime.” You go out to eat, you go to the theater, you make passionate love many times, and you have intense conversations rather than just sticking with the small talk. You also fight a fair amount and you feel that your normal life has been, however temporarily, robbed from you.
The problem of course is that we “expect too much” from each visit. Remember the old question “Are we having fun yet?” The quest for continual high-quality excitement is not conducive to casual downtime together, and such routines are the glue that binds relationships together in the longer run. Or in other words the high travel costs are a potent enemy of the all-important “low expectations.” You’ll have a lot of thrills but it is also hard to make it work. And of course a lot of the time you’re not together at all. If you really love the other person you’re not consistently happy even though your peak experiences are amazing.
(If you have a long-distance relationship and are looking for advice: Do something else significant on your trip to that distant rendezvous and so lower expectations for the visit. Meet another friend too, or set up some business, or give a paper at a scintillating academic conference. Yes, you will have less time with your potential beloved, but the remaining time will get you further toward where you want to be. How much time does one need to fall in love anyway?)
Now, a long-distance relationship is, in emotional terms, a bit like culture in the time of Caravaggio or Mozart. Then costs of travel and access were high, at least compared to modern times. When you did arrive it was often very exciting and indeed monumental. Sadly, the rest of the time you didn’t have that much culture at all. You couldn’t run to the internet and watch Haydn on YouTube. Neither radios nor record players were around. Books were expensive and hard to get. The peaks were amazing but the disappointments were great as well because you just didn’t have very good or very convenient access to a lot of quality culture. Compared to today, you couldn’t be as happy overall but your peak experiences could be extremely memorable, just as in the long-distance relationship.
OK, now let’s consider how living together and marriage differ from a long-distance relationship, at least with regard to the peaks vs. the steady daily experience. When you are married and living in the same house, transportation and access costs are very low. Your partner is usually right there and it’s very easy to see him or her. Most days are not grand events but you have lots of regular and indeed predictable interactions.
The daily progression of marriage, of course, has an ordinariness and sometimes even an ugliness that is not always present in the long-distance relationship. Not every meeting is accompanied by passionate sex or an evening out at the theater. You might not even get a home-cooked meal but rather frozen food. There are also the dirty dishes in the sink, hedges to be trimmed, chores to do, and perhaps even diapers to be changed. In other words, there are lots of little things and lots of routine. You can think of a marriage, in its own way, as being a “culture of small bits.”
In my view, if you are happily married, or even somewhat happily married, your internal life will be very rich. You will take all those small bits, and in your mind and the mind of your beloved they’ll be woven together in the form of a rich and deeply satisfying narrative, dirty diapers and all. It won’t always look glorious on the outside but from the point of view of interiority—what you really experience—the marriage is better than the long-distance relationship. Most people, of course, would agree. The evidence from social science also seems to confirm that most people are happier when they are married.
Now to return to culture, access has indeed become easier. The internet and other technologies mean that we literally are living with our favorite creators, or at least we are living with their creations. It is no longer a distance relationship between us and our music, for instance. It is no longer hard to get books—just download them into your Kindle or Sony Reader or whatever device replaces them. Click on Amazon or any of the many online bookstores. Culture is there all the time and you can get more of it, pretty much whenever you want. You are not committed to any particular moment of culture but you are committed to your established flow and how you have tailored the daily stream of your experience.
In short, our contemporary culture has become more like marriage in the sense that we are trading in some peak experiences for a better daily state of mind. Culture has in some ways become uglier because that is how the self-assembly of small bits looks to the outside observer. But when it comes to the interior dimension, contemporary culture has become happier and more satisfying. And, ultimately, it has become nobler as well and more appreciative of the big-picture virtues of human life.
Many critics of contemporary life want our culture to remain like a long-distance relationship, with thrilling peaks, when most of us are growing into something more mature. We are treating culture like a self-assembly of small bits, and we are creating and committing ourselves to a fascinating daily brocade, much as we can make a marriage into a rich and satisfying life. We are better off for this change and it is part of a broader trend of how the production of value—including beauty, suspense, and education—is becoming increasingly interior to our minds.