Infotention and "The Pale King"

Can liking boredom help you use the internet better?

"The Pale King" is an unfinished novel by David Foster Wallace (DFW). In her review of the book (p. 15 New City, June 2nd, 2011) Monica Westin, a former college contemporary of Wallace at Amherst college, notes:

"That boredom can be a path to nirvana is the core of the book-the character who levitates is the one happy figure in the novel, an auditor named Drinion who achieves transcendant ecstasy through giving himself completely to utter concentration on the mundane. As Wallace writes to himself in the appendix of 'The Pale King,' which contains outlines, unfinished fragments and notes by the author: 'Drinion is happy . Ability to pay attention. It turns out that bliss-a second-by-second joy + gratitude at the gift of being alive, conscious-liese on the other side of crushing, crushing boredom. Pay close attention to the most tedious thing you can find (tax returns, televised golf), and, in waves, a boredom like you've never known will wash over you and just about kill you. Ride these out, and it's like stepping back from black and white into color. Like water after days in the desert. Constant bliss in every atom.'"

I don't know if I agree with Wetsin's sentiment of Drinion being the novel's only happy character, (Sylvanshine and Reynolds, if troubled, seemed happy in a modern life resigned kind of way) but the point here is about boredom. Boredom and its relation to modern life is absolutely one of the keys of DFW's work. Although as a friend pointed out, isn't enduring boredom the same way to nirvana via the monastery?

This crystallizes itself in section 22 of the work amidst 'Irrelevant' Chris Fogle's recounting of the moment when accounting became his life's work, as he was sitting in on the incorrect final review session for his final the next day. The gentleman leading the Tax Accounting review delivered an exhortation, or horation,:

"I wish to inform you that the accounting profession to which you aspire is, in fact, heroic. ... the heroism of your childhood entertainments was not true valor. It was theater. The grand gesture, the moment of choice, the mortal danger, the external foe, the climactic battle whose outcome resolves all-all designed to appear heroic, to excite and gratify an audience. An audience. ... Gentlemen, welcome to the world of reality-there is no audience. ... Cowboy, paladin, hero? Gentlemen, read your history. Yesterday's hero pushed back at bounds and frontiers-he penetrated, tamed, hewed, shaped, made, brought things into being. Yesterday's society's heroes generated facts. For that is what society is-an agglomation of facts. ... In today's world, boundaries are fixed, and most significant facts have been generated. Gentlemen, the heroic frontier now lies in the ordering and deployment of those facts. Classification, organization, presentation. To put it another way, the pie has been made-the contest is now in the slicing. ... You deal in facts, gentlemen, for which there has been a market since man first crept from the primeval slurry. It is you-tell them that. Who ride, man the walls, define the pie, serve." - Pp. 228 - 233 of "The Pale King" ISBN 978-0-316-07423-0

Contrary to opinions that the novel itself is boring "one culture blog, on hearing about its subject, wondered if it might turn out to be 'the most boing book ever.'" (p. 52 NY Times Magazine, April 10, 2011) I was extremely excited to read the passage above as it spilled out. In general I thought the work was interesting, despite being about boredom.

On a related tangent, infotention is a neologism coined in 2009 by Howard Rheingold, as he defines it on City Brights: "Infotention is a word I came up with to describe the psycho-social-techno skill/tools we all need to find our way online today, a mind-machine combination of brain-powered attention skills with computer-powered information filters. The inside and outside of infotention work best together:   Honing the mental ability to deploy the form of attention appropriate for each moment is an essential internal skill for people who want to find, direct, and manage streams of relevant information by using online media knowledgeably.    Knowing how to put together intelligence dashboards, news radars, and information filters from online tools like persistent search and RSS is the external technical component of information literacy. " Viz.

So what does all of this have to do with "King"? allow me one more quote, ripped from Sylvanshine's (a fact psychic) stream of consciousness "The entire ball game, in terms of both the exam and life, was what you gave attention to vs. what you willed yourself to not." (p. 12 of "The Pale King") That sounds pretty similar to the quote from Howard above, doesn't it?

In my class at Rheingold U on Mindamplifiers, we studied Infotention and tried to build our own radars. They were a collection of RSS Feeds, Twitter streams and other 21st century media designed to cull the useful info from the information overload known as the internet. If, for example, you were interested in graphic design, you should find the most efficient way to get the relevant, current info about graphic design, plus how to keep out useless stuff. A big portion of all this is reading stuff online that will help you reach your goals, vs surfing aimlessly or lurking around facebook. Not to say socializing isn't important, but you want to find the right people to be social with online who can help your infotention. Follow important graphic designers on Twitter and engage them in a dialogue so both of you can learn from eachother better.

How does boredom, the exhortation and Sylvanshine's quote fit in? Perhaps because there a properly tuned infotention radar is perhaps more dull than I have outlined. Perhaps instead of spending hours online keeping track of dozens of blogs and Tweets, you are actually better off reading, re-reading and critiquing 20th century print books about graphic design by yourself on your desk. Certainly there will be times to be social and publicize your reading online, but maybe that's 30 minutes on a proper Facebook status update, after 10 to 20 hours critical reading, analytical thinking and drudgery.

Obviously this is a hypothetical, and I am open to your ideas concerning how infotention and DFW's conception of boredom as both a pathway to nirvana, plus a truly heroic 21st century undertaking, are connected, what do you think? E-mail htricker@yahoo.com, follow @danoff and comment on the lab's Facebook page.


 * Footnote: Check out the formulas on page 1 and 2 of http://kraut.hciresearch.org/sites/kraut.hciresearch.org/files/articles/Resnick10-Startup-current.pdf