Ted Dawson: On Cyber Monday I turned off my router: Slowness in the Digital Humanities
On Cyber Monday I turned off my router: Slowness in the Digital Humanities
I’ve never shopped on “Black Friday.” Maybe it’s that I don’t like waiting in lines, but I like to think it’s because the celebration of consumer capitalism isn’t my thing. I prefer spending the Friday after Thanksgiving relaxing, taking walks, enjoying the company of family and friends. Not buying stuff. In a society of 24/7 consumption, there’s something nice about having a day of relief, and if this day just happens to fall on the high holy of consumer culture, all the better.
In the days of “old media,” it wasn’t too hard to withdraw from the consumerist orgie. Don’t turn on the TV or the radio. Stay home. Or go out into nature. But in recent years, “Black Friday” has started chasing after us. One can try to defend “Cyber Monday” as something other than an extension and intensification of everything awful about the Friday before it. We’ve probably all heard arguments about online retail as somehow greener, arguments proffered by such important environmental advocates as Amazon.com. It’s quite difficult to determine whether online or offline shopping has a bigger carbon footprint, and it really doesn’t matter. Cyber Monday brings the consumerist frenzy of Black Friday, along with the resulting carbon footprint, to another day, to another medium, and to the rest of the world.
Go to amazon.de and you’ll see what I mean. Germany now has “Cyber Monday Woche,” even though they don’t have Thanksgiving or Black Friday. In Germany’s “third way” social market economy, most stores are prohibited from opening more than 6 days a week. Walking in a German city on a Sunday, you actually feel the change of pace. The pedestrian zones are filled with families out for walks, gaggles of teenagers wandering around doing lots of nothing in the way that only teenagers can, students in cafes arguing over philosophy and falling in love with each other… am I idealizing this? Absolutely. Still, something happens every weekend in Germany that never does in the United States. In the internet age, however, no third way is available. Allowing any consumer capitalism automatically results in total consumer capitalism, and “Cyber Monday Woche” is an iconic example of how the internet has enabled the infiltration of 24/7 consumer culture into a country which has tried to keep its capitalist economy within humane boundaries.
Of course, consumer capitalism isn’t the only thing to be totalized by global computer networks.We live in a time in which a single medium has come to dominate our work, our leisure, and our shopping, making it difficult to isolate these activities from each other. Responding to internet-enabled constant work (total work?), German companies and government ministries have put policies in place to prevent workers from emailing during their time off. But there doesn’t seem to be a simple way to restrict internet-consumerism, either for a society like Germany or for an individual (like me).
Last Cyber Monday, I tried a simple solution: I turned off my router (and the wi-fi on my laptop and phone). Since Cyber Monday is a work day (total consumerism!), this proved problematic, and I broke my resolution several times to check my emails, respond to colleagues, and schedule appointments with students. Nonetheless, it was a great day. I felt unfettered, able to focus on reading texts for my dissertation and writing this blog post, without the constant distraction of this or that email or the nagging desire to at least look at Amazon and think about what (work-related) books I could put on my Christmas list.
Perhaps this all sounds a little reactionary. Turning off routers and celebrating a very bourgeois division of the day into labor and leisure time? Really? And isn’t making Cyber Monday into “Turn off your Router Monday” just the sort of resistance that reinforces the system it purports to oppose (a la satire and the culture industry)? Yes and yes. But this somewhat curmudgeonly attack on Cyber Monday should be understood as a microcosm of a much bigger issue: how do we find space and time for reflection in a culture of 24/7 capitalism, where we are always at work both as laborers and consumers? As humanists, we are not only about reading texts, but also about taking the time to reflect on them. We require the critical slowness that Lutz Koepnick identified in his 2014 On Slowness as the strength of the humanities. Koepnick writes:
Slowness […] allows us to recognize the dynamic simultaneity of multiple speeds of change and movement without relegating some to the closed space of the past and celebrating others as singular pathways into the future. […] Humanist writing today, in fact, needs to learn to turn its own (self-)perceived slowness into an engine of critical analysis and insight. Instead of mourning its possible demise, it needs to actively involve itself in and reflect on today’s battle over attention, not least of all by arguing against monolithic visions of history, development, change, and movement. (283)
What my screed against Cyber Monday intends to do, then, is not so much oppose Cyber Monday — to which I’m actually relatively indifferent — as open a discussion on how we can retain our humanistic slowness in a time when traditional avenues for reflection seem to have been cut off. This question is especially relevant to digital humanists. One of our foremost tasks is to provide counternarratives on the digital age, and to do this, we must learn to write and think slowly about — and on — the internet. The Vanderbilt DH Center’s blog, which involves a sort of peer review process, is one example of trying to bring slow writing to the internet. But there must be more profound ways of doing this. So please write to share thoughts and suggestions!
Ted Dawson is a Ph.D. candidate in German Studies. As a Mellon Graduate Fellow and HASTAC scholar at the DH Center during the 2016-17 academic year, he developed projects at the intersection of Digital and Environmental Humanities (ecoDH).