If Nobody Tweets About a Tree Falling in a Forest, Does It Make a Sound?

I don't even have to think about it any more. Even before my muddled morning mind has time to form a meaningful thought, my fingers fly across the keyboard and move my mouse to check in on the growing list of ways to measure the efficacy of my efforts. It's essential, it seems, that I begin my day with electronic evidence that I"m still here and that my world is still working:

• How are the hit counts on the gallery website, any unusual patterns?
• Anyone Tweeting about my artists or exhibitions?
• Where's my book on the Amazon.com list?
• Who's checking out the Moving Image website and from where?
  
• How many new people want to be a Facebook friend?
• Any new google alerts come in?

I can easily recall a time when the thought of buying a personal computer for my home seemed the height of nerdy self-indulgence, and yet now I seem to go into www.withdrawal if I don't get of my daily dose of digital validation.

From a pre-Internet/pre-SmartPhone perspective, I'm know that seems insane, but the truth of the matter is that it's easy to do it all, virtually subconsciously, and move on. Thinking about it is distracting (heh!...what you doing here?), but simply doing it is painless.

I thought about this when reading two things this morning. First was something MoMA curator Barbara London said about Cory Archangel, who has a highly anticipated exhibition opening up this Thursday at the Whitney.

From the NYTimes:

“Cory is one of the first in a young generation of digital hackers to really enter the art world,” said Barbara London, associate curator of media and performance art at the Museum of Modern Art, who has included Mr. Arcangel’s video works in several shows. “Now the boundaries between art forms are dissolving, and working digitally is just normal practice. But Cory was among the first. I think that’s really important.” [emphasis mine]

The second was Art in America's Brian Boucher reporting on Creative Time's commissioning of three Twitter art projects, including one by Winkleman Gallery fave, Man Bartlett (who has some great drawings in our current group exhibition, [be always plugging...always selling ;-)]):

For his Creative Time project, #24hPort, Bartlett will spend 24 hours at New York's Port Authority bus station, asking passengers and passersby, "Where are you going?" and "Where have you been?" and tweeting their responses, contrasting the drudgery of humble, real-time travel with the instantaneousness of networked messaging. [emphasis mine]

Again, the idea came up...digital is more than just normal, it's somehow, in some parallel universe sort of way, better.

Now I know there are folks who are concerned about the impact of our constant contact and the lack of courtesy we're showing each other because of it. A Palm Beach-based etiquette expert has even gone so far as to declare July as "National Cellphone Courtesy Month" (but as CNET has pointed out "The "National" part is debatable, since no national body like the U.S. Congress has backed the event.")

But count me among those not so worried about the way we spend so much time online (whether via our smart phones or personal computers). Count me among those much more worried about the kind of technology coming where you won't know someone is online (i.e., and not paying attention to you) because it will look like they're paying attention to you, when they're really reading their Tumblr on the inside of their wireless compu-glasses.