Noise Cancelling

I have been cutting the noise out of my life. The mental noise of interactive distraction, or “interstraction.”

I rarely carry a cell phone any more, and I may be ready to give up on the device altogether. At first it made me fidgety. I frequently reached for the multi-distractional smart phone out of habit, only to find it gone. That habitual tic faded quickly. For the last few months I’ve come back to using payphones to fill the occasional void which appears in my mind, a void filled only by some form of communication.

I am at a place in life where, for better or worse, no one needs to reach me with any urgency, and vice-versa. Even when I’ve had greater responsibilities I found it less and less necessary to maintain constant access to a telephone. It has become a laborious and, to me, almost irrelevant means of communication.

Leaving the cell phone was not an abrupt decision. I did not suddenly decide to step off the grid and turn luddite. This is one stage of a gradual shift away from the needless intrusions of banal interactive features which provide no value. I’ve given up on large swaths of the Internet, including the infinite backwash of comment boards and restaurant reviews — those pesky, arbitrary, mostly useless torrents of text that provide virtually nothing of merit.

A few months ago I had a moment of clarity regarding user generated reviews and content. Looking at New York City in satellite photos taken from several thousand feet upstairs I zoomed in on midtown Manhattan. As I zoomed in closer a bunch of reviews started popping up over restaurants and buildings. “THE GREEN PEPPERS WEREN’T CRISPY ENOUGH!” announced one indignant reviewer of an Italian eatery. “THE BARTENDER HAD AN ATTITUDE PROBLEM” barked someone who evidently had issues with the staff at a midtown pub.

These little comment balloons popped up all over town to which I loudly whispered “Shut up! Just shut up!” I never thought I’d tell a map to shut up.

With apologies to all Yelpsters and reviewers, I’m sorry but I’m just not listening.

I gave up on web- and mobile-based social networking services (I expect to return). I always knew those things were at best harmless and at worst a waste of time, but in recent months my senses weighed heavily toward the brain-draining wastefulness of it all. Social networking is a vacuum cleaner of creative energy.

There are some who abstain from social networking, decrying it as inane and beneath their standards. I don’t fall into that camp. I find the social networking fad perfectly amusing and, yes, inane, but I see no need to be cynical about it.

It is a little disheartening, however, to find how many people consider me “gone” or unreachable when I cannot be found on the social network of the moment.

Social networking is a strain of self-publishing. Since the earliest days of mainstream access to the Internet I felt that self-publishing was both the promise and the peril of the World Wide Web. Under various delusions of self-importance I’ve shared writing and photographs and piano music and other creative things on the World Wide Web since 1993. Only in the last year have I asked myself: “Why would anybody do this? Who would just give it all away? Who would take the result of their creative energies and just throw it up for grabs?”

I started thinking like this about a year ago. Coincidentally the Judith Griggs incident occurred about a month later, crystallizing my thoughts on giving one’s self away.

Judith Griggs stole someone else’s content and famously claimed that everything on the Internet is public domain. Everything. She is wrong, of course, but only in the legal and ethical sense. The reality of the Internet is that full businesses and livelihoods depend on cherry-picking content from others, vaguely citing their “source”, sometimes under the rubric of “crowdsourcing” — a buzzword for begging, borrowing, and stealing.

I’ve had so much of my stuff stolen over the years, brazenly ingested into the works of publishers ranging from 12-year-olds to major video game companies and even one unfortunate visual artist whose sculpture appeared almost literally in my back yard. I call that poor sod “unfortunate” because he is one of the few people I ever went after for stealing my content, and yes he and his funding sources were mightily embarrassed.

Legally and ethically Judith Griggs was wrong, but in the reality of things I think she pretty much called a spade a spade. Now when I find my content stolen (as I did recently when I landed on the web site of a seemingly reputable financial news web site) I usually react as I do when I find an error-filled Wikipedia entry: I do nothing. My time is worth more than it takes to enter and possibly get lost in the content bureaucracies of others. It can be stopped on a case-by-case basis, but I think my serenity is better served by simply not posting content to the Internet in the first place.

With most of the “interstraction” out of my way I feel almost like I did in the early 1990s. I feel quiet inside. In the early 1990s the main thing eating my mind was payphones. Public phones were, in those days, an endless source of amusement and interesting things. The rising distraction of online services and dial-up BBSes came next for me, followed by IRC.

Today, in this year of 2011, I find myself turning once again to payphones, both as a means of communication and as a creative outlet. Have you used a payphone lately? There is a rugged and unsanitary feeling of picking one of these things up, punching the numbers, and standing on a street, trapped in a tiny way, trapped and exposed as the city moves around you. People cast glances at me when they see me using a payphone. I do the same thing when I see people using these phones. I suspect that people who glance at me using a payphone think I am poor, homeless, insane, or somehow lost. They may be at least partly right.

Some of the phones smell like heavy cologne, others smell like cigars. A lot of payphones make me cough, they smell so strong.

An unsubtle whiff of disenfranchisement swirls around payphones. You could probably never be reached at a payphone in an emergency because no incoming calls are allowed. Many toll-free numbers cannot be called from public phones. Those who rely on payphones do so under the lurking threat of their removal. This line of communication is rough and unsettled.

I used to pick up payphones and dial 0 to ask the operator for the correct time. Today dialing 0 opens a murky world of exorbitantly-priced operator assisted calls.

I know a rotary dial payphone that still works. The analog labor of dialing a 10-digit phone number on a rotary dial phone is calming in a nostalgic way, as is hearing the simple sound of a dial tone.

I don’t know how long I might stay off of cell phones and other needless distractions. For now, though, the quiet is a welcome and soulful relief.