I am not sure if Milan Kundera has ever heard the term “Web 2.0”, but in his book (though, he was likely writing it before the term was coined anyway) The Curtain: An Essay in Seven Parts (that I first wrote about here) there is a quote that strikes me as related.
Kundera is referring to a “long forgotten” 1930s Czech novel called The Internal-Combustion Monster by Jaromir John. Kundera says that John’s story is about the maddening sound of cars when they first appeared on the scene (of course, a fraction of today’s cars that we don’t even really hear anymore).
Using this story as a starting point, Kundera points out:
We can deduce a general rule: the existential import of a social phenomenon is most sharply perceptible not as it expands but when it is just beginning, incomparably fainter than it will soon become. (121)
He goes on to give an example from Nietzsche and then writes:
Bureaucracy in Kafka’s time was an innocent babe compared to today, and yet it was Kafka who revealed its monstrous nature, which since then has become routine and no longer commands anyone’s interest. (122)
Kundera is writing about “social phenomenon” in the context of art in general with the novel as the centerpiece specifically. I am not aware of a novel that uses Web 2.0 as a backdrop, but Kundera’s observation made me think about “Web 2.0 social networking” as a phenomena that is just beginning. How is it different from what came before?
When the Web browser was invented a lot changed, but one of the characteristics was that the Web made many economic activities more efficient and time more productive. Granted, “surfing” used up a lot of time and instant messaging was a time black hole for sure (though, a pale comparison to the time black hole that is Twitter), but, for the most part, the “broadcast Web” and many of the first applications saved time.
Last Fall I attended the Web 2.0 Summit. At the Summit they had a panel of late teens and early twenty-somethings talking about their Internet-related habits. A number of the participants claimed that they spent about 4 hours per day on mySpace. I mentioned this comment to several people that I know and the reaction was “what do you do for 4+ hours?” Someone responded with, though in jest, what is probably pretty telling “oh, they are making purple ponies fly across their page”.
So, there is the rub: Web 2.0 takes a lot of time (more than television?). Endless bookmarking and blogging and futzing with mySpace or Facebook, takes a lot of time. But, it isn’t really productive time. It is truly “social” time.
From a literary perspective, I wonder what the novel would say about Web 2.0 here at the beginning of this social phenomenon. For that matter, what would it say about the Web in general?
A last thought for this post, Kundera writes:
The novelist’s ambition is not to do something better than his predecessors but to see what they did not see, say what they did not say. (15)
What has not been revealed?
