Citizens Against TL;DR, Unite!
The Search for a New Abbreviation
When looking at tourists in cities whose principle economy is based in their past histories, there is generally a single pace at which those tourists are moving: fast. In a city such as Rome or Paris, where there are literally hundreds of monuments created over thousands of years, tourists are shoved along from place to place, either on their own or as part of organized tours. Modern industrial tourism has given us a world in which value is equated with the lowest price and the highest number of sights, to the point of practically existing as a mathematical formula: “In ‘x’ days, you’ll see ‘y’ sights for only ‘$z’… x*y*z = What a deal!”
But this formula makes a critical error. It assumes that the act of looking is the same act as seeing, when that isn’t really the case. Art historian Jennifer L. Roberts makes that point in a talk given as part of a conference investigating “the essentials of good teaching and learning.” Roberts describes how she came to realize that one of the most important parts of teaching today is the deliberate slowing of the pace of students’ experience. For example, before engaging on a research project of a single painting, she requires students to spend 3 hours sitting and looking at the painting, and simply taking notes on the points and observations that come from this extremely slow and deliberate pace. In doing so her students begin to see, not simply to look at, the painting. Tiny details emerge, shapes and colors shift with time, and the student emerges with an experience, as well as the painting itself, burned into memory.
In our daily lives, the quickened pace of our internet-based experiences stands at the complete opposite end of the tempo spectrum from the type of observation promoted by Roberts. We pass incessantly from one stimulation to another, without spending any more time than absolutely necessary looking at — not seeing, but just looking at — what is on the page in front of us. Anything on the internet that attempts to take a slower pace, anything that runs for more than 3 sentences, risks the implied or explicit commentary of “TL;DR” (Too Long; Didn’t Read).
Tourists in front of the Pantheon in Rome or Notre Dame in Paris do much the same: look, photo, onward! Contemplation and idleness are not tolerated in these settings. Time is money, quite literally, as that is what the formula of tourism dictates. If you spend more time observing a particular monument, you are necessarily losing time somewhere else, and thus the “value” of your trip decreases.
But if we can first recognize that value is not determined by the formula I pointed at above, just as looking at a painting does not equal having seen it, then we can examine other avenues by which tourism can benefit the individual. My particular solution is to use books as an aid in seeing a city. Others may have different ideas and different instruments, and there is more than enough room for that in the world of tourism. But the critical element is not only the methods or instruments that are used, it is also simply the time that each person invests to the endeavor. We want people to see time as a tool in and of itself, used to read back over a certain passage,to take a leisurely walk around a city, to have a long meal filled with relaxed discussion as an opportunity rather than as a strictly programmed moment on a packed itinerary. If we cannot overcome the rapid pace that we have come to consider necessary, then no amount of books, movies, lectures or museums can give us a new perspective on the world we’re supposedly observing.
Without being a contrarian, blind to today’s reality, we can still ask ourselves at times to eschew the “TL;DR” mentality. Sometimes it’s ok to wait before deciding that we’ve seen the world around us, aided perhaps by a new abbreviation — “NY;NC” (Not Yet; Need to Contemplate).
