This title is taken from William Gaddis’ book The Recognitions which reminds me of a quote by Max Read in a recent issue of Book Forum where he reviewed Richard Seymour’s The Twittering Machine: “the social industry wants us to keep writing—and writing, and writing, and writing, rendering legible, analyzable, and profitable nearly all our basic social interaction. And while massive Facebook server farms whirring away in Scandinavia might be able to make some vague sense of all that data, the rest of us can barely hear over the noise. Each new byte of information adds confusion and entropy, and takes us further away from meaning and consequence.” Where do annotations and online criticism fall alongside the host of other online interactions? My impression is that literary criticism is one of the most defensible sorts of writing one can do on the internet, but the canvas matters. A website like Genius differentiates itself from personal blogs, open letters, or comment systems, because it allows the writer to pinpoint exactly the section of a text they are referring to. Without this guiding finger, online writing ends up being solipsistic and circular. How could Vannevar Bush not have foreseen that his imaginary devices would leave us unprepared to contend with them appropriately? The point Seymour’s text makes is that our devices don’t have control over us grounded in their built-in social or biological “incentives”. But rather, we have a death drive towards using them in order to escape the weight of time. Edmund Tyone at the end of Eugene O’Neil’s Long Day’s journey Into Night knows this feeling well when he quotes Baudelaire: ”Be always drunken. Nothing else matters: that is the only question. If you would not feel the horrible burden of Time weighing on your shoulders and crushing you to the earth, be drunken continually.”

The reasons for using Genius to annotate a story from Cane are many. It is intuitive, playful (essential to DH studies), and part of the contemporary conversation about a whole range of texts. I have no doubt that in the future a high school student will search for Jean Toomer and the Genius entries will pop up allowing them to see scholarly work performed using a platform they are familiar with. Job well done team! Now if only the remainder of online writing followed suit. In my mind every “comments” system should be done away with in favor of an annotation system. It would potentially solve two problems plaguing the online world: It would give meaning to our writing, which in its current state is merely an opportunity to demonstrate personality and signal one’s affiliation. The other point is that it would allow commentators to think like students of Literature or Philosophy and come to terms with specific parts of a text. Honing in on phrases or sentences that strike them as useful or problematic. In this way people would judge others by the content of their words and ideas, not feeling like they were at war with other personalities. To turn online writing into the study of language and force of thought would be a milestone in returning meaning back into our interactions with each other. The canvas is corrupt, and the free-for-all that has been the comments system is in need of a revolution.