The Small Stuff was this month's book club book. Join 3000 other readers to talk about books each month.
November's book will be How to Not Know by Simone Stolzoff.
The main ask of Bogost's book is to get readers to slow down and enjoy the physical experiences already existing in their lives1. Don't just go rake the leaves, enjoy the fresh fall air, the feeling of the rake on the grass. Enjoy the feeling of the carpet on your bare feet. Don't just rush through the chore to get it done so you can move onto the next thing on your list of productive tasks.
One big problem with this idea of slowing down is that we feel we need permission to enjoy things around us2. Society has ingrained a crazy desire in us that every moment should be productive. We can't simply sit and enjoy the outside, we better be reading a book that can help us be better at...something. Unfortunately, Bogost doesn't do a great job addressing how to get away from that societal pressure towards productivity. He simply says we need to slow down, and leaves it to us to figure that out.
Bogost also laments the lack of ownership in present society. We no longer own the movies or music, we pay a fee to access it for a set amount of time3. This can bring excellent serendipity, like last night when Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman popped up on Netflix and my wife and I enjoyed a show from our childhood. She talked about the family game nights she had that were narrarated by Dr. Quinn.
The dark side to this is the deletion of digital purchased you didn't really own. You thought you owned it. You paid a price that used to mean you owned it. What you really bought was a limited time license for the movie. You had no way of knowing what the limited time was, and nobody reads thousands of words of legal jargon under a purchase.
Coming counter culture to that we see a resurgence in the purchasing of CD's because when you own a physical copy you truly do own that physical copy. Yes it can degrade or get lost, but no corporation can come into your house and take the purchase away from you. The Small Stuff would have us enjoy the physical experience of getting up and placing a new disc in the player out of our currated music collection, and on this point I agree with Bogost. I've enjoyed currating a music and movie collection. I buy discs every month and add to my collection.
Later in the book Bogost looses me though. He spends a bunch of time talking about finding gratification in the YouTube videos of people unclogging drains or ASMR. If those videos are your thing then yes enjoy them, I don't understand how Bogost goes from a strong push for readers to get out in the physical world and literally touch stuff, to saying we could just watch a video from the comfort of our own couch. Using whatever device you have on hand to enjoy anything simple lets your spaces bleed into one another diminishing the value of the experience of a video because you're pooping at the same time.
Should you read The Small Stuff by Ian Bogost?
While I found a bunch of good points in the book, this already short book could have provided the same information at half the length. Bogost repeats the same ideas many times across chapters without taking them a step further. I don't think he could have quite got it all into a single long blog post, but it certainly could have been shorter.
Footnotes
1 The Small Stuff Pg 4
2 The Small Stuff 22
3 The Small Stuff Pg 63
