socmed

We’ll Take a Cup of Kindness Yet

By in bring me the head of nicholas carr, foolosophy, montaigne, socmed, technology

Can any river possibly flow
beyond the love of friends?
– Li Po
I enjoy reading meditations on the nature of online relationships and the ways in which our very ideas of relationships are changing as a result of the Internet, but it is a bit of a predictable trope for writers to contrast online interaction at its shallowest with traditional interaction at its deepest, and Roger Scruton provides yet another example:

Yet already something new is entering the world of human relations with these innocent-seeming sites. There is a novel ease with which people can make contact with each other through the screen. No more need to get up from your desk and make the journey to your friend’s house. No more need for weekly meetings, or the circle of friends in the downtown restaurant or bar. All those effortful ways of making contact can be dispensed with: a touch of the keyboard and you are there, where you wanted to be, on the site that defines your friends. But can this be real friendship, when it is pursued and developed in such facile and costless ways?
Real friendship shows itself in action and affection. The real friend is the one who comes to the rescue in your hour of need; who is there with comfort in adversity and who shares with you his own success. This is hard to do on the screen — the screen, after all, is primarily a locus of information, and is only a place of action insofar as communication is a form of action. Only words, and not hands or the things they carry, can reach from it to comfort the sufferer, to ward off an enemy’s blows, or to provide any of the tangible assets of friendship in a time of need. It is arguable that the more people satisfy their need for companionship through relationships carried out on the screen, the less will they develop friendships of that other kind, the kind that offers help and comfort in the real trials of human life.
Maybe it’s different for British philosophers, but honestly, among ordinary people, aren’t many of those we call our friends simply companions with whom we pass the time? I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with enjoying the company of others for the hell of it, but I don’t imagine I’m alone in thinking that if I were forced to settle for making friends among those in my close proximity, I’d be very lonely indeed. I guess I’m an intellectual, if we define the term as someone who enjoys ideas for their own sake, beyond any practical import; someone who enjoys “thinking about thinking”, as one definition of philosophy has it. (I hasten to add, being intellectual is not at all the same thing as being smart or profound; plenty of intellectuals have subscribed to some of the stupidest ideas ever invented.) And frankly, most people seem to be content to know just enough to get by. To almost everyone I know in real life, evenings and weekends are for leisure and entertainment, not reading and writing. As Dennis Baron said in reference to Nicholas Carr’s own portentous claims of the Internet’s corrosive effects upon our lives, “That position incorrectly assumes that when we’re not online we throw ourselves into high-culture mode, reading Tolstoi spelled with an i and writing sestinas and villanelles instead of shopping lists.” Without the Internet, I’d be stranded in an intellectual wasteland. Hell, communicating with like-minded people online is probably all that preserves what social skills I do have.
Scruton can call personal shyness a “defect” leading to narcissism all he wants, but for people like me, being taciturn and standoffish is neither good nor bad; it’s just the way it is. The things that give me the most enjoyment are largely solitary pursuits. I simply don’t need much companionship. I’m one of those for whom the anonymity and distance of the Internet paradoxically makes me feel freer to express myself openly and honestly, which in turn has led to some of the closest friendships I’ve ever had. His assertion that having a screen between you and your friend, one that you can avoid at will, amounts to “denying the other the power and the freedom to challenge you in your deeper nature”, begs the question of what our “deeper nature” is to begin with. Me, I tend to mostly identify “who I am” with “what I think”, and I’m fortunate enough to have friends who challenge me in that regard all the time. My deeper nature has nothing to do with small talk and sitting around in my underwear scratching myself, and once again, it’s really tiresome that so many people confuse “inchoate” with “authentic”.
Like most things, I suppose, you get out of your online relationships what you put into them. Maybe it is more effort to have to use linear thought and words to fill in the gaps left by an absence of body language and other nonverbal cues, but I don’t see why that can’t be mostly surmounted by honesty and a good faith effort. Li Po and Tu Fu carried on a twenty-year friendship in poetry despite being separated over most of that time by war, drought, and exile. The most significant amount of time they spent together was a three-month span in 744. Was that not a “real” friendship, then? We’re still talking about it almost 1,300 years later, aren’t we? Or what about Montaigne, who only had four years in his late twenties in which to know Etienne de La Boétie, but was haunted by the loss for the rest of his life?
And let’s also consider that for some people, friendship is an opportunity to “share not suffering but joy”, as Nietzsche put it. Cultivating the best of ourselves to share while sweeping away the rest is also a way to provide support in each other’s hour of need. Not everyone needs a shoulder to literally cry on.

All That Twitters Isn’t Gold

By in socmed, writing

Phil Davidson:

It wasn’t that long ago, you’ll recall, that Twitter was derided as an exercise in vanity for famous people to feed their comically-obsessed fans a glimpse of the celebrity lifestyle, no matter how mundane the details. (“No way. Kelly Ripa likes pear slices in her salad? So do I!”)

But in the last two years or so, the comedy industry’s opinion of Twitter did a complete 180. There’s been a wave of comedians, writers, performers and producers joining the early adopters and utilizing Twitter as a platform to tell 140-character jokes and reach new fans.

It’s easy to see why. Twitter is in a way a virtual writer’s room where, at your leisure, you can have an immediate audience with comedy legends, professionals and the occasional undiscovered talent as they deliver jokes, witty observations and other miscellany. And it’s free. You won’t have much luck asking Lebron James to come over and entertain you with some free basketball, but on any given day you can observe the next comedy superstar test out a joke on Twitter before making it part of his act.

Yeah, that’s great and all, and I’m sure it’s been a boon to haiku poets as well. (Was it really all that difficult to find bon mots, witticisms, zingers and one-liners before? Anyway.) But for the non-early adopters among us, those who dropped Twitter off in a basket on the front steps of the orphanage in the first place, whether or not it has any useful function at all is a peripheral issue.

When people complain about the cold, impersonal nature of online communication, I feel that what they’re mainly reacting to is the fact that most people are, quite simply, shitty writers. It doesn’t mean they’re stupid; it just means that they find it difficult to turn their thoughts into nuanced sentences that do a good job of capturing enough of the full flavor of their personality. It’s all they can do to convey basic information without burying it under a mound of misspellings, typos and bad grammar. I know enough people who are smart and capable of intelligent conversation, but their emails (or handwritten letters) are brief and utilitarian to a fault.

Now, you may find this hard to believe, but I was not always the finely honed, chiseled, sculpted wordsmith you see before you, no indeed! When I first started writing online oh-so-many years ago, I was undisciplined and unformed. My pacing had no stamina and was easily winded, my metaphors were flabby and sagging, my ideas themselves were paunchy, and my overall coherence and paragraph structure was pockmarked with quirks and irregularities like dimples of cellulite. My ability to spew hot air was more like a hairdryer on medium setting than a blast furnace.

I did not spring onto the Internet fully formed, like Athena from Zeus’s forehead, is what I’m saying. I reeked (and I trust you’ll politely overlook my repeated use of the past tense here), but I learned by constantly being exposed to better writers, especially once I discovered blogs. I read so many people who said what I wanted to say, only more clearly and concisely, and I shaped my own writing accordingly to reflect their styles. And as I’ve said before, the more I did it, the more fun it became.

So for me, the biggest problem with the inexorable trend toward social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook postings and the ubiquity of texting as opposed to email is that it solidifies online writing around the absolute lowest common denominator. Instead of challenging themselves to exploit the potential of a largely text-based medium like the Internet, people are reshaping the medium to suit their limitations. Instead of trying to become better at expressing themselves through writing, they’re settling for banding together around mediocrity, where the goal is to express yourself with as little effort as possible. Fine, Twitter is great for delivering stand-alone lines and simplistic expressions of agreement or disagreement. But trying to follow an actual debate or back-and-forth conversation one or two sparse sentences at a time is utterly maddening, and as I keep complaining about, that unfortunately seems to be the only type of conversation a lot of people want to have anymore.

…right on cue.

Write Away

By in socmed, technology, writing

Larry Magid:

But my big question is whether Zuckerberg is right when he supposes that young people are likely to permanently adapt to alternatives to traditional email. While it’s true that kids are developing some new habits that will last a lifetime, it has always been the case that some teen habits change as they get older, especially as they enter the work force.
Fact is, many businesses run on email today and though things will change over time, I don’t see instant messaging, text messaging, Facebook messaging or any other technology threatening email anytime soon.
Sigh. Does this count as a Pyrrhic victory? I mean, I shook my head in bemusement when I read the press accompanying Zuckerberg’s announcement and saw him claiming that high-school kids make him feel old when they tell him that they don’t use email anymore because it’s too slow. Well, fuck those little ADHD bastards anyway. I hope it turns out that their goddamned phones are slowly giving them all thumb cancer too! But if the best people can offer up in email’s defense is that it’s more efficient for business, well, talk about damning with faint praise. Doesn’t anyone use it for actual letters anymore? For, dare I say, the art of writing? As a labor of love?
Which brings me to this excellent essay by Bill Morris:
This doesn’t mean Estleman and I are Luddites or cheesy romantics. It’s both simpler and more complicated than that. It means we don’t believe that faster is necessarily better, and we’re distrustful of a bill of goods that our gadget-drunk culture has swallowed whole, the illusion that technology has some magical power to improve our lives. Estleman and I are essentially conservative animals who distrust the notion, so prevalent today, that all things can be improved with the right technology, the right information, the right management, the right laws. While mankind strives to improve itself to death, some of us want no part of it.
…One could argue that writing is writing – it’s all communication – whether it’s scratches on a cave wall, glyphs in stone, ink on papyrus, pencil on paper, typed characters on bond stationery, or digits in the ether. I disagree. In writing and reading, no less than in art, the medium of creation and consumption is critical to a work’s effect. That’s not to say that writing longhand is better than writing on a typewriter, or that writing on a typewriter is better than writing on a laptop; rather, it’s to say that each of these acts is different from the others and will yield different types of prose.
…Similarly, tapping out an e-mail and hitting the Send key (or texting with your opposable thumbs) produces a different effect from composing a letter, revising it, putting it in an envelope and mailing it to someone. And opening that envelope and reading that letter is a different experience from reading an e-mail or a text message. It simply is. It’s more tactile, more suspenseful, more personal – and more likely leave a lasting impression. When writing an e-mail, I find I write much faster and with less thought and feeling than when I write a letter.
Preach it, my brutha. Of course, I disagree that email is an inferior medium for writing letters, as I’ve already said in detail. One point I will keep hammering on until everyone cries, begs and pleads for me to give it a rest already, though, is that the gadgets themselves are not causing us to be more hurried and careless in our correspondence; they’re just symptoms of our work-obsessive culture that recycles every second of free time into an opportunity to get more work done. You can draw the line almost anywhere you choose. He and his friend stick to typewriters and envelopes; I happily use email and hyperlinks but refuse to have anything to do with social networking sites. I’m sure there are some who would argue that even those can be used intelligently, but even so, that’s just a bridge too far for me. Doesn’t really matter. The important thing is that people find a way to set aside the time and energy – assuming they have the desire – to make communication with their friends and loved ones something worth reading. Technology makes it easier for people to be lazy, true, but maybe the fact that we’re so eager to blame gadgetry for cheapening our relationships is indicative of a refusal to consider something more unsettling — maybe a number of our friends just don’t care enough to make us a priority, and vice versa.

Pics or It Didn’t Happen!

By in non compos mentis, socmed, waiting for the barbarians

Thanks to Arthur for passing this story along to me:
Popular TV personality Bill Nye collapsed onstage Tuesday night in front of hundreds of audience members during a presentation at USC, campus officials said.
…Tristan Camacho, a USC senior who attended the lecture, said Nye was walking toward the podium when he collapsed mid-sentence. “Then after about 10 seconds, he popped back up with much gusto and asked everybody how long he was out for and went on with a story about how a similar thing happened to him that morning.”
Nye appeared determined to finish his presentation, but began slurring his words and stumbled against his laptop, Camacho said. At first, Nye refused the offer of a chair and continued taking sips from a water bottle. Camacho said Nye was eventually removed from the stage.
“Nobody went to his aid at the very beginning when he first collapsed — that just perplexed me beyond reason,” USC senior Alastair Fairbanks said. “Instead, I saw students texting and updating their Twitter statuses. It was just all a very bizarre evening.”
Oh, well done, Bill! Obviously he has no talent for self-promotion, or he could have been immortalized in the realm of cultural legend. If only he had had the forethought to go ahead and die, he could have been the new Kitty Genovese for a modern generation of solipsist retards.

Attention Must be Paid

By in bring me the head of nicholas carr, foolosophy, fresh hell, socmed, technology, work

I was reading yet another positive review of Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows and wondering if anyone was ever going to point out the fucking obvious. So thank you, Evgeny Morozov:
Had Carr looked beyond the neuroscience, he may have found that many of the problems that he blames on the Internet — constant busyness, shrinking attention spans, less and less time for concentration and contemplation — are rooted in the nature of working and living under modern capitalism rather than in information technology or gadgetry per se. In fact, as Pinker correctly points outs, Carr’s are very old complaints.
Exhibit A: back in 1881 the prominent New York City physician George Beard published “American Nervousness”, a book about the sudden epidemic of “nervousness” sweeping America, which he blamed, in part on the telegraph and the daily newspaper (the book later proved a great influence on Freud).
Exhibit B: in 1891, almost 120 years before The Atlantic published Carr’s “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”, the same magazine ran “Journalism and Literature”, an essay by the polymath William Stillman, where he attacked the cultural change enabled by the telegraph-enabled journalism much in the same vein that Carr attacks the Internet. Stillman complained that “we develop hurry into a deliberate system, skimming of surfaces into a science, the pursuit of novelties and sensations into the normal business of our lives”.
The Internet may be amplifying each of these problems, but it surely did not cause them. When the famed sociologist Manuel Castells speaks of the “black holes of information capitalism”, there is as much emphasis on “capitalism” as there is on “information”.
If anyone ever listened to me, I’d have probably bored them to death by now as often as I go on about this, but all of our techno-gadgetry fetishes are merely a symptom of a restless mentality that sacralizes work and accomplishment. We’ve been hearing for a couple centuries that new inventions would relieve us of most of the drudge work that made our lives so punishing…and they did! The problem was, and still is, that we just invent new things to do with all the time we saved, and we expect our gadgets to let us do them all at once. No one knows how to stop and say enough is enough, and quite possibly, they instinctively fear discovering how empty they are even if they did.
The part I found most amusing in the review is that she had to download a ten-dollar program that turns your computer off for you for however long you specify. The idea being, restarting it is such a huge chore that you’ll be less likely to just aimlessly drift back online out of habit. I can’t help but think that if you’re so undisciplined that you can’t turn the computer off yourself and walk away to do other things, maybe you should take that ten bucks and go pay someone to teach you how to sit zazen. That’s been shown to rearrange neural pathways as well!

There’s My Flair! And This Is Me Expressing Myself!

By in ohferfucksake, socmed, work

“They can’t get inside you,” she had said. But they could get inside you. “What happens to you here is forever,” O’Brien had said. That was a true word. There were things, your own acts, from which you could never recover.

Nation of slaves, indeed. Spending your adulthood fearing the potential job you might not get because of something you posted on the Internet once, what a life. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a Facebook Like button…

I had a friend who worked for Pitney Bowes once. She told me with great amusement how she actually got called in to talk with her bosses regarding some concerns they had… over some community college courses she was taking. On her own time. With her own money. They truly felt they had a right to dictate to their employees how they spent their time off the job.

You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty and then we shall fill you with ourselves.

Successpool

By in socmed, technology, the wire, writing

Julian Baggini:

When blogs first appeared, they were compared unfavorably with newspaper and magazine articles. They tended to be shorter, were written more quickly, were light on research and heavy on opinion. But to those growing up on Facebook and Twitter, they must seem ponderously slow and long. For those who value thoughtful, crafted writing, this is a worrying development. However, paradoxically, microblogging might actually help longer, more thoughtful writing. The ever-shortening nature of social networking communications could help revive ‘proper writing’ by re-opening the gap between off-the-cuff jottings and thoughtful prose which blogging temporarily blurred.
This could easily occur as a result of a kind of Darwinian struggle. Those teletrailers who manage to be interesting and pithy in short tweets and messages could attract followers away from those who take 400-word blogs to make their point. Natural selection could result in the survival of the briefest. But, as we’ve seen, the distinctive feature of teletrailing is that it provides a constant streams of hyperlinks to more substantive material. Since people are going to receive many such links a day, there will be another evolutionary struggle, from which a few victors will emerge.
I’m not sure what point he’s making here. Is he claiming that blogs are neither fish nor fowl but rather a farrago (I’m feeling alliterative today) of writing styles destined for the rubbish bin of history, a textual Frankenstein’s monster doomed to be chased off into the cyber-wilderness by hordes of fearful peasants with Twitter-torches and Facebook-pitchforks? I mean, as he himself says, the whole point of social networking sites, other than to let everyone know about the sandwich you just had or what you dug out of your ear canal, is to point the way toward more substantive material. You mean, like, um, people who write 400-word blog posts?
(By way of reference, the post immediately below this one is a little over 800 words, quotations included. I myself may not be the most interesting writer, but I think it’s fair to suggest that if your attention span is so hyper-frenetic that you lose concentration halfway through, you need to kick the caffeine/cocaine/meth habit ASAP.)
I read plenty of “proper” writing online every day, but even so, much of that takes the form of more-or-less colloquial essays. And blogging, to me, serves as a vital means of bridging the silent divide between author and reader. It’s true that bloggers are more like pundits than journalists, elucidating issues that other people first bring to everyone’s attention, but it was only ever right-wing political bloggers who believed their own nympholeptic rhetoric about being revolutionaries who were going to overthrow the old guard of the hated “liberal media”. Those of us who weren’t intoxicated and deranged by the pungent fumes of our own effluvia and hubris have only ever seen it as a way for like-minded people to come together and talk about what they see, sort of like sitting down to watch the news with a group of smart friends. Read any article in the New York Times or Washington Post, and then look to see how many blogs are linking to it and commenting on it. How is this a bad thing? And how would it be improved by people simply tweeting the link to the original article?
Anyway, like I said, it’s not clear to me what exactly he’s getting at. This, though, made me smirk:
The possibility of cashing in on social networks is potentially making many more people commodify themselves. Authors for example, are encouraged by publishers and agents to think about themselves as “brands”, and to blog, twitter, make friends on Facebook and so on. They are not alone: bands, artists, even therapists are turning into their own mini-PR departments, increasingly concerned not just with what they do, but how they can sell it to as many people as possible. High profile but actually quite rare tales of great success encourage creative to go along with this.
I would be a liar if I said I was not caught up in this trend. I would say I have more instrumental reasons for using Facebook than I do other ones, and while I see my twittering is a fun, creative challenge, I’m not sure I would have even started doing it I hadn’t thought that it might be good for my profile. Anecdotal evidence suggests that if I am unusual, it is only in my candour. The problem is that being high-minded and opting out looks like a luxury few can afford. Being active on social networking sites may be far from sufficient for success, but it looks increasingly as though it is necessary.
A luxury? Choosing to dig in your heels and refuse to do whatever you’re told is necessary for career success (or simply necessary to please your boss and keep your job) is a luxury? I’ve said many times that I pride myself on doing all I can to find a way to do an end-run around traditional notions of success and achievement, but, to quote Butchie from The Wire, “Conscience do cost.” It costs financially, and it costs in terms of social standing. I’m not complaining, but it’s not an easy path to choose.

Neologisms for Dummies

By in books, bread and circuses, jests japes jokes jollies, language, socmed, tribalism

The fuck..?

Two weeks ago, best-selling author Jodi Picoult sent a Tweet in a fit of pique. Upon reading Michiko Kakutani’s glowing review of Jonathan Franzen’s new novel Freedom in the New York Times, the lady novelist took to her keyboard and typed out the following:
NYT raved about Franzen’s new book. Is anyone shocked? Would love to see the NYT rave about authors who aren’t white male literary darlings.
Then fellow best-seller Jennifer Weiner revved up her Twitter account, too, and posted about the breathless critical love of Franzen, whose book was still not out yet. She invented the Twitter hashtag #franzenfreude, which she describes thusly: “Schadenfreude is taking pleasure in the pain in others. Franzenfreude is taking pain in the multiple and copious reviews being showered on Jonathan Franzen.”
Weiner tweeted prolifically after starting the franzenfreude meme. “In summation: NYT sexist, unfair, loves Gary Shteyngart, hates chick lit, ignores romance. And now, to go weep into my royalty statement,” she wrote on Aug. 19.
It’s like watching Curly Howard with a paint can on his head and buckets on both feet, using an umbrella to duel with a potted fern. Has no one else noticed what Michael Schaub already pointed out?

Weiner probably does have a rough life, what with her bestsellers and the popular film adaptation of one of her novels a few years back. And I’m sure she’s talented, but for fuck’s sake, if you’re trying to convince people to read your books, maybe coming up with the word “Franzenfreude” (which is literally “Franzen joy,” and thus the fucking opposite of what she’s trying to say) isn’t your best sales pitch.

See, this is why I keep saying we should just use the English word “epicaricacy”, which means the exact same thing. It might not have lent itself very well to a play on Franzen’s name, but still, she could have been spared so much embarrassment.
And is it just me, or is a story containing a sentence like “So-and-so tweeted prolifically…” just absolutely guaranteed to end in tears of laughter? Is it even possible for Twitter to feature in a story without something atrociously stupid being said?

Postmodern Love

By in foolosophy, marriage, socmed, technology

What’s good about both the Stanford study and the durability of even not-so-cool sites like eHarmony is that being proactive about connection is no longer viewed as unromantic or loserish. Somewhere along the line, enough friends and friends-of-friends started meeting cool people and even falling in love to make the “Let’s just say we met at the deli” cover story moot.
But as eHarmony’s new campaign makes clear, love — or even a really good hookup — isn’t always a simple matter of what matches up perfectly on a survey. “What if you were loved for you?” it asks. What if? What if we had a way of finding people who share our interests and like our pictures, so we could be out dancing instead of sitting at home lonely? And what if, along with all the practicality and purposefulness and monthly fees the Internet brings, it turns out we still hope, in our hearts, for something approaching magic?
A friend of mine semi-shamefully admitted to me once that she had tried eHarmony out, like she was half-expecting me to burst out laughing and flash the L-for-loser sign at her. My attitude about online dating has always been, why the hell not? Her biggest complaint about it was that “people lie” about themselves in that environment. Yeah? And? Like they don’t do that anywhere else?
More than half of all marriages end in divorce, and who knows how many serious, committed relationships don’t even make it to marriage before they dissolve. Basically, the odds are overwhelming that whoever you’re currently with is not The One For You. Of course, the biggest problem with that is the idea that people meeting in their twenties or thirties and staying together for several more decades till death does them part is normal, but anyway. The point is, most traditionally-formed relationships are doomed to collapse at some point, so why stigmatize those who want to try to take a slightly more scientific approach to dating?
Most of us probably meet our prospective partners either through work or mutual friends, which in many instances can provide a paltry enough dating pool. Shy people who don’t necessarily enjoy making the social scene are even more screwed. Whereas on the Internet, you can easily find groups devoted to whatever bizarre hobby or fetish you enjoy. Whatever constellation of traits and beliefs are most important to you, there’s almost certainly people out there who match up pretty well with them. Of course there’s much more to a relationship than how it shapes up on paper, but I can’t help but think it’s an improvement to already know you have so much common ground to get started on.

The Recline of Western Civilization

By in buried alive, foolosophy, fresh hell, socmed, technology, writing

Richard is talking primarily about the China blogosphere, but what he says is of course applicable to blogging in general, and it reflects a similar sentiment I’ve started to see expressed with increasing frequency; namely, that blogging itself is outdated, obsolete and generally not what the cool kids are doing anymore (in the comments, his exchange with Bob Page fleshes out the theme a little more).

Twitter has obliterated what I used to use the blog for, namely sharing links and offering some commentary. And the China blogosphere is so fragmented it’s much harder to be heard above the din. The fact that I’m caught up in my own issues (I’m planning to launch my own small business soon; I’ll keep you posted) hasn’t helped make this blog more productive. But even if I were as productive as in 2003, the site would be in decline. China blogs are too many, and blogging in general is becoming increasingly antique.

I do miss the “golden age,” from 2003-2005, when I could open a thread before bedtime and wake up to 300 comments. But that required full-time posting and, at its peak, the help of three or four other bloggers all putting up copy throughout the day.

I was running down the blogroll last week, and I saw where Micah Ian Wright of the Propaganda Remix Project had stopped the site’s blog over three years ago:

C’mon… this blog is, like, dead, already
Come Join Me On FacebookI found blogging on Facebook to just be a LOT easier than using Blogger… maybe if I get super famous or something I’ll start a -real- blog, but if you’re just a friend or a fan (or an enemy) looking to touch base, Facebook is the site where you’ll find me.

My first thought was, what the fuck does “easier” have to do with it? Where does “effort” enter into this format at all? You mean I have to save a totally different bookmark for Blogger? And then I have to log in and everything, even if I let my browser save my ID and password? OH GODS THE PAIN MY CLICKY FINGER CAN’T TAKE IT ANYMORE!

Seriously, I remember way back in the mist-enshrouded days of, oh, just under a decade ago when a couple friends and I were talking about building a blog/website from scratch, and what a godsend it seemed like by comparison to go to Blogspot with a name in mind, get a URL, choose a template, and start blogging five minutes later. I can understand people simply preferring Facebook for whatever reason, but it seems insanely spoiled and lazy to act as if it’s too much trouble for people to come to a blog to read your thoughts as opposed to a Facebook wall, just like it flabbergasts me to see how people act as if emailing is a laborious chore when you could just be texting instead. If only we could have electrodes implanted in our brains that would process and distribute our thoughts for us so we didn’t have to go to the excruciating effort of typing them by hand…!

Like I was just saying about the prophesying of the printed book’s extinction, I think we’ve always been infatuated with portentously declaring the death of traditions and trends, when often all we mean is that they don’t have their glitzy novelty anymore. I can understand why people would say that about blogs, but to be honest, I rarely find the mega-blogs worth reading anyway, so I really don’t care if they start to suffer precipitous drop-offs in traffic and commentary (comments at huge political blogs are comparable to YouTube for sheer inanity) as users flock to newer social media. They tend to be lowest-common-denominator sinkholes who only link to other members of the blogosphere’s upper-class, so good riddance in any event. (Though if someone like Atrios started posting exclusively on Twitter, would it even make a difference in his writing style?)

At any rate, it greatly amuses me to think that I could already be some sort of dinosaur by preferring to stick to blogging and email for communication. A digital Luddite. But I prefer a small audience anyway, which is why I make zero effort to promote this space. Aside from the apparent correlation between number of commenters and lack of intelligent discussion, I like being able to actually talk back and forth with those who do comment; I wouldn’t want to have to take a removed role of regulating trolls and refereeing fights. And I imagine I can’t be the only one who prefers a format that allows us to attempt to make Proust look like a haiku poet with our witless ramblings. Hasn’t anyone considered what will become of all the windbags if no one reads blogs anymore? We’ll be right back to bothering you in person again, that’s what.

Let the majority move on to twatting and friending each other silly. Those of us who remain can possibly settle down to making blogging into something more artistic and substantial, free of trendy, superficial attention.

The Mask and the Mirror

By in psychology, socmed, technology

But for all the downsides of comments-thread anonymity, there’s a major upside: It shows us the American id in all its snaggletoothed, pustulent glory, with a transparency that didn’t exist before the Internet. And in its rather twisted way, that’s a public service.
…And yet anonymous comments — all of them, even the written equivalent of high-speed drive-by shootings — serve a useful function. They show us what the species is really like: the full spectrum of human behavior, not just the part that we find reassuring and enlightening.
As someone who has been long fascinated by the irrational side of human nature, I agree completely. I don’t waste any time reading comments at YouTube, say, because they make me weep for humanity and contemplate suicide. But I don’t think it’s ever a good idea to let the way you want things to be get in the way of clearly perceiving how they actually are. If the majority of people, even the ones who are computer literate and somewhat technologically savvy, are a mass of hooting, mean-spirited, feces-flinging ignoramuses who need to have their names tattooed on their knuckles to help them remember how to spell them, well then. That’s what we’ve got to work with, that’s where we have to start. Dream of the Enlightenment all you want, but put on your sewer boots and wade into reality.
I’m unabashedly in favor of allowing people their online anonymity, because frankly, leaving aside obvious examples of violent threats and personal stalking, the only thing most anonymous net denizens are guilty of is failing to respect fraudulent authority. From Lee Siegel to CNN anchors, when you hear people whining and complaining about anonymity, it’s a certain sign that their fragile egos, so long sheltered by the polite agreement among other pretentious, ignorant gasbags in the chattering class, have been shattered by being nimbly mocked, pantsed, debunked and outwitted by the stereotypical Guy in His Mom’s Basement Wearing Pajamas.
My favorite example was when Marshall Wittmann, former Christian Coalition hack turned DLC hack turned Joe Lieberman flunky, had his ridiculous “Bull Moose” blog, where he referred to himself in the third person constantly, sort of like The Rock, only not cool, and not funny. Anyway, one day he summed up his center-right political philosophy by saying, “The Bull Moose grazes in the vital center,” no doubt mightily impressed with his own high-mindedness and poetic grace. To which a pseudonymous commenter quickly replied, “Best euphemism for cunnilingus ever!”
 
To me, that alone suffices as proof for why we need expression on the Internet to remain free and anarchic. One sacred clown like that makes up for a ton of unimaginative trolls.
It’s funny, because in the blogosphere, I was always more irritated by the idiots who couldn’t/wouldn’t stop rising to the bait whenever an obvious troll would show up in the comments. They’re easy enough to ignore if you really want to, but the sad truth is, even mostly intelligent people don’t want to. I stopped reading blogs like Sadly, No! years ago because their comment section turned into a retarded wasteland of trolls, meta-trolls, and imbeciles who couldn’t tell the difference and thus argued with both.
When a person comments anonymously, we’re told, they’re putting a mask on. But the more time I spend online the more I’m convinced that this analogy gets it backward.
The self that we show in anonymous comments, the fantasy self, the self we see in the mirror when we fantasize about being tough and strong and feared, the face we would present to the world if there were no such thing as consequences: That’s the real us.
The civil self is the mask.
I’ll beg to differ here, though. He’s right that the unrestrained, impulsive self is more immediate, more direct, but that doesn’t mean it’s more “real” than our social selves. Things are not their origins. Roots aren’t more “real” than branches and leaves. Humans, being another species of ape, are social animals through and through. We didn’t spring fully formed out of sensory deprivation chambers. There is no such thing as a “pure” human nature independent of the family, the tribe, the clan, the hamlet, the town, the global village. Even Nell had a mother and sister. From the time we’re toddlers, we’re constantly learning to modify our needs and wishes based on the reaction we get from those around us. It’s possible, in our modern age, for an adult to cultivate an isolated, solitary existence, but they don’t totally reinvent their character and historical habits in the process. All their memories, experiences and ingrained habits travel with them, even if they shut themselves off from allowing any new stimulation or information to enter their experience.
Now this was just funny:

Restricting or eliminating anonymity discourages gratuitous jerk behavior, just as the invention of caller ID turned prank phone calls into nostalgic memory.

O RLLY? Online soundboards have brought about a new golden age of prank calling! Besides, you never heard of punching *67 before dialing the number?

Rumors of Our Deaths

By in books, foolosophy, socmed, technology, writing

Authors will survive and thrive. Thousands of years ago, some creative individuals painted the caves of Lascaux and began the art of storytelling, which has survived far more than the introduction of the e-book.
Finally, Johannes Gutenberg can relax. Long into the future, the printed book will continue to survive because of its portability, durability, and flexibility. Many readers will prefer to read printed books for a variety of reasons that will endure. Though massive print runs will decline, today’s print technology allows a book to be manufactured and delivered within 24 hours of placing an order. I foresee a future when all of the electronic devices will have a button to press when you decide you really want that hardcover or paperback copy mailed to your home. Because no matter how exciting the world of enhanced media books becomes, I suspect there will be some like me who want it both ways. I may love my new iPad, but I still look forward to reading that relic of the past, the good old-fashioned, printed book.
Even as something about this feels true to your pessimistic soul—you can’t help but feel that we are not all slaves to technological progress. There are still backward parts of the world, like the theater companies of London, New York, Paris, and Buenos Aires where human beings still commit vast amounts of words to memory. You have friends who, when they get drunk, recite Keats, Yeats, and Wallace Stevens. In some kind of group unconscious our oral culture has survived after thousands of years, and so too “book culture” will survive. We live simultaneously in several times and ages of civilization. Human beings carry the past within them as they move into the future.
The “future of the book” is, by definition, unknowable. There are only attitudes towards the future which shape possible futures from the vantage of the present: foully apocalyptic, silvery utopian, cautiously conservationist. These attitudes can even coexist within each of us. When you think about the crisis of the book you are really confronted with a crisis of your will. You can choose the culture you want, although you may not get it exactly as you dreamed. If you commit yourself, again and again—and it is an ongoing commitment, less easy than it used to be—to the culture of thought, inquiry, and rhetorical expression that arose in conjunction with the written word, inevitably you will carry books with you in whatever form, and inevitably you’ll want to “access them” and compose them in their traditional bound and printed form, if only to feel a shimmer of connection to earlier human generations.
It’s undeniable that you do want this connection and that you’re not alone. American as you are, deracinated, modern: you have cause to regret so much waste, so many ruins created in the name of “fresh starts” and blank slates. The British psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott suggested that the fear of having a breakdown is our way of remembering an earlier breakdown. And so it is with industrialism and the book. American culture has killed so much that once gave pleasure to so many that it seems only logical to expect that books will be next. But the cycle of regret, too, is deeply ingrained in American life. After the buffalo were hunted to extinction on the western plains, the people who did it tried to bring them back; along the Northeastern rail lines, developers and architects eye the abandoned and rebuking factories and wonder what to make of them now. The old bones are what we have left, because we’ve surrendered the will and capacity to build newer structures like them. They are our pyramids and cathedrals, and the knowledge they once represented is lost to us, the pain that went into their labor has been distributed elsewhere, although we have not cured the pain of the laborer. To look on them is to know that it did not have to turn out that way.
Possibly due to the fact that our relative youth as a nation has been one of seemingly endless expansion and innovation, Americans are inordinately fond of melodramatic declarations about the end of an epoch, the death of a tradition. We practice a cult worship of gadgetry and novelty for its own sake. Just a couple things to keep in mind as we hear once again, in what is becoming a tradition in its own right, how books are going to be rudely shoved aside by Progress into History’s comforting embrace.
I was just talking about this with someone earlier this week. My essential feeling about it hasn’t changed; I think, as Prichard said, that it’s not a zero-sum situation. Most people will supplement their actual books with their electronic siblings to varying degrees. I don’t see many people just outright abandoning printed material for a Kindle, Nook, or iPad.
However the content gets packaged and delivered, I think Roth is right when he suggests that writing itself is what’s changing the most, that our fragmented writing style is an adaptation to fit our hyperactive attention spans. Like I said, it’s probably wise to stay a little jaded as Americans chase one shiny object or another like seven year-olds on a soccer field, yet even so, I can’t help but worry a bit when you see the relentless fixation on speed, convenience and half-baked opinions exemplified by something like Twitter, while it’s difficult to find anyone who cares to put more than two or three lines into an email. I think a lot of what worries people over this issue is the symbolic significance of the book itself, that of quiet, largely solitary contemplation and reflection. This, of course, is incomprehensible to a culture that sees time as money, something to be invested wisely and spent on accomplishments. If even private time with a book isn’t safe from a grotesque mentality that incessantly seeks to “improve” things, to mindlessly increase speed and efficiency, well…
Me, I think I’m going to follow the ideal suggested by Morris Berman and become a Taoist hermit, ensconced deep in the woods with my library. Feel free to stop by and borrow a book if you’re in the area.

Idleness, Indolence, Insolence

By in calvin and hobbes, foolosophy, santutthi, socmed, technology, work

We have created a monster that is consuming us. And I don’t mean that “the Internet is bad” in that hypocritical and falsely ascetic way. I mean that we, along with the phones that travel with us, the texts we type in movie theaters, the instant messages we receive now even on some planes, the social media many of us are expected to participate in on behalf of our jobs, and the complexes and work ethics we have all inherited from our diverse array of guilt-generating forebears, have bubbled together into a frenzy of ceaseless professional engagement that is boiling us dry.
[…] I don’t own an iPhone or a BlackBerry because I do not want to receive e-mail all day every day. Increasingly I understand this preference to be naive, impractical and really rather twee. On several occasions in the past year, days when I’ve run between appointments and not brought my laptop, I’ve had to call my boyfriend to ask him to log into my e-mail and tell me whether I’ve missed anything urgent. I should get a smart phone because I live in the real world. And in the real world, where I used to receive a few dozen e-mails a day, I now receive hundreds.
[…] I don’t think the notion that we have to be constantly plugged in is just in our heads: I think it’s also in the heads of our superiors, our colleagues, our future employers and our prospective employees. There will be judgment, or at least a note made, perhaps by a boss who’s tried to reach you unsuccessfully, or an employee who has an urgent question that goes briefly unanswered.
To not be reachable if called upon at any time, except perhaps the dead of night, feels sinful; unavailability betrays disconnectedness, and disconnectedness has come to stand for idleness and indolence. How many people have sent needless e-mails at 7 a.m. or perhaps 11 p.m., with the thought, if not the conscious intention, of communicating an intensity of professional commitment, demonstrating defensively or passive-aggressively or in the hopes of beating the next round of layoffs that they were beavering away at every odd hour of the day and night.
America’s excesses are never far from sight: Our endless enthusiasms for boundless capitalism, materialism and hedonism persist. But these three have always had a complicated but close relationship with their uptight buddy, Puritanism, and I can’t help feeling these days like Cotton Mather and Jonathan Edwards have insinuated themselves into everyone’s friends and family network, preaching the gospel of a work world without end.
Well, yes. Once again, though, the machines were created to address the perceived need of more productivity, more convenience, so yes, those fucking Puritans and their diseased minds. We’re still suffering the effects of living in a country they founded. But honestly, how much of what we do for a paycheck is, you know, vital? And how much of it is just frenetic activity in the service of manipulating manufactured desires? We long ago passed the point where we could produce enough of the essentials for everyone to live comfortably. Most of what we do now is try to convince people they can’t live without something they never even knew existed five minutes ago, something that will make them feel special for a moment or two before needing to be replaced with something bigger, better, flashier, newer. Like all drugs.
I think the system will eat itself eventually. In the meantime, though, it’s just a question of how much you’re willing to do without, how much you’re willing to be a pariah, how firmly you’re willing to defend your perception of what is absolutely necessary for you to be content, come what may. Personally, I would rather work as a janitor or hanging off the back of a sanitation truck than to become a white-collar professional (and yes, I’ve done similar work before, so that’s not empty bravado). Luckily, I sat down and thought through this at a time when most of my peers were busy trying to craft fake IDs to get hold of beer, so I was able to avoid the debt that traps most people in this hamster wheel consumer society.

For Here There Is No Place That Does Not See You/ You Must Change Your Life

By in foolosophy, poetry, socmed

I’m not completely sure, but I’m getting a sneaking suspicion that this dude isn’t too enthused about online interaction:

And blooms of renewal, I suspect, will not be found online as well. The electronic sheen of social media sites is no substitute for communal fabric. There is no animal musk nor angelic apprehensions to en-soul the flesh and tease wisdom out of obdurate will …
No matter how many restless shades want to friend you on FaceBook nor ghostly texts descend upon you in an unholy Pentecost of Tweets, online exchanges will continue to leave you restless, hollow, and yearning for the colors and cacophony of an authentic agora.
The adolescent purgatory of FaceBook — with its castings into the Eternal Now of instant praise, acceptance, and rejection — reflects, magnifies, and acerbates the perpetual adolescence of the contemporary culture of the United States, intensifying its shallow longings and displaced panics, its narcissistic rage and obsession with the superficial.
It devours libido, by providing a pixilated facsimile of the primal dance of human endeavor, leaving one’s heart churning in thwarted yearning, locked an evanescent embrace with electronic phantoms, as one, paradoxically, attempts to live out unfulfilled desires by means of hollow communion with the soul-negating source of his alienation.
One can never get enough of what one doesn’t need. Ergo, the compulsions and panic of millions of hungry ghosts will hold an ongoing, hollow mass online, in a futile campaign to regain form, gain direction, and walk in meaning and beauty among the things of the world, but instead will remain imprisoned within the very system that condemned them to this fate.
And this is the place, we, as a culture, will remain, for a time. This electronic inferno will be our vale and mountaintop, our sanctuary and leviathan. We will stare baffled into its vastness, stupefied and lost within its proliferate array of depersonalizing distractions and seductions.
The more we try to lose ourselves in it, by surrendering to its shimmering surface attractions, the more tightly we will become bound in the bondage of self.
Naturally, living in the grinding maw of such monsters of alienation will engulf one with ennui and angst. Moreover, the judgment of anyone claiming not to be afflicted should be regarded as suspect.
Oh, is that so? Well, I suspect the judgment of anyone who traffics in such prosaic jeremiads, so I guess we’re even!
I should say that I now feel bad for poking at Joe Bageant the other day. The romantic longueurs and the circumlocutory cri du coeur in this essay make Joe look like a model of terse realism. There’s even the obligatory quoting of Eliot’s “The Waste Land”!
Anyway, I have no use for Facebook, Twitter, et. al., as I keep saying. But the shallow inanity of social networking sites is not somehow an infernal subversion of the true essence of human interaction. Gods, man, have you ever actually spent time listening to what ordinary people talk about? Did you grow up or spend a substantial amount of time in a small town, pre-Internet? Has it ever occurred to you to wonder why most people who did will tell you that all they dreamed of doing was getting as far away as they could, as quickly as possible? You think mindless, suffocating routine is exclusive to big-city life in the digital age?
In a way, though, the romantics are correct that our heightened sense of individuality helps create a stronger sense of alienation. The more facets of our personalities and tastes we develop, the more points of divergence between us make themselves visible, and the greater the impression becomes that no one truly understands us in all our complexity. But the answer to that is not to daydream about what a joy it must have been to live in the same area that your great-great-great grandparents did, doing the same things, seeing the same few dozen people all your life. To his particular credit, unlike most people who take up this banner, Rockstroh doesn’t call for any such retreat, but still:
Try this: embrace the bracing pain of your alienation: make a home in being lost. Gaze with wonder upon the sacred scenery of your bewilderment … Wandering in the wilderness is a holy state.
In other words, in times such as ours, when we embrace our alienation then we will be welcomed home … to share a common shelter with the multitudes who are also lost.
Life didn’t become meaningless in the last few centuries. We didn’t lose anything along the way. We discovered, in our burgeoning self-awareness, that meaning did not inhere in life itself. Now our anomie should be a provocation to forge new bonds and new meaning. I find the wide-open freedom of it exhilarating, myself.

Vanishing Point

By in foolosophy, socmed, writing

Pace Chris Clarke, I don’t think the biggest problem with Twitter is that there’s no conceivable way it could ever be useful, nor that there’s nothing of value to be said in 140 characters (I had thought of the haiku angle myself). It’s that it’s just the latest manifestation of the mindless, zombie lurching toward speed and simplicity for their own sake. Frankly, I don’t want to live in a world where blogs and emails are considered too time-and-labor intensive for both the author and the reader.

Granted, it often is annoying to read the sort of shorthand that Twitter enables, but as with text messages, that in itself isn’t a herald of the new Dark Ages or anything. It’s the bizarre spectacle of people who are utterly convinced that they need to save more time and effort without seeming to have the slightest idea of why they’re saving it, or what they’re going to do with it besides cram it full of more trivia and frenetic activity. What have we done with all the time we’ve saved in the last fifteen years or so, since the Internet became part of our daily lives?
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