roachboy

i dont see any basis on a message board for assuming that the people posting are not always acting as devil's advocate--or the contrary, really: both assumptions seem to me equal in their arbitrariness.

i mean, these spaces function to the side of most types of social interaction and are not substitutes for them--they are obviously pretty abstract--it would seem to me that a messageboard is an open field for experimenting with identity (authorfiction) and positions. and i assume that most posters i read here are, to one extent or another, experimenting when they write. that tfp, for example, has developed some dimensions of community that would be kinda absurd if you didnt assume that what people wrote says something about who they are is simply a choice that segments of the folk who post here have made. think about moe's taven in the trampoline forum, for example. we get to go to the thread and act as though we are getting trashed in a tavern, and, like most taverns for many folk, a significant motive for being there in the first place is sex. so you get that there too. so long as there is a general agreement amongst the people who post there about what they are doing, it is fine--but at the same time, if you think about it, it is a very strange idea.

what do any of us know about anyone else, really, in this place?
i know the dominant mode of interacting through a messageboard works with the illusion of transparency at their center--but i have never believed that this transparency was operational--more that it was something that folk simply preferred to believe about it that may be binding on them but which says nothing about the nature of this kind of space. you can see these assumptions working in how many of the journals are written here too--most are written as though they were telephone calls--not by replicating the form, but by replicating the assumption that a disembodied voice at one end of the line can let a second disembodied voice at the far end of the line into the detail of their life simply by talking as though that detail was available. now this is not a criticism, and maybe the problem is mine--when other folk post, maybe the think they really are talking to friends here who are friends in the same way as 3-d friends are--and maybe they're right--because they happen within particular speech communities that form within this board. either way, i simply notice that this stuff happens all the time.
when i post, i see a white square inside a green square.
when i send the post, i see a green square scratched up with white letters. and those scratches are all that anyone here knows of me.
and i can manipulate those stratches as i like.
so you know what i want you to know.
or what i decide would be interesting to float, to add to a mix of what you know.
or whatever--you cant account for motive here at all.
so i am not sure that there is a distinction in principle in a space like this between devil's advocate any any post, since all posts are equally experiments with identity, with staging experience in a curious written format, etc.

so if there is a difference between d.a. and troll, it is rhetorical--a troll is a form of devil's advocacy that you dont like. for whatever reason. or that the mods dont like, for whatever reason.
there is a rhetoric of sincerity and there is a rhetoric of experimentation, maybe--and there are folk who use the first to do the second or whose mode is to move from the second and give the impression of moving from the first.
and you cant tell.
one can always flip into the other.
in fact, posts probably are characterized by a continuous shuttle between the two. abstraction makes such things safe.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite