|
if your characterization of posts was correct, pigglet, i can assure you that i would not bother with this forum.
the politics forum is a type of game.
every player comes to it with a little discursive machine or three that they like and that often they revert to letting that machine run and the results are the logic of that machine. however, it seems to me that each situation presented, each thread, is a different game, and so each is a space adaptation of these machines....and they do not always work....
for example: one aspect of playing the game here for me is a long series of little skirmishes with ustwo. persona-wise, each of us is the reverse of the other: politically we are very far apart, in terms of how and what we write, we are antithetical to each other--most of the time, ustwo's posts leave their assumptions assumptions, they do not spell them out--and most of my responses are about trying to get him to spell them out---with varying degrees of expectation that the ploy will work (some mornings the sun is out, some mornings it is not, some mornings my husky is bothering me, some mornings he is asleep etc.)--i find that i often assume it wont work and so proceed on that basis...for better or worse.
i tend to lay out much more of the logic behind what i am doing, mostly because that i just how i think about things (well, roachboy is a version of how i, the other guy, think about things--roachboy is much more limited--this format is really quite limiting--but i, the other guy, find working with constraints interesting and so here i am, trailing roachboy behind me)---and i am sure that ustwo wishes i would just shut the fuck up sometimes.
the result of this is more often than not little irony duels, which can be funny but often are just snippy seeming.
it is part of the game--every game includes the possibility of standoff, of non-conclusive sequences. just as every game includes the possibility of something strategically interesting or challenging--just as every game includes the possibility that you will loose.
at bottom, whether you play or not it is a matter of whether you find the game as a whole interesting.
every game is about constraints: this one is about lots of them--how where and why each player uses the board, how much time they have, when they post, what the situation around them in 3-d is when they post, how that situation effects what they post. it happens that my 3-d life finds me writing alot on my home computer and that i find this forum an interesting distraction from stuff i should be doing---it is also the case that you can see this in how i write, in what i write because the type of writing that i do is heavily analytic and requires that i spell out the arguments, and if i shift from a project to here (which i do more often than not) the way of thinking i had been locked into while working drags into here. this is not the case with everyone--each person wedges their play in this game into their own schedules and in their own way. navigating the divergence ways in which people use this space----when they use it and why they use it---is essentially one of the constraints of playing here over any period of time.
i think players like to imagine that the forum is like a table and that everyone is sitting around it in the same way and that discussion happens amongst people who are fully present--but it aint like that. not necessarily. it is as if by sitting around a table in 3-d there is a series of tacit agreements that obtain concerning interactions--what they entail, what kind of attention you can expect--all of which follow from a particular way of being in a shared space. here, the only shared space is the sequence of boxes containing posts, and the only agreement about what kind of interaction can be expected is the one that emerges across sequences of these boxes. this is a community, but a very particular kind of community, one that you really cannot think about using 3-d communities as a guide--if you do that, you will just get frustrated, you will rationalize that frustration by assuming that everyone else is a fuckwit and you will stop sooner or later.
this space is what it is.
i find the messages from most of the other players here to be interesting enough to keep me hanging around....i expect this holds for the other players as well....the varying worldviews that you run into here are interesting in their variety, even if there are points of fundamental disagreement or incomprehension that separate them....otherwise none of us would be here.
i find the recurrent calls for short posts annoying because being able to stretch things out is one of the features that keeps me interested enough to play here at all.
sheesh, another long post....
__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
|