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jesus, what a fucked up situation.
this seems redundant. i dont know.
1.
particular:
i detest myspace.
maybe its the genuinely ugly interface design. maybe its the importance that such a shallow space has assumed. maybe it's rupert murdoch. maybe it's the fact that it is SO fucking stupid. such spaces seem to encourage more stupidity. it also encourages lying, which we call "manipulation of identity or persona"...
nothing seems to me more tedious that stupid people lying to each other.
2.
general:
one question it raises--apart from the particulars of the story, about which i am having some trouble making a judgment simply because we really dont know enough about megan to be able to ascribe blame or explain much--one question this raises concerns the nature of internet communication, the curious way in which a 2-d persona gets filled in by others with projections, the way in which these projections replace the actual 3-d person behind the persona, the extent to which these projections enable irresponsibility, the extent to which they make responsibility impossible nearly.
you dont really know who you are interacting with.
you dont have any cues that'd indicate when you might have gone too far.
internet communication is in many ways the pure expression of capitalist social relations: we make ourselves into things and treat others as things.
within this general repetition of capitalist social relations, we pretend that we dissent.
there is something structurally fucked up about all of it.
so for example you can abstract yourself from the possibility that what you write inflicts pain: you can turn it into a parlor game because the target of your unspooling of whatever sadistic impulse you allow to unspool is an abstraction, not a person.
you can enjoy what in 3-d would be sadism: the replacement of a human being with an abstraction based on your own fantasies enables the erasure of
any ethical consideration that would get in the way of such in 3-d.
think about it: you see parallel activity here: think about the way in which the community deals or does not deal with those who might have deep psychological issues who turn up. collectively, we cant even tell if these issues are real or if they follow from a process of persona construction, whether what gets written is mimetic or if it is fiction. this because despite what you might prefer to pretend obtains about what people write, there is no agreement AT ALL about that relation.
so how is anyone supposed to make a judgment about how to communicate if you cant even figure out the status of what you are reading?
self-limitation.
but the abstraction that shapes all communication over the net militates against that.
so when you let go and allow your inner asshole to come out to play, you can pretend that nothing is at stake.
from the above, it should be obvious that i find netcommunication to be quite alienating, frankly.
i write stuff here, but in general am acutely aware that you dont really know me on the basis of it.
you write stuff here and no-one knows you on that basis. they know fragments of you. they fill in the rest with projections. so do you with reference to everyone else.
but there is a community because of the degree to which the parameters (the rules and assumptions) that shape tfp reinforce our inclinations to want to see in it a community.
because we share at one level or another the desire to see a community, we act as though there is one.
so there is one.
nothing like that obtains on myspace.
that is why myspace is a cesspool.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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