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i've been thinking about this thread from time to time. like alot of folk my 4-space life is busier than i'd like it to be and that's forced changes in my usage of alot of things, including tfp. since everything is a function of one's perspective, i figure it's important to note changes at that level first.
so i've got more stuff going on, sometimes as stuff to do sometimes as stuff to avoid, but there we are.
the community---well, the subcommunity that i swim about in mostly, which centers on politics---that sub-community feels really small these days. and it's difficult to have terribly intricate discussions that aren't like snowball fights, two lines of boys hurling things at each other. sometimes it's possible, but usually not so much.
and i'm a part of why that happens....i like to think that's not the case....and sometimes it's not. ... but other times it is. that bothers me a little, that does. it leads to one of those chicken-egg questions, whether the change is in me or in the community or in the broader world and it's obviously all the above but in no particular mixture.
for myself, i would like to be part of moving discussions about politics forward, toward something else, but sometimes it feels like it's just not going to go. the only way forward seems to do like beckett sez: try again. fail. start again. fail better.
the problem with political discussion at the moment is likely a function of the small, relatively self-contained sub-community that frequents that space. it seems that this group shares a preference for a different kind of engagement from what happens in other forums, even as they way we collectively use that preference is to pelt each other with snowballs and such. political discussion could always use more folk. and while it's often a bit rough and tumble and gets exasperating for everyone (i've no doubt of that) at one point or another, it is an interesting crew.
but more people, more threads=mo better.
there's also the bigger Situation Problem and its reflection(s) in how political discourse works, particularly in the states. when the cliche was coined "may you not live in interesting times" what i think it meant was that periods that historians and other people who get for whatever reason to make such determinations after the fact decide is an "interesting time" is experienced by the people who live through it as incoherent, difficult, problematic to stage clearly, difficult to think through or about.
and these are interesting times we live in.
if a generalized incoherence proves anything at all, it's that.
btw--i dont know how one would go about correlating messageboard usage with that of other social media. it doesn't seem to me that a messageboard does the same things as facebook or twitter at all, so imagine them as operating in parallel worlds rather than as mutually exclusive. but then again, i don't play farmville so maybe i dont really understand anything about how facebook can eat time.
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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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