The Locking of the Avril Thread

The people who write 250-word "articles" for Vice Mag could conceivably be paid by the magazine, but this can only be in an abstract, technical sense. "Thanks, Mr. M. for the story. Since we're a legitimate periodical with a keen sense of our burgeoning market, we can afford to pay you for your insights. Please accept this check for $7.25 with our compliments." Clearly, income derived from writing for this publication contributes to nobody's standard of living.

Well see, Calum's attacks are not exactly verbal, are they?
Since we all like analogies here, imagine yourself walking down the street in your neighborhood and you see a man holding up a sign with something daft like "if kylie showed up at your house at 3am asking you to give a ride to the prime minister, would you?" written on it, and you start conversing with the sign-holder. The sign-holder turns out to be a major asshole and makes personal attacks on you. You walk away. The next day, that asshole is there again, with another sign. You start talking to him again. He threatens you. You walk away. Next day. You see him holding another sign. You start talking to him. WHY?

But you know, I've been a member of many different forums/chat rooms/net communities over the past few years, and I've never seen a single occasion where the "let's just ignore him and go away" approach worked. People ALWAYS end up responding to trolls, and the only way these situations are ever resolved is a) if the troll leaves, b)if the troll becomes "tamed" or c) if the troll is somehow banned. People just can't resist the temptation of interacting with trolls...we could talk a lot about the psychology of this (and it really is like that in every single occasion I've witnessed, which sort of destroys Calum's "haha, you're all obsessed with me" pose; he's eminently replaceable), but since (IMO) interaction is, realistically speaking, inevitable, those who become offensive during it shouldn't be regarded as harmless.

"A Calum In Harlem"

any "damage" he is capable of is restricted to that thread and those people who choose to interact with him.

This thread sort of shows that this isn't the case, coz those who interact with him then get mad and it flows over into other parts of the forum. Which isn't his fault, granted, but whaddyagonnado.

The "street" analogy is maybe not so wise, because even tho it's a public forum ILX is also a community based on certain views & attitudes, I think, so it's more like he's sitting around with his sign in some big house that we all own (or haha, a garden, as mark s used to refer to it).

i'd much rather have a beer with mr. momus. in a pinch.

BEER? You're trying to make me think like you, aren't you?

The "initiation ceremonies" exist; you've gone through some of them, so have I, so has Calum. They're not something concious, they just happen, they're inevitable.

And I don't like personal attacks happening at any place I frequent, real life or online. There's a difference between not being nice when you have some sort of point to make and throwing up insults at random. Really Momus, you of all people should know that "being nice" isn't something ILX places much value on, I mean, look at the amount of nastyness regularly happening here (and that goes doubly for ILM)

1. Nothing is inherently more authentic than anything else.
2. However, some people want to emphasize the 'real' aspect of a thing, and others want to emphasize the 'fake' aspect.
3. The people who emphasize the 'real' aspects are often convergers, the people who emphasize the 'fake' are divergers. Because 'keeping it real' is about imposing a restricted code ('to thine own self be true', 'stay in touch with your roots', etc) whereas 'keeping it fake' is about breaking free of restrictions ('become whoever you want to be', 'find new facets', 'copy people you admire' etc).
4. Some, looking at a virtual community, stress the 'community' part of it. Others stress the 'virtual' part of it. The 'community' stressers end up saying that there is basically no difference between real life and the online space. The 'virtual' stressers see a big difference.
5. By seeing an online community as basically no different from real life, we throw away the freedoms of virtuality, all its unique properties. For instance, it's amazing that in a virtual community I can say something rude to the very testy hstencil and not get punched. (Then again, perhaps hstencil is only free to be testy because he is in a virtual space, not a bar.)
6. One problem the people who think that 'URL = IRL', at least metaphorically, is that when you press them on the metaphor, it's always a different one. The 'real life' which the URL is 'like' is sometimes a private club, sometimes someone's house, sometimes the nation state, sometimes a crowded theatre, etc.
7. What this reveals is that etiquette, context and the physical body are all much more intimately connected than we sometimes think. Why use real world, bodily etiquette in a virtual world space where bodies are not present? Why impose real world laws in a virtual world where conditions are very different? Where you can effectively walk through walls, fly through the air, pretend to be whoever you want, mask yourself, etc? Why fear the freedoms of the virtual world, which include the freedom to be rude and the freedom to be fake?

-- Ned Raggett (ne...), June 20th, 2004.

Ned wakes up and checks ILx. Fucking typical. [[big winky, Ned]]

-- Matos W.K. (michaelangelomato...), June 20th, 2004.

Yay!

-- Ned Raggett (ne...), June 20th, 2004.

I am at the tail end of a bender, came into the office to grab my laptop, couldn't resist checking email again, and voila. ulp.

-- Matos W.K. (michaelangelomato...), June 20th, 2004.

Yeah, I was about to wonder which end of the 'must check ILX before I sleep/after I wake' course you were on.

-- Ned Raggett (ne...), June 20th, 2004.

Calum's lame taunts about my time and so forth are based upon ignorance. *That* is patently obvious to me as well, as well as to others, and I suspect to you to some extent or another.

Lock the back door
Lock the Calum threads
Lock the front door
Leave

(J0hn, I'm jogging round the apartment between posts. Must enjoy these limbs before they evolve into a jam jar.)

It's certainly a point that the internet is and is seen as a place where one can have the freedom to be rude and the freedom to be fake - I think most people will, at some point in their online life, have been allured by and have exercised these freedoms. Equally, many people who regularly use the internet for interaction believe it gives them the freedom to be real, as opposed to their constrained, boundaried 'real lives'; and this 'freedom to be real' is the same side of the same coin as the 'freedom to be fake', no binary opposite. 'Become whoever you want to be' can mean 'become whoever you really are' without any mental leap.

But you assume that the internet is completely separate from the 'real world', and I think that's a fundamental flaw of your argument. The two bleed into one another. Neither determines the other, but equally neither can exist entirely separate from the other.

O brave new world, you cry, that has such people in it! and you echo an island Miranda faced with a mess of corrupt courtiers, faced with a social world out of which her father and most of her upbringing has come, faced with a culture into which she does and will slot seamlessly. You echo a girl seeing a mirage, not a visionary. You echo a glorious dream of what might be -- but I rather think you're straining yourself with each attempt to define and exalt it, and if you talk and talk more on it it will dissolve utterly.

(Tangentially, I think that one of the reasons why you and I shall probably rarely agree is that I find you to be a very binary thinker. I wonder: is it that what I see as 'binary thinking' you see as 'divergent'?)

la la la xpost.

xpost

the URL=IRL business: I think you get overexcited about personae. This is one of the central axes of so many of our disagreements! I love/use/celebrate persona, but I think they're as remarkable for their strictures as for their freedoms. I'm inclined to think that the tonic "just kidding!" is, as often as not, a red flag with the legend "I'm not actually kidding" written largely on its face.

ok when my wife reaches the top of the stairs and finds me at this thread aGAIN O NO DAMMIT ARGGHGHG

Because 'keeping it real' is about imposing a restricted code ('to thine own self be true', 'stay in touch with your roots', etc) whereas 'keeping it fake' is about breaking free of restrictions ('become whoever you want to be', 'find new facets', 'copy people you admire' etc).

You're not really saying this with a straight face, are you? I mean really? Really really? Because the binary you propose isn't one set of Bad Evil Restrictions vs. The Key To Freedom OMGWTF!!! It's just the restrictions you don't like vs. the ones you do, with your good self providing favorable window-dressing to the ones you like.

You must see that, don't you?

My specific thought-style is diverger + binary, in other words, use oppositions which exist, but then throw them away and use other ones. Never believe the binaries contain any 'truth' whatsoever. I kind of learned this from Roland Barthes, who said that although we can't avoid using structures, we should be nimble when it comes to abandoning them. 'Abjuring' was the word he used. Binaries are crutches, we use them to get somewhere. If there's a Segway parked there, we throw the crutches away and use that instead.

Strikes me you haven't been the best model in this regard.

'Staying in touch with your roots' and 'becoming whoever you want to be' are logically opposites, and irreconcilable. But it's a particularly American vice to believe they're compatible, and I forgive you for it.

I'm the kind of person who waits for Vice magazine to tell me when it's time to throw one set of binaries away and adopt another. Which is why it's terribly important to me to write Vice rather than simply read it.

...that's just begging to be judiciously edited and quoted back, innit?

(my thought-style, for what it's worth, is generally: look at the binary. realise that the number of exceptions to the binary that immediately spring to mind is extremely large. decide binary is useless in this situation. discard. If a binary is a crutch, I either have a wheelchair or two broken arms.)

I didn't mean the mirage comment in a Plato-ish way, although you're welcome to interpret it as such if you want to (so long as there will be no suggestions of my endorsing his silliness). Would you like me to rephrase it?

Jennifer Lopez uses the 'block / rocks' binary the same way she uses her legs: to get somewhere.

it's a specifically American vice to believe in the harmoniousness of divergent models? Haha, I win 4ever, your Hegelian antiquated ass loses 4 all time haha! You do realize you just undid all your rhetoric about "using" binaries & then abandoning them, right? & admitted that you don't actually believe all this claptrap about moving "beyond" anything: that you're just a partisan adherent to some Emperor's new clothes?

http://fattydave.homestead.com/files/zing.jpg

'Staying in touch with your roots' and 'becoming whoever you want to be' are logically opposites, and irreconcilable

No! They completely aren't: and what a total failure of the imagination to say that they are! I refute you, Andre Breton refutes you, Isidore Ducasse refutes you, and Seneca the greatest playwright of all time refutes you! "Becoming whatever you want to be" without "staying in touch with your roots" (your loaded phrasing demands a refutation all its own) is not "becoming" at all: just slumming or playing let's-pretend. You're not "using" binary oppositions: you're making slow, sweet love to them and promising them sweeties if they'll play nice!

x-post donut bitch otm obv