The Locking of the Avril Thread

"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

Be that as it may, I'm still not gonna diss anyone on the internet, 'cause my momma taught me better than that.

Seriously though, as a member of the Internet Generation and all that, I've seen no evidence so far that Human Emotional Reactions have become an anachronism; if anything, I'd say that they're even *more* plentiful than IRL, and an integral part of the whole shebang, especially for those who cultivate entire friendships/relationships through it. As such, if you're rude, you will still piss people off and upset them. And unless you have a good reason for that, you're still an asshole.

(I admit this might be a generational thing, if I was 40something I'd probably think that it's a nifty new toy to experience with and nothing more, too.)

You've just re-stated the rockist position on authenticity, J0hn. You're saying 'You can do both,' but then you immediately declare a preference for 'roots' over 'becoming': in your model, presumably, one can stay in touch with one's roots without even thinking of 'becoming', but 'becoming' in its own is 'just slumming or playing let's pretend'.

I don't disagree with your definition of 'becoming' -- though the word is not well-picked, since it has traces of Heidegger's concept of authenticity, which leads us back to rockism and Platonism; I can only 'become' by stressing that I'm heading towards 'the real me'. What I disagree with is the word 'just', and the implication that 'just pretend' is not the whole core and essence of that part of the binary. There is nothing wrong with pretending to be someone you're not, and becoming that person! We all do it. Wire had 'Forty versions all dying to get the part'. This is what I mean when I talk about 'divergers'. Moving towards fiction and away from 'the authentic'. Perhaps we need a word which, unlike 'becoming', connotes pluralism, divergence, and the joys of the fictive. A word which had more Donald Barthelme than Tolstoy in it (he adds, just to keep The Music Mole happy).

'From the work of Freud, Heidegger and Lacan we can put together a definition of the Uncanny as that state of mind which we experience when the unbroken and coherent appearance of the so-called 'common-sense' world is broken or disrupted by evidence of its 'made' quality, as a constructed world. This gives rise to feelings of being disturbed, disgusted or horrified, or to great levels of anxiety or vertigo as certainties are threatened and the very structure of everyday and normal life seems to give way. A classic instance of this would be the mingled fascination and disgust many people feel when confronted with a transsexual; that is someone whose sense of themselves is at odds in a very deep way with their apparent [to others] gender identity... Of course, the threat of anyone who transgresses the boundaries which we regard as fundamental to the nature of the world and of the 'Real' is that by transgressing them they bring to our attention the possibility that these bounds may be arbitrary, or that we too may exist in some deep way on both sides of any given divide.'

This matches what I said upthread about 'natural law' and also about not believing that binaries contain inherent truths.