Sorry about the long rambling post. I'm afraid it was a replacement for my normal internet diatribes. Like I said at the begining of this whole thing, I do a lot of arguing on the internet. Why do I do that? Right as I'm decrying the ammount of sure stupid opinions on the internet?
Well, I'm a damn dirty hypocrite that's why.
Why do I do it though? Hypocricy is part and parcel of being human, so that isn't the reason, it's an excuse. I'll tell you why. Shocker huh? Like I totally wasn't setting us up for a talk about that, was I? Litterary devices for the win!
I do it because I'm starved for conversation about the things that interest me, I feel powerless about the things around me, I have no voice in the larger scheme of things, and I want to reach out to people to share the ideas I have that I think are worth being heard.
Isn't this though the way we always feel? How often at work do we have to bite our tongue about that sycophantic incompetant boss of ours? Don't we all wish we could march into the Capitol with wooden barrels of hot tar and bags of feathers? How can we connect with people with our own interests? It feels like we have no voice over the louder, crazier, and richer people. It's so damn hard to do that in real life. I can't afford to hire a lobbyist to go talk to Senators about what affects me, and what would make my life better would hurt the bottom line of campaign donors who pay for those commercials with the scary quasi-racist/homophobic/xenophobic/red scare overtones. Christ, you would be an idiot if you didn't see the old school Willy Horton ad back in 1988 as a scare for white people. The Swift Boat stuff is straight out of the McCarthyism playbook. Getting people to listen to you when you don't have a college degree is really hard because we have been conditioned to believe that someone who never finished college is unintelligent, a slacker, or a failure. Ok, I kinda am a slacker, that's a given, but I am far from unintelligent.
I love history, and not just pop history like World War II, hippies, Vietnam, the Founding Fathers, etc. I would actually love to get a copy of Gibbons' "Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire" for leisure reading. John Locke and Rousseau talking about social contract theory is a huge favorite. I love reading about the massive ulcer that is trying to straighten out English Royalty during the War of the Roses. I love that stuff. I love discussing Richelieu and Realpolitik. Yet, since I don't work in the local PoliSci department, or am busy writing books about the stuff, I have few people in my immediate circle that can talk to me about this kind of stuff.
On the internet, you can find groups of people who you can talk about this stuff with. You can write huge long posts about your opinion or outlook, and have links and sources cited. Some of these posts rival term papers, and mid-term essay tests. They are some well thought out, informative posts. Seriously, journalists could learn a thing or two from them. These people have become my outlet. Since I didn't finish that history degree, I'm not writing those history books or lurking dusty archives in London, Seville, or Paris, or D.C. They are the way I can feel intelligent again between those moments when I feel like I haven't suceeding in using my intelligence to the full potential I feel I have.
Yes, I am a bit conceited about my intelligence. I don't care. My intelligence is a source of confidence for me, and I will hold onto it tooth an nail to keep me from totally feeling like I am a meaningless mass of mediocrity. I still plan to use it for the powers of good some day, and Lex Luthor will be finally vanquished forever to the Fortress of Solitude.
Ok, maybe I'm not Kryptonian in my level of intelligence, but I do adhere to most warning labels and microwave directions. I have also been known to buckle up, not impulse spend, and follow Ikea directions correctly.
Yet, I think that's a huge thing for me, and quite possibly a lot of people out there, especially the venom spitting raptors at the bottom of the web page in the comments. We feel marginalized, and voiceless. The internet gives us a place to finally speak out and try to be heard. It just keeps falling short though. We never seem to have our thirst slaked for speaking out. Why? We can't truly feel the reaction, the connection, the intimacy of really sharing ourselves.
Of course we all know about the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory (google it, it will explain everything), and the joy of anonymous internet, but at the same time that veil that we can hide behind becomes a burqa we force ourselves to wear. We have become cowed from speaking out because of pseudo-alphas in the pack, we have been taught to not rock the boat, we have been taught not to share those social tar pit topics that send a herd of elephants into the room. It's safe to speak and be you on the internet. To share those dark things, to share an intimacy that you normally can't. There is this whole thing a guy does where he takes anonymous letters that reveal those demons that only lurk in the deepest winter nights and posts them on the internet and in art shows. He has made a fabulous expression of existential angst our society has taught us that we aren't allowed to share, that we are scared to share, that we have been beaten into not sharing. We aren't able to connect.
The pace of society that moves as fast as processors upgrade has left intimacy and time to listen to people behind. So we look for it in our internet and phones.
I remember years and years ago when I was in college Kurt Vonnegut came to speak at my college and I managed to snag a front row seat to see him. Someone asked him how he felt about this newfangled internet thing that was all the rage these days. These days being around 1998 or so. He sighed and look down and up into the ether as he spoke, channeling Mark Twain. To me Vonnegut looked and acted so much like I feel Twain would in this day and age. Alas I digress, but so it goes. He spoke about how he remembered the ham radio days. How his friends and acquaintances would go on and on about how they had made friends in Singapore, and Poughkeepsie, and London, and Alderaan, and Burkina Faso, and all over the world. They would talk about how their friends just had a baby, or just got a new job, or had some other wonderful thing. Then those friends would be gone one day. They had a transistor blow, or that baby began to take up to much time, or maybe they simply lost interest with the voice on the speaker. Now this intimate friendship ended without all the wonderful drama that we have come to expect from friendships; the fights, the screaming, the drinking, and the lovely passive aggressive aftermath. It was fake. It was never a real friendship. They weren't able to come over and help you move, or give you a real shoulder to cry upon, or take you to a bar to lament your life. That's what Vonnegut saw in this internet, false connections. I didn't think about it at the time, but when it was over, I headed off to the school computer lab to hop onto the halcion days of Yahoo Chat.
Just like we have done since time immemorial, we haven't listened to the people who try to warn us. I didn't take Kurt's words to heart. I feel I can call him Kurt, we had that kind of connection, he was a famous person speaking and I was an audience member, I totally got a connection out of it. I actually bought a book of his because of it....Cat's Cradle sucked.
He was right though. We have built MySpaces, Facebooks, and Geocities that crumble to the tides of server costs in an attempt to connect to people. To make friends, to be heard.
It's all so fake.
You do not have 467 friends in real life that you can go to the lake together or hit the clubs with. You have 3 or 4 really good friends like that, and you don't need to poke them to get them to reply to you. You don't have to constantly blast my inbox with updates about your trifling minutia of life, I'm already your friend, I by implied contract have to care about the disappointing bagel you had today. You don't have to make a guestbook for your baby, I already agreed to watch him so you could go the the Radiohead concert....again. You can share all of this with me at the coffee shop, or the bar, or at the patio table while we drink poorly mixed drinks and burn meat.
But we don't. Forming that level of intimacy is hard work. It requires commitment and putting up with the hard stuff. Divorces, lost jobs, dead parents, drunken benders, letting them ruin your upholstery as you drive them to the hospital with a nail through their foot, fights over who is right and who deserves what, tolerating that got awful thing they do when they are trying to deal with that itchy soft palate by making that grunting snort noise. You know what the fuck I'm talking about Sarah.
It's easier to be smart on the internet when we can jump over and grab a quick reference from the other tab. There is no challenge to linking to politifact.org and using that as the irrefutable crux of your argument. (Obama never said he was going to veto the Patriot Act, go look it up. Oh, and he was never pro-gay marriage, just civil unions). It's hard to save up for school and bury yourself in dry academic tables about farm production under the Hohenzollern's. It's hard to defend your opinion with your own words.
Thats what I made of myself. I took the easy way to a false sense of emotional connection with someone who responds to my personal ad, and then feel a sense of loss when they stop replying because that person at the drug counter finally asked them out. I took the short reply on an internet forum instead of making myself read Charles Dickens and his impact on Victorian culture. (He made them extra boring. Seriously Dickens, Tale of Two Cities is shit.) I used the easy internet blast shield to hide from the slings and arrows of life. I put a good 15 years of work into building this. I only now am realizing what a waste so much of it was.
Yeah, I get long winded.
