Scouring the murky parts of cyberspace.
Or more appropriately, maybe I need to rework the headline here/tagline from Alien (1979) to say something like, “In [cyberspace], no one can hear you [unless you] scream.” Which is not to say ALL CAPS, ALL THE TIME, but is to say, quantity trumps quality (or volume drowns out nuance ). It’s a topic I was reminded of this morning when reading Walter Kirn’s single sentence condemnation of social media:
And ‘social media,’ which is pretty much what everyone is doing now instead of reading, and also instead of doing pretty much everything kind of like reading, including sewing (PERSONAL SEWING LIKE THE BORDERS BOOK CHAIN IS FOREVER LOST, PEOPLE!!!) is not only the most heinous misnomer in history and one that we should have laughed right off stage immediately (instead of all cheerfully self-lobotomizing and getting on board with the whole disgusting invasive-market-research-posing-as-“helping-people-connect” thing so as to “build platforms” for our “serious” work, our precious books and films; C YA!!!!), its essential vision of the human self as a tagging, thumbs-upping, status posting, uploading-home movies of the dog to youporn, I mean youtube, though, actually, same dif., and hey check out my new… I forgot… how do you spell forgot? I’ll use Spell-Check (how does Spell Check work again?) has got be the thinnest, crappiest vision of our being, our nature, our spirit, that we’ve ever self-servingly wandered into and lacked the truth-telling capacity to go “Yuck, this reeks! This stinks! It’s not even funny anymore how gross and stinky this is!” and yank ourselves back out of and head off for the showers.
[via “Hey, Intellectuals! Hey, My Fellow Weenies”]
