Thanks to the internet, you can say anything. And anything you have to say, you can look up and find other people who are either (A) saying basically the same thing or are (B) interested in the thing you’re saying. There’s a market niche demographic slice-a-mahoozy for whatever happens to be your bag. Because the unthinkable becomes suddenly articulable - if not socially acceptable or practical maybe so much outside of the confines of the web - you’re suddenly free to access perceptual states and you have the data to fill them out and make them seem real. But somehow, because of that near-universal accessibility of information, that ability to find someone else talking about something you’re into, it has a way of backfiring. That both nothing is sacred and nothing is off-limits, in a certain sense, has a weird way of leveling everything out.
With the internet, all content basically becomes equal. The content becomes less the point than how you access the content: from what kind of OS and browser you use to what kinds of psychological lenses, filters and paradigms you apply. And it’s all for sale: it all has a dollars and cents value per word and per link. Some words become literally worth more than others because there are more ad slots associated with them. The human mind works the same way though, naturally. It values certain images and concepts more than others for sheer survival reasons. Our perceptual instruments, our thought processes, our linguistic methods all lock together…
Marketing segments, demographics, is there an advertiser who wants to associate themselves with words and phrases I’m using, so that they can subtly or overtly manipulate their meaning? Should the marketplace be the final arbiter of meaning, of who says what, of how it’s heard and delivered? I don’t necessarily think so, but here I am slinging words for money - a little bit like Dickens, but not much.
Is the truth worth a damn in today’s market? In a world where you can find a YouTube channel on any damn thing, nothing seems all that worth looking up. You can take one of several paths, informationally, I think. You can seek bigger and bigger hits, bigger payoffs, bigger titillations. But with a search engine, you always just keep searching. You never find it. You’re never done. You never get to sign off on anything, and say, I’m done searching. Thank you.
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ASSOCIATED CONTENT @TMBCHR (Auto-Generated)
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7 Comments
Relevant, but from another direction altogether
http://www.timboucher.com/journal/2007/10/27/google-attacks-paid-links/
we never stop searching
Kind of shows the pointlessness of searching for anything. You eventually either become more and more depressed, or realize your own innate wholeness.
Sometimes this happens to me while I’m on the internet. I wonder why I feel so disconnected to what I’m searching for and I realize it’s because I’m full, I have to push the plate away and leave the table.
We never do stop searching. The Internet seems to be a false oracle. But a signpost nonetheless, to an oracle, the true oracle we seek. We’re always tempted to assume that we have “assumed control”, we have assumed control. But even the next oracle we have sought for so long, is only the *next* oracle. How many oracles are there? It makes me think, “the answer” is only a matter of scale. Humans can plug into the answer — hell, we already are “plugged in”. Plug yourself into the idea that there is no “oracle”.
What if control itself is nothing more than ephemera? Won’t come as a surprise to anybody here, but what if there is no such thing as control? Wherein, where are our little liberal niches we’ve been promised , for instance? I remember being told the Internet would bring me closer to my “niche” and I would feel more fulfilled and whole, because all the sociologists in 1996 were basically just excited about being able to see for the first time in their lives a 14.4k image get transmitted from some primitive server out there, “somewhere”. Weren’t we all!?
But I remember on NPR back in the mid 90’s, some liberalese apologist arguing about the importance of the internet and keeping it akin to “The Wild West” as opposed to “regulated like wall street”, because “think of all the gay kids out there who use newsgroups to get the emotional solace they need.” I think today we refer to such shit as “LULZ”. Or something. I don’t fucking know.
Truth is about the Internet, is that we were humans about it — and obviously still are humans about it. Humans first, humans second and humans ad infinitum. I for one kind of believed I could singlehandedly make the Iraq “war” cease when I started “blogging” in the early two-awts. I really did. I thought, bought into and bled the belief that just a few of us could “effect” and “affect” “change”. I thought I could march on the motherfucking streets with a bunch of other people and it would project our value onto the world — because when we came home from our “marches”, the Internet said so — as in “OMFG they DIDN’T cover the march fairly at all!”. The anger and DISBELIEF gave it all a purpose. Now the motherfuckers are covering any and all protest they can — now that they don’t matter. In other words, protests now matter for TV coverage because they no longer matter and protests have been denuded of any and all substance. IN OTHER WORDS. like a bunch of chickens feeding, “they” knew it would go like this. Why? Because EACH AND EVERY ONE OF US lives in some kind of 60’s social-bonded-to-personal paradigm whether we like it or not. Somebody somewhere — a lot of dudes and ladies fo sho, never bought in. Felt above, felt beyond. The true revolutionaries, indeed, are those who rule the roost now — unlike those popularly touted as such. Are they not right in believing so? Where has “intelligence” or “intuition” gotten the lump sum of our ranks anywhere thus far? Add in the “Internet” to “Intelligence” and “Intuition” and you’ve got yourself some kind of alliterative joke. Me me me.
I I I
And has not the Internet turned into a joke when it comes to spending any time?
They’re covered to show people how helpless they are. According to the below it’s all over anyway. It’s good to know it’s over so we can move on.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_XgkeTanCGI
I know exactly what you mean about being full and pushing the plate away, Julia. Over the past year I’ve begun associating less with writers, bloggers and plain old people whose line of thought runs too close to my own. Not out of any mean spirit of rejection, but because communication comes easily with people like that, and it feels more important (albeit infinitely more frustrating) to try and communicate with people who are different.
One fear I have about the internet (and electronic gadgets in general) is that they will (or do) train people to live solipsistically (fake word!), only acknowledging things that they’re familiar and comfortable with. Which doesn’t mean we need to be constantly confronted with things that challenge us or make us uncomfortable, but the more of our perception becomes electronically mediated, the easier it is for us to lose common decency toward each other and just seal ourselves away. I never listen to MP3 players outside my home (sometimes I break this rule) for this reason; too many others in my generation use them to block out other people and the parts of the world they dislike. As for how this ties into the internet. Imagine you’ve walked into a miraculous, magical room, where luminous writing appears on the walls. At first, you’re enthralled; the writing is beautiful, captivating. After a while, you notice that the only writings that ever appears on the walls are your own thoughts. How much value does such a room have? I’d say it has some; it may help you order your thoughts and express them more clearly. But in terms of growth, and good old human contact, you’re essentially talking to yourself.