I find this whole Facebook thing sort of interesting. Not Facebook in general, as in, allow me to pontificate about the obvious as every other old fart has who’s recently discovered this thing inhabited by young farts which no doubt will be going out of business any minute now thanks to that recent invasion by said old farts which will drive the young farts to greener pastures. None of us need that. (And I do suspect that there is, somewhere, a real Facebook where people can do Facebookian things without their mothers—or coaches—looking over their shoulder.) No, what I’m talking about is just my own enjoyment of the milieu. Sim Life with real people is how I’ve grokked it. First of all, I get to read cryptic notes people post about their comings and goings, some of them virtual poetry. NoShow, for instance, inhabits a post-symbolist universe that is both haunting and daunting. It’s like news leads from the eighteenth dimension. O’C, who seldom if ever changes his profile picture, apparently shuffles his profile picture a lot behind the scenes, thus causing Facebook to think he’s changed his picture, since every day a new profile picture is announced, but the picture remains the same. All sorts of people tinker with their profiles in general, so you’ll read that so-and-so no longer likes Moby-Dick or something, which makes me wonder how you could have liked Moby-Dick and suddenly, indeed violently, changed your mind about it. Since the underlying point of F (the metanarrative, for you post-contemporarians) appears to be the planting of a flag in the ground announcing your availability for relationships, or unavailability, with clear denotation of who exactly should be looking at your flag, and therefore presumably all the rest of the information being window dressing to attract those whom you wish to attract, I am very disappointed that I don’t seem to see much but the window dressing. Everybody with whom I am friends is either in a stable relationship or a stable lack of relationship. This is rather dull. I want to see people do more hooking up and unhooking (or is it hooking down?). I want to see my golf buddies who’ve been married for thirty years change their interest from women to men. I want more soap opera! You people need to mix it up a little more. Rot is setting in. Life is a banquet, and most poor suckers are starving, Patrick. And, of course, I want more Scrabulous, which has become my latest passion. There are few greater joys in life than a seven-letter word comprising lots of Qs and Zs on a triple-word-score square. On the other hand, I don’t understand a lot of these groups that people join and leave with such frequency. Why did Harrison invite me to join Oregon Trail? Of course, at least that looks like there’s something there. Most of these groups are ephemeral paragroups that only an Old Baudleroo could love (talk about the difference between art and reality). People seem to join and unjoin them simply because there’s nothing on TV to distract them from some aimless computing. More people should be like O’C and get involved with a 5-disk set of Blade Runner. Then again, O’C would get involved with a 5-disk set of Howard the Duck outtakes, so maybe he isn’t the paradigmatic Facebookian. Still, I do like pictures, another Facebook thing, and I’ve even posted a few myself. I don’t want to see a lot of drunken college students (or, worse, high school students), thank you very much, but I like to see people travel, or old pictures of everyone, or whatever. Plus there’s quite useful features like messaging and the like, when I’m too lazy to scuttle over to my normal email account. In sum, the whole enterprise is rather enjoyable. I’ll be happy to befriend you, if such is your inclination, especially if you’re willing to engage in a Scrabulous game or three. Unless you’re Chris Palmer, who has yet to use a word I’ve ever heard of, while all I ever do is go around putting the odd S at the end of things. Jeesh!
Meanwhile, I did a rough recording of the Geopolitics lecture last night, and tonight I’ll edit it and post it. I hate losing something decent, and mostly I did think it was pretty good. There’s lectures and there’s lectures, though. Sometimes I write a thing out, and pretty much just read it, and other times I work from an outline. When I go live, I balance different levels of ad lib and scripted, with differing results. I obviously haven’t gotten a fix on this yet, or maybe it’s that some material I know so intimately all I need is to keep an eye on the organization, for instance my Cur lectures on the social contract, and some is much more precise and specific, like Caveman. At least I try to match the mode to the material. Anyhow, if you’re a View from Tab subscriber, you’ll see it shortly. Or you can just pop over to the podcast page tomorrow and pick it up. Or you can ignore it completely. Whichever. I get paid the same amount either way.
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