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“Did those poems of mine send out / Certain men the English shot?” Yeats mused in a later poem, thinking of his inflammatory Irish nationalist verse.
These days, little gestures can have large unintended consequences for anybody. It was Art Miami that got Kate Kretz’s “Blessed Art Thou” on the TV news, but the simple act of sending the jpeg to her list had gotten the image spread around on the blogs a week prior to that, and the global debate was on. I received the jpeg and simply thought, “Oh, how nice, Kate’s done a followup to ‘The Sacred Ovaries.’” I don’t think I even acknowledged receipt. Somebody else posted it, and somebody else copied it.
This is why I don’t post a certain number of these 1500-word screeds even as friends-only after I have written them; they seem innocuous at the time of writing, until I think further about just how much is consequence-provoking these days.
Fortunately, someone else will always have expressed the same opinions, only in a followup comment posted on another blog altogether. It is a pleasure to discover stories from far-flung locales that confirm that none of us are truly solo productions; some insights are just less common than others, just as some aesthetic tastes are less common. This is scarcely an elitist remark, since the scarce opinion or preference may simply be godawful by any rational standard; or it may simply be idiosyncratic. I mentioned once the growing quantity of worthwhile music that has a fan base worldwide, the problem being that two of the fans are in Moldova, and three of the fans in Bolivia, and one of the fans in Saskatchewan and another in Western Australia. Touring the clubs is out of the question.
I’ve gone back and deleted references to usernames from some of these posts because I realize that even the unselfconsciously globalized users of this medium don’t seem to understand that they are posting for the entire planet to read, not just the reader base they intend to reach. (This has always been the case with books and recordings, but now every computer-literate person on earth has that capacity; as in the slogan of, I think, the Technorati blog-search, “55 million blogs. Some of them have to be good.”) One of my favorite articulate journals has just been deleted entirely from LJ, and this seems to be commonplace, given the number of strikethroughs I see in usernames that survive as comments on other people’s blogs. They could simply delete the entries they wish they had never posted, or recategorize the whole journal as friends-only, but for some reason taking the whole thing down is the simplest solution.
People can spend their whole lives regretting being overlooked, and then when they are discovered by the world, they discover that they wish they could have remained anonymous. Any creator provokes responses that are other than what had been anticipated (including, most often, total indifference), but those who take the global condition for granted don’t seem to understand just how distressingly and delightfully various the globe really is. When they find out, it frightens them.
It is sometimes disconcerting to be reminded of one’s place in the margins; I have never had the vast majority of the dreams being listed as the most commonplace ones on lizjonesbooks’ catalogue of dream typology, though I haven’t been able to list one that doesn’t turn out to be shared by some other people contributing to that list. It is enough to make one wonder whether the world might indeed be an immense aggregation of cognitive minorities, so that vast though the major groupings may be, apart from the basic biological functions and impulses no single view of the world is shared by more than half the planet. A moment’s reflection makes me realize that this can’t possibly be true; just the global economy probably requires the functional consensus, reluctant or not, of more than half the world population, and the size of any cognitive grouping all depends on how you define and categorize certain core beliefs. (In other words, make the phrasing general or ambiguous enough, and a large majority will express agreement. But the big ideas, which the sociobiologists are pleased to call memes, mutate to fit different ecological niches, and it is disturbing as well as pleasing to discover what has become of them in a different habitat.) Even though the reaction is irrational, the sheer range of diversity revealed by the internet makes me think of the human species as a huge statistical improbability, like Lake Wobegon where all the children are above average.
I could go on to rehearse the old sociology-of-knowledge model of cognitive packages and how they are adapted, but that would ruin a perfectly good closing line, now wouldn't it?
These days, little gestures can have large unintended consequences for anybody. It was Art Miami that got Kate Kretz’s “Blessed Art Thou” on the TV news, but the simple act of sending the jpeg to her list had gotten the image spread around on the blogs a week prior to that, and the global debate was on. I received the jpeg and simply thought, “Oh, how nice, Kate’s done a followup to ‘The Sacred Ovaries.’” I don’t think I even acknowledged receipt. Somebody else posted it, and somebody else copied it.
This is why I don’t post a certain number of these 1500-word screeds even as friends-only after I have written them; they seem innocuous at the time of writing, until I think further about just how much is consequence-provoking these days.
Fortunately, someone else will always have expressed the same opinions, only in a followup comment posted on another blog altogether. It is a pleasure to discover stories from far-flung locales that confirm that none of us are truly solo productions; some insights are just less common than others, just as some aesthetic tastes are less common. This is scarcely an elitist remark, since the scarce opinion or preference may simply be godawful by any rational standard; or it may simply be idiosyncratic. I mentioned once the growing quantity of worthwhile music that has a fan base worldwide, the problem being that two of the fans are in Moldova, and three of the fans in Bolivia, and one of the fans in Saskatchewan and another in Western Australia. Touring the clubs is out of the question.
I’ve gone back and deleted references to usernames from some of these posts because I realize that even the unselfconsciously globalized users of this medium don’t seem to understand that they are posting for the entire planet to read, not just the reader base they intend to reach. (This has always been the case with books and recordings, but now every computer-literate person on earth has that capacity; as in the slogan of, I think, the Technorati blog-search, “55 million blogs. Some of them have to be good.”) One of my favorite articulate journals has just been deleted entirely from LJ, and this seems to be commonplace, given the number of strikethroughs I see in usernames that survive as comments on other people’s blogs. They could simply delete the entries they wish they had never posted, or recategorize the whole journal as friends-only, but for some reason taking the whole thing down is the simplest solution.
People can spend their whole lives regretting being overlooked, and then when they are discovered by the world, they discover that they wish they could have remained anonymous. Any creator provokes responses that are other than what had been anticipated (including, most often, total indifference), but those who take the global condition for granted don’t seem to understand just how distressingly and delightfully various the globe really is. When they find out, it frightens them.
It is sometimes disconcerting to be reminded of one’s place in the margins; I have never had the vast majority of the dreams being listed as the most commonplace ones on lizjonesbooks’ catalogue of dream typology, though I haven’t been able to list one that doesn’t turn out to be shared by some other people contributing to that list. It is enough to make one wonder whether the world might indeed be an immense aggregation of cognitive minorities, so that vast though the major groupings may be, apart from the basic biological functions and impulses no single view of the world is shared by more than half the planet. A moment’s reflection makes me realize that this can’t possibly be true; just the global economy probably requires the functional consensus, reluctant or not, of more than half the world population, and the size of any cognitive grouping all depends on how you define and categorize certain core beliefs. (In other words, make the phrasing general or ambiguous enough, and a large majority will express agreement. But the big ideas, which the sociobiologists are pleased to call memes, mutate to fit different ecological niches, and it is disturbing as well as pleasing to discover what has become of them in a different habitat.) Even though the reaction is irrational, the sheer range of diversity revealed by the internet makes me think of the human species as a huge statistical improbability, like Lake Wobegon where all the children are above average.
I could go on to rehearse the old sociology-of-knowledge model of cognitive packages and how they are adapted, but that would ruin a perfectly good closing line, now wouldn't it?
