I’ve had what feels like a very busy week. I think that means it actually was a very busy week, but I can’t quite be sure Huh.
One symptom: having lots of scattered thoughts which don’t coalesce into anything bloggable. (Not that I orient my internal mental life around blog-coherent thoughts, nosirree.) But I’m gonna blog a bunch of stuff anyway.
TETSUJIN28 AND ONLINE COMMUNITY
I used to spend a hell of a lot of time on RPG.net. It was my main online community, essentially taking over from the old Vic Uni BBS when that bit the dust. In recent years the blog-and-LJ community has become my focus, and time being short as it always is, RPGnet is just an occasional stop to lurk nowadays.
It was a shock to hear that one of the better-known members of the RPGnet community had died in a vehicle accident. Unlike the old Vic BBS and the new blog/LJ-crowd, the RPGnet people were only known to me online (with some exceptions, having met up with a fair number at different events down the years). So hearing that Britt Daniels, online handle tetsujin28, had died was deeply weird. He was a part of my community, but I find it hard to claim I knew him at all. He was a familiar presence with a familiar voice, but… hell, I dunno. All these questions of knowing and connecting through a text-only medium raise themselves again, the same ones that used to send my head spinning in ’94 on the BBS, the same ones that the world at large is wrestling with right now. We’re still in the earliest infancy of understanding what this new communications technology is doing to our understanding of community, of social relationships, of identity. It’s changing stuff, that’s for sure. Big things are afoot.
I like to point to the cellphone and say ‘this is the beginning of the new era’, and I’m deadly serious, even when I say it in a cheesy kinda way. The near-ubiquity of the cellphone *changes what it is to be human*. The digital revolution was huge, but that was the prologue; the cellphone is chapter one.
Anyway. Thoughts spinning out – I said this hasn’t remotely coalesced. I never much got on with Tet online, but he was a part of that community, and I’ll miss his presence every time I drop back in. I wish him peace.
WE SIT IN JUDGEMENT
At the film fest, I watched ‘The Heart of the Game’, a really rather good doco on a girls’ basketball team in Seattle. I might talk about it in a later post, as it provoked a lot of thought in different directions. One scene I want to mention now: a girl in the team ended up the centre of a regional controversy, and the documentary included some radio talkback where listeners called in to express their opinions on the girl and the decisions being made around her. It was a scene explicitly designed to get a rise out of the audience, and it worked: How could these people say these things? By what right can they pass judgement on this girl? Whatever happened to ‘judge not lest ye be judged’?
I was thinking about it later on, and it occurred to me that a feature of our current discourse is that we are constantly called to sit in judgement on others.
Media outlets, politicians and other public figures are constantly appealing to us, implicitly or explicitly, to pass judgement. This goes beyond just seeking our opinions – we are encouraged to act like the apocryphal audience in the Roman arena, marking with thumb up or down the fate of the defeated.
In fact, I’m beginning to think that’s a key part of the technology that structures current public discourse. We are encouraged to have an opinion, and because we buy into that, we walk right into the hands of the opinion-makers. The propagation of rhetoric would fall apart without an eagerness to pass judgement.
Where is the counter-value to this? Where are the voices in society asking that we not sit in judgement, that we seek better information, that we keep our minds open to different explanations for what we see? There are some, but they are meek voices, and they do not carry much weight. Is this inevitable? Is the eagerness to judge something fundamental to ‘human nature’ or a product of our current socialisation?
[I’m well aware that I’m here arguing the precise opposite of my argument in comments with Andrew a couple weeks back, where I said that holding back on passing judgement for more facts was a poor way of coping with the world. I still think that. I guess I’m containing multitudes again, or there’s some hypocrisy going on somewhere. Like I say, not yet coalesced.]
CLOTHES FOR THE TALL DUDE
Why is it so damn hard to find some casual trousers with long legs and a medium waist without going to a tailor? There’s a lot of us tall skinny guys around. What’s the story? I’ve had it with poor-fitting clothes, but I’m not seeing a lot of other options. (This is the true and actual reason why I wear jeans all the time. They come in a size that fits me.)
19 thoughts on “Thought Collection”
Comments are closed.
Online communities are weird. I’ve also experienced the strange disconnected grief of someone I’ve only known as text on a screen dying.
I’ve also experienced the weird thrill of seeing my name in the “thank-you” list of a short film written & directed by someone I’ve never met. It turned up in my mail one day on a DVD-R and the credit came with no warning.
Then there’s the recent experience of being asked “How did you two friends meet?” and the two of us spontaneously coming up with a complete lie on the spot because we were both embarrassed to say “over the internet.”
I agree re: cellphone importance. I say this all the time – we still have no idea of the true impact of the cellphone revolution, and the simple fact that soon just about anyone will be able to speak to just about anyone else, anywhere in the world, instantly, just by knowing the right combination of numbers. Nor do we know what comes AFTER the cellphone revolution, with hitherto unforseen advances in communications technology.
I love it. I can’t help it.
Why is it so damn hard to find some casual trousers with long legs and a medium waist without going to a tailor?
Learn to sew and make your own. That’s what I did, and I’ve never looked back. You can even borrow my sewing machine, if you like.
Also, I know that there’s a Big and Tall shop in Auckland. Maybe next time you’re up there give the place a look.
I’m saddened to hear of your friend’s death, it can feel strange to grieve for a person whose absence doesn’t change one’s interactions with the world much.
I think text-only friends are an old feature of distributed literate communities. I bet Talmud commentators had them, and theorising monks from different communities, let alone the written melee of secular academic debate that long predates e-mail. Epistolatory relationships are old news, and people used to copy out bits from other people’s letters to send on to new correspondents, it was just slower by mail and a bit more work than cut-and-paste.
For example: my maternal line family has been distributed over more than one continent since some were early settlers in Maine and yet through writing we have remained in touch with each other; giving each other our input and advice (we’re all full of theories), sending our children to each other to have their minds broadened and to meet eligible geeks (and thus ending up swapping back and forth who lives where). Because we are related it is easy to see we are a community, which probably has made it easier to keep on keeping on with the communication, and keeping on with that has helped us remain culturally similar to each other such that we have stuff to say to each other. My kids have sent email to their Canadian 4th cousin and they can’t even read, did her Mum (my 3rd cousin who I have met: one sunny afternoon in 1978) think this odd? No, it’s deeply familiar behaviour. We wrote letters for the first 330-odd years, email as well since I can remember, and now some blogging too, but I don’t think what we write on makes much difference, it’s more that we do.
Written relationships were slower before, and communities perhaps more difficult to join, but how much difference does speed and ease make? When I meet a relative from letters for the first time it feels just like meeting an online friend. And when they die, it is sad in a slightly strange way; some of the richness that the unexplored world used to hold is gone.
(Were you on scfbbs when I, Minerva, was?)
Steph: the shop in question has been helpful but doesn’t have anything. They emphasise the big more than the tall…
Susan: How much difference does speed make? A great deal, I think. These aren’t fully-developed theories, but I do have a strong sense that the speed of communication makes the communications technology much more an extension of the ‘self’ than old written communication, which alters the psychology of the experience. Add in the ease of massive interconnected discussion and you end up with something very different from the old; probably a difference of degree rather than kind, but such a difference that it has real effects. That’s my notion, anyway. In any case, you’re right to pull me up on underselling older forms of such communities – I forget about them when I talk about this stuff, and I shouldn’t.
(And yes, I remember Minerva, although I don’t think we had any big interactions. I was Pakrat, first logged in in ’93 and became a regular in ’94.)
(Oh good lord, I had no idea… and in my head Pakrat was short. Funny; we also haven’t had any big interactions here, on nzrag, or even in reality yet, despite liking many of the same people and doing some of the same stuff. But I’d miss you if you died.)
I emphathise with the tall-clothing issue. I just bought a $70 tshirt because it was LONG and didn’t bare unintended midriff. Things should always come LONG. Short people are inferior and should have to take things UP, ’cause it’s usually impossible to take them down 🙂
Being short and fat (and therefore inferior?) is hard too. I gotta buy big to fit the boobs/hips but then the shoulders are too wide, tops are too long, and trousers need at least 20cm off. Really plays havoc with ‘fitted’ stuff.
Perhaps I can save my cut-off leg bits and sew them onto the bottom of your trousers? That way we BOTH win 🙂
I asked John where he got his trousers from and he said Kathmandu. Maybe I should stop asking, he seems to buy everything from there.
i don’t think clothes from shops are meant for real people. but i just hate walking around work naked. so i go with illfitting. occassionally i luck out and something fits like a glove. but then i usually ruin it by shrinking it or stretching it during the washing process.
I think that speed makes a great deal of difference, because the whole nature of the communication changes. I believe that the immediacy of it changes the whole way we communicate. For one thing, email has the potential to be much more two-way communication than the old-fashioned epistolatory relationships. I refer to swapping email as a conversation, but I’d never refer to letter writing that way.
The portability of it is also a huge factor. I have recently had an email conversation with a friend. This was a fully two-way communication, sometimes with the space of just a few minutes between emails. In this time, she shifted house from Texas to New York and then flew to Finland for a holiday.
If this had been a snail mail conversation, I would have sent a letter to Texas. With any luck, US Mail would have forwarded it to New York in time for her to read it by the time she was home from Finland. Or it might never have arrived. I also doubt that either us would have written letters which said, in their entirity, “You lucky bastard!” or “DRUGS!” or whatever.
This is without even getting into mailing lists and other online communities, where people from many different parts of the world can come together to discuss macrame or slasher movies in near-real time.
I remember Minerva from the BBS. Susan, you’re related to Ed Lynden-Bell, right? Like cousins or something? I was Exterminator. (I always remember meeting Tom Crosby for the first time and him blinking at me and saying, “You don’t LOOK like an exterminator!” I still don’t. No one ever got the joke behind that alias.)
Clothes: my pants are always too long, so I only shop at places which will take up the legs for free. I always buy XL or XXL t-shirts and shirts that are too big because I hate tight clothing, even when I’m not as fat as I am now.
Woah, another name from the BBS. (Susan, I was on there as “Finn”).
And Pearce: no one got to joke because no one else read Burroughs =)
Aaaah, the BBS. What funtimes, what memories…. 🙂 I was ‘fish’ on the BBS, by the way. Duh.
Actually, I started as ‘fish130’ for some random reason, then morphed to fish when Lordkarl revealed he had the password to that username. Cheeky bugger held out on me for ages 🙂
You was fish130 because you signed up during COMP130
I recalls everything!
🙂
The BBS is being remembered all over the place at the moment…
(1) BBS
Wow, BBS memories. Crikey! It was strange, it was crazy, but it was very *right* for the time.
Susan: I was also there, as Robroy. I am also the person who was in your phil tutorial.
(2) Clothes
I’ve found that tramping shops are very good for getting practical wearble clothes that last. Sadly, they tend to cost a bit.
Scott: They didn’t need to read; it was the first line of dialogue in the Naked Lunch movie.
(1) BBS – I was there too, firstly as ‘ethel’ then ‘aardvark’. As Morgue says on a subsequent post, the BBS seems to be popping up everywhere.
(2) Clothing – I think most of it is designed for someone either taller than average for their dress size, or skinnier than average for their height, but not people who are so tall that they’re TALL. I have absolutely no problem with pants, the hems all seem to come to the right place, my big bugbear is sleeves. Full-length sleeves often seems to be about 1 inch too short for my arms.
Oh and one other thing, following up from your passing judgement comment – is it just me or does anyone else find that One News we want your opinion crap kind of insulting and pathetic? I notice the current one (so far as I can make out from my limited TV viewing, so if I’m getting this wrong, I apologise) is about daycare or stay at home mums, and you appear to get to cast a vote on which is better. Maybe, just maybe, instead of soliciting yes/no judgements from a bunch of random people, one news should examine some of the factors behind why mums (I noted also that the poll appears to be about mums, like children apparently only have one parent) make the decisions they do, e.g I’m sure the current housing/rental market might just have a wee bit to do with parents’ decision-making about why they choose to stay at home or not, rather than just what parents think is ‘better for the child/morally right’ but then I guess if you’re a TV news presenter earning that much you might not be able to cope with the idea that economic factors come into consideration when people decide whether or not to use daycare.
But I guess that wouldn’t fit into a ten second soundbite, or fulfill the purpose of providing the illusion to people that their opinion is important to one news.
I heart you, Janet.