On Tuesday someone I follow on twitter announced they were leaving having been driven off through tweets received. This blew up really quickly and so I was able to glean very little in the limited time I had access to their timeline before the account was deleted. Being a timeline only of their tweets, I couldn't see what abuse or menace they were on the receiving end, so I could very well have the wrong reason they found their back to the wall. But I think it was over the use of a single word.
The word 'banter' in its original meaning has the sense of light-hearted verbal exchange. Certainly nothing aimed at wounding. But the word has I think developed a bit more edge as it is used as an excuse to defend hurtful barbs. This is particularly true of team sports dressing rooms, where the cut and thrust of banter is perceived as both a team bonding instrument but also a tool for toughening up. The logic running something like if you can't take the competitive asperity of a dressing room, you probably won't be able to survive in professional sports. It's a proving ground of sorts. A verbal assault course that has to be bested. It's a completely non-sensical argument, since a team dressing room is absolutely the place to retain grudges, because you are forced together with people you probably don't like every day with no escape. As to team building, how many soccer clubs banned card schools that were supposed to help bonding, only for the playboy millionaires to have huge gambling debts with team mates that only ruptured any sense of unity? So much is excused as being 'just a bit of banter' and players often claim they love 'a bit of banter' with the crowd, until they lose it and respond with a gesture that lands them in trouble with the governing body, or worse. I don't think Eric Cantona saw it as just a 'bit of banter' when he leapt into the crowd with a karate kick at an opposition fan who had been baiting him.
So the word itself has perhaps become degraded from its original sense. The ex-twitterer didn't even use the word 'banter', but the slang foreshortening of it to 'bants'. I think the tweet was something like "just bants". I was completely unaware of this idiom and had no idea that's what they were referring to. So I went online to look it up in that gospel of idiomatic usage "Urban Dictionary". I saw that 'bants' was just a shortened slangy version of 'banter', perfect for the cramped language use encouraged by 140 characters on twitter. You shave all of a single character by such usage.
But I'm an old hand at referencing "Urban Dictionary". I know full well that there is likely to be more than one interpretation of any slang or idiomatic term or phrase listed there, and indeed validation and veracity are, as is the prescription of our age, voted on as to confirm or reject. Indeed 'bants' has another meaning and I suspect it was this that brought down the opprobrium on the tweeter's head. (As is often the case, there are actually a couple of minor variations on this second meaning, as UD always manages to convey a sense that any verbal explanation has had its vowels and consonants mangled in the telling as is the wont of the generations who speak without moving their upper lip and that the transcription on UD reflects this local and regional variation).
I'm not going to reproduce the alternative meanings, you can look them up yourself if you're so minded, but it seemed apparent to me that here was a difference between a UK English interpretation of the word 'bants' from an American English one, where the words is actually an acronym and its letter 'N' is highly charged as reiterated once again only this very week in the UK by Jeremy Clarkson's grovelling apology for using it and in the US, by a professional sports team owner stirring up the whole race issue with his own players and abdicating his right to own just such a sports team.
I knew neither meaning of the word as indeed I'd never heard the word before. I think it highly likely the tweeter only knew of the UK English one and thus fell foul of an unintended reverberation in its use. Is that a defence? I have absolutely no idea to be honest, in such a fast changing world of slang and idiom it simply isn't possible to stay on top of every single new word and phrase. "Urban Dictionary" being a crowdsourced compendium of such usage only encourages faster coinage of new idioms and all are of course completely unsubstantiated.
But and this is a big but, you put yourself and your opinions out in public on platforms like Twitter, you better be prepared to stand by and back up every word you post. Because if you put stuff out there that you are not in full comprehension of its meanings, shades, imputations, undertones and overtones, then you expose yourself to all manner of challenges. Should those challenges be vicious, insulting and cruel? Of course not, but they will be and possibly more since the current state of both legislation and law enforcement seems totally overwhelmed by the virtual phenomenon. Which brings me back to the dressing room. It's not how I would choose to forge a bonded, united team environment, but at present that is the state of affairs. You stand up and back yourself with a rhinoceros-plated hide, or you go under. It is the same in social media. And getting your language right is a crucial part.
Showing posts with label Internet. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Internet. Show all posts
Thursday, 8 May 2014
Tuesday, 4 December 2012
The Internet - An Example of Adam Smith's Market In Action
I use Google Blogger. In fact I've used it right now as you are reading this very post on it. Me and millions of others. And then there's those who use WordPress , Tumblr and other platforms. 156 million publicly viewable blogs in 2011.
There's a court case in the UK, a man is suing for being libelled on a blog. One of the parties he is trying to sue is Google, for providing the blog tool in which he claimed to have been libelled. The argument runs that as soon as the potential libel had been reported, Google should have taken the offending blog down. Google's case is that it is not a publisher, therefore it has no causative association with the libel. I'm no lawyer, but it seems to me these two arguments do not quite address the other head on, because they are battling over words and definitions; a publisher can be included in a libel claim. A company that is not deemed a publisher cannot. If Google is providing a universal software, is it actually a publisher or a facilitator?
Leaving these finer points of legal definition behind, the thought struck me that in washing their hands of any responsibility, yet providing a worldwide platform for anyone who wants to give their thoughts to the world, Google is approaching the status of the market as outlined by the Eighteenth Century economist Adam Smith.
Smith posited that buyers and sellers each trying to maximise their own gains through trade, creates a market that maximises benefit for all society. His famous quote is that such a market functions "as if by the operation of an invisible hand". That is the intricacies of the myriad of interactions are beyond the analytical conception of any one individual; quite simply, the picture is too big to see.
There are many criticisms of this concept, from the fact that it is clearly a metaphor and that is no literal guiding hand of the market, through to its complete amorality that takes no account of things like social costs, both physical and human. What it suggests to me is that economics is a bogus academic discipline and with guiding concepts such as the invisible (unknowable) hand, is it any surprise that economists and bankers in particular are about as effective as long-term weather forecasters?
But returning to the Google case, their defence seems to me to be akin to the Invisible Hand of the free market. Google seem to be saying they help service the online market by providing platforms, but are powerless to control what is transacted online between bloggers and blog readers. I'm not sure what I think of their argument, but instinctively I am suspicious of the Invisible Hand because it allows its adherents to throw their arms up their arms in helplessness and deny any culpability. Google is saying it isn't an individual and only individuals make potentially libellous statements. But then equally corporations cannot claim to have been libelled and had their feelings hurt when they are accused of various things, because only individuals can have their feelings hurt, not corporations. What corporations mean is they have their brand image damaged. They can't claim to be an individual or a corporation depending on which suits them.
There's a court case in the UK, a man is suing for being libelled on a blog. One of the parties he is trying to sue is Google, for providing the blog tool in which he claimed to have been libelled. The argument runs that as soon as the potential libel had been reported, Google should have taken the offending blog down. Google's case is that it is not a publisher, therefore it has no causative association with the libel. I'm no lawyer, but it seems to me these two arguments do not quite address the other head on, because they are battling over words and definitions; a publisher can be included in a libel claim. A company that is not deemed a publisher cannot. If Google is providing a universal software, is it actually a publisher or a facilitator?
Leaving these finer points of legal definition behind, the thought struck me that in washing their hands of any responsibility, yet providing a worldwide platform for anyone who wants to give their thoughts to the world, Google is approaching the status of the market as outlined by the Eighteenth Century economist Adam Smith.
Smith posited that buyers and sellers each trying to maximise their own gains through trade, creates a market that maximises benefit for all society. His famous quote is that such a market functions "as if by the operation of an invisible hand". That is the intricacies of the myriad of interactions are beyond the analytical conception of any one individual; quite simply, the picture is too big to see.
There are many criticisms of this concept, from the fact that it is clearly a metaphor and that is no literal guiding hand of the market, through to its complete amorality that takes no account of things like social costs, both physical and human. What it suggests to me is that economics is a bogus academic discipline and with guiding concepts such as the invisible (unknowable) hand, is it any surprise that economists and bankers in particular are about as effective as long-term weather forecasters?
But returning to the Google case, their defence seems to me to be akin to the Invisible Hand of the free market. Google seem to be saying they help service the online market by providing platforms, but are powerless to control what is transacted online between bloggers and blog readers. I'm not sure what I think of their argument, but instinctively I am suspicious of the Invisible Hand because it allows its adherents to throw their arms up their arms in helplessness and deny any culpability. Google is saying it isn't an individual and only individuals make potentially libellous statements. But then equally corporations cannot claim to have been libelled and had their feelings hurt when they are accused of various things, because only individuals can have their feelings hurt, not corporations. What corporations mean is they have their brand image damaged. They can't claim to be an individual or a corporation depending on which suits them.
Sunday, 3 May 2009
What I love about the internet is ... its desultory predictability
"Scores to settle. Paying back for any wrongs done to me. Debits and credits. Double entry, the Damon approved method of account keeping. I am extended a whole heap of head butts for lavishing my asperity upon. George. Lawrence. The Fuzz. Whichever spotty herberts passed on their STDs. Another unknown, whose credit card I pilfered, which itself turned out to have been hooky. Oh yes, plenteous and condign, but can any disperse my rage ? A rage against myself. For I dwell without any hope of ever leaving this archipelago. I endure the prospect of forever having no love. Forced to subsist without lust even. So to fill in the yawning time on Death Row here, I have to wrest some modicum of control back for myself. Seemingly, that only comes from revenge, so enervated am I. My body is scarcely alive to me, until it is profaned. So is it any surprise I oblige my one carnal passion, that of vengeance ? The one that still sparks my sentience, the one that antiphons any endocrinal despatches. The goal that gets me out of a strange bed in the morning. Reprisal is next to reprise in the dictionary.
You know what I love about the internet ? No, indulge me a little. It’s worth staying with this one I promise. Good. Well, would you not agree that it’s a free-for-all tabula rasa that wraps itself around the circumference of the earth ? Anyone can create and contribute and etch their initials on to it. But not like some sad old patchwork quilt of remembrance. This has all the vigour of grafitti artists spooring their signature. Ooh, get you, their ‘tags’ ! Though for self-preservation purposes, I can’t leave any obvious brume of self, still it’s finally possible for me to flame on undimmed. I am alive and kicking. Although at several removes, so that I do not invite disclosure and death. The Net amplifies me sufficiently, to cast off the shackles from my mind, even if my body remains earthbound. It respires me some breath. I can partake once again of civilisation. In the great debate.
You want learned knowledge on arcana, you can, albeit unreliably and often unattributed, study it on the Web. It’s a bit hit or miss, but hey as I discovered back in college, further reinforced by Corfu’s infuriatingly patchwork library, that’s how modern epistemology shakes out. Though to be honest with you, I still favour the solidity of the bound tome for the purposes of culling knowledge. There is no such thing as an achingly beautiful website. Just the arterial red and blue of venous hypertext. But really I’m well beyond being forged in a crucible of knowledge. I only now require to be informed, rather than instructed. Intelligence not as a faculty, but as data. I seek after a full quiver of missiles. So to that end, I relish the delights of blogs and message boards. Where I can eavesdrop undetected, on what taxes the mind of my countryfolk and keep in touch with my hearth. The Net as my home from home if you will. Yet what is even more familiar and reassuring to me, are people’s personal homepages. It feels like visiting neighbours and friends, only without the burden of reciprocation. I often feel like I’m Santa plopping down through their chimneys, helping myself to the milk and digestives left out for me, without compunction to leave them any gifts in return. All of this should facilitate me remission. Of being with the grown ups for the brief, glorious interim of my sojourn. Yet lamentably, I discern the increasing infantilizing of all my race back home. These charter ticketed kids are apt emissaries for their elders. With full undiplomatic immunity from consequence.
Forgive me, all that might betoken an antagonism on my part towards the virtual beast. Far from it, what I most cherish is that this autonomous space for our minds to be writ large, this great collective consciousness, has evidenced a return to form. A reversion to type. A newly conquered universe now awash with our detritus and refuse. To wit, for all our contortions of higher aspirations, we soon corkscrew and gravitate around the twin pillars of commerce and sex. These remain our obsession. The largest ever, ongoing worldwide poll demonstrates it to be so. A secondary control test poll, that of the camera phone backs this up. So stick two fleshy digits up to the Classical Greeks and their paeans to the higher human spirit.
In regard of sex, all our experiences and feelings, such as they persist, are as if mediated for us by a silicon membrane anyway. We are all wraiths wondering spectrally through some sort of ectoplasmic dreamscape. Copulation, despite it supposedly being the most involved, physically-centred activity, is now vaporous and insensate. Nothing is present in actuality, on which to hang one’s emotions on to. Relationship is a mere bump, a pedestrian road rage not even meriting the term ‘impact’. More just a diffusing wake. If we danced, if we oscillated, so as to light up our beings with excited sparks or vapour trails, I might settle for that. But we don’t. We are inert. This is how we approach each other. This is what we have reduced ourselves to. This is why the internet is so right. The unsustainable economy of sex in real life, now pays off in spades in the virtual. A realigned love triune, of camera, fingered keyboard and fibre optics. We are each sat alone in front of our mousepads, but at least my isolation is elevated by having the sun beating down on me, quaffing cocktails poolside. How is your dreary fantasy backgrounded ?
Same thing commerce too. Convenience shopping from the convenience of your own home. Hunting down rapacious desires like big game, serves to indulge the predatory in people. And getting involved in on-line auctions renders them combatants in a virtual joust. Or a poker game of who blinks first. For we are all traffickers, recycling our superfluous lives on e-Bay. Piqued by absurd jealousy if they are outbid by an anonymous stranger. See, that’s what I also love about the internet. It tilts the market balance. Right off its unhinged axis ! Now any buyer can just search online for exactly what it is they’re after. No matter how intricate or particular their tastes. My husband and his ilk always supplied anything and everything you could want, in that they knew where to lay their big, hot hands on it. But their customers were limited, cos their purlieu was beyond most people’s taste radar. But now everyone has satellite navigation at their fingertips. Every wanton attachment, which has always been procurable, if not exactly on tap, can be tracked down for ready purchase by the consumer. No more is there such a thing as an illict pleasure. Only one that may not yet have an online community, dedicated to discussing its zesty delights. Plus the chances are, it’s not even being touted by a professional criminal, but by some devotee in his attic or bedroom. My husband’s losing market share. Caveat vendor. Emptorially empty-handed. Not only are people locating merchandise themselves, but they’re also becoming producers too. Again circumventing my husband’s wares. Observe the kids out here with their camera phones and videos. Downloading and sending back their own material online. Don’t tell me they’re charging their mates for their shared kicks ? Home-made pornography. On location out here. Coarsened violence on ‘YouTube’. Happy slap rather than slapstick. Thus the depravity has become so mundanely accessible, it loses its risk factor that makes it cost inelastic. The behemoth has reared up and swished its long, spiky tail across the knuckles of Damon’s talons and swiped the whip hand from him. Though uncentred, this particular exchange maven also knows which end to hold a crop by.
As for me, I celebrate the fact that I can partake of a little of my own revenge online. Not ordered off the peg. Rather one I can fashion for myself. I’m finally back in the Forum. Shopping around in order to manufacture and distribute my own brand of retribution. I may have previously vouched for revenge being up close and personal, in best order to dish it up cold. But the marvel of modern connectivity has caused me to revise my opinion. It no longer requires my thumbprint. What could be colder than not even appending your name, your colophon to the deed ? This way I can run amok on the whole tiny-minded world ! Like everything else, it’s acquisitive and venal and therefore fundamentally a numbers game. For once in my life I have full access. Now I am imbued in my own right, with the meddling powers of the immortals. All thanks to t’internet (as one of my Northern conquests insisted on calling it)."
You know what I love about the internet ? No, indulge me a little. It’s worth staying with this one I promise. Good. Well, would you not agree that it’s a free-for-all tabula rasa that wraps itself around the circumference of the earth ? Anyone can create and contribute and etch their initials on to it. But not like some sad old patchwork quilt of remembrance. This has all the vigour of grafitti artists spooring their signature. Ooh, get you, their ‘tags’ ! Though for self-preservation purposes, I can’t leave any obvious brume of self, still it’s finally possible for me to flame on undimmed. I am alive and kicking. Although at several removes, so that I do not invite disclosure and death. The Net amplifies me sufficiently, to cast off the shackles from my mind, even if my body remains earthbound. It respires me some breath. I can partake once again of civilisation. In the great debate.
You want learned knowledge on arcana, you can, albeit unreliably and often unattributed, study it on the Web. It’s a bit hit or miss, but hey as I discovered back in college, further reinforced by Corfu’s infuriatingly patchwork library, that’s how modern epistemology shakes out. Though to be honest with you, I still favour the solidity of the bound tome for the purposes of culling knowledge. There is no such thing as an achingly beautiful website. Just the arterial red and blue of venous hypertext. But really I’m well beyond being forged in a crucible of knowledge. I only now require to be informed, rather than instructed. Intelligence not as a faculty, but as data. I seek after a full quiver of missiles. So to that end, I relish the delights of blogs and message boards. Where I can eavesdrop undetected, on what taxes the mind of my countryfolk and keep in touch with my hearth. The Net as my home from home if you will. Yet what is even more familiar and reassuring to me, are people’s personal homepages. It feels like visiting neighbours and friends, only without the burden of reciprocation. I often feel like I’m Santa plopping down through their chimneys, helping myself to the milk and digestives left out for me, without compunction to leave them any gifts in return. All of this should facilitate me remission. Of being with the grown ups for the brief, glorious interim of my sojourn. Yet lamentably, I discern the increasing infantilizing of all my race back home. These charter ticketed kids are apt emissaries for their elders. With full undiplomatic immunity from consequence.
Forgive me, all that might betoken an antagonism on my part towards the virtual beast. Far from it, what I most cherish is that this autonomous space for our minds to be writ large, this great collective consciousness, has evidenced a return to form. A reversion to type. A newly conquered universe now awash with our detritus and refuse. To wit, for all our contortions of higher aspirations, we soon corkscrew and gravitate around the twin pillars of commerce and sex. These remain our obsession. The largest ever, ongoing worldwide poll demonstrates it to be so. A secondary control test poll, that of the camera phone backs this up. So stick two fleshy digits up to the Classical Greeks and their paeans to the higher human spirit.
In regard of sex, all our experiences and feelings, such as they persist, are as if mediated for us by a silicon membrane anyway. We are all wraiths wondering spectrally through some sort of ectoplasmic dreamscape. Copulation, despite it supposedly being the most involved, physically-centred activity, is now vaporous and insensate. Nothing is present in actuality, on which to hang one’s emotions on to. Relationship is a mere bump, a pedestrian road rage not even meriting the term ‘impact’. More just a diffusing wake. If we danced, if we oscillated, so as to light up our beings with excited sparks or vapour trails, I might settle for that. But we don’t. We are inert. This is how we approach each other. This is what we have reduced ourselves to. This is why the internet is so right. The unsustainable economy of sex in real life, now pays off in spades in the virtual. A realigned love triune, of camera, fingered keyboard and fibre optics. We are each sat alone in front of our mousepads, but at least my isolation is elevated by having the sun beating down on me, quaffing cocktails poolside. How is your dreary fantasy backgrounded ?
Same thing commerce too. Convenience shopping from the convenience of your own home. Hunting down rapacious desires like big game, serves to indulge the predatory in people. And getting involved in on-line auctions renders them combatants in a virtual joust. Or a poker game of who blinks first. For we are all traffickers, recycling our superfluous lives on e-Bay. Piqued by absurd jealousy if they are outbid by an anonymous stranger. See, that’s what I also love about the internet. It tilts the market balance. Right off its unhinged axis ! Now any buyer can just search online for exactly what it is they’re after. No matter how intricate or particular their tastes. My husband and his ilk always supplied anything and everything you could want, in that they knew where to lay their big, hot hands on it. But their customers were limited, cos their purlieu was beyond most people’s taste radar. But now everyone has satellite navigation at their fingertips. Every wanton attachment, which has always been procurable, if not exactly on tap, can be tracked down for ready purchase by the consumer. No more is there such a thing as an illict pleasure. Only one that may not yet have an online community, dedicated to discussing its zesty delights. Plus the chances are, it’s not even being touted by a professional criminal, but by some devotee in his attic or bedroom. My husband’s losing market share. Caveat vendor. Emptorially empty-handed. Not only are people locating merchandise themselves, but they’re also becoming producers too. Again circumventing my husband’s wares. Observe the kids out here with their camera phones and videos. Downloading and sending back their own material online. Don’t tell me they’re charging their mates for their shared kicks ? Home-made pornography. On location out here. Coarsened violence on ‘YouTube’. Happy slap rather than slapstick. Thus the depravity has become so mundanely accessible, it loses its risk factor that makes it cost inelastic. The behemoth has reared up and swished its long, spiky tail across the knuckles of Damon’s talons and swiped the whip hand from him. Though uncentred, this particular exchange maven also knows which end to hold a crop by.
As for me, I celebrate the fact that I can partake of a little of my own revenge online. Not ordered off the peg. Rather one I can fashion for myself. I’m finally back in the Forum. Shopping around in order to manufacture and distribute my own brand of retribution. I may have previously vouched for revenge being up close and personal, in best order to dish it up cold. But the marvel of modern connectivity has caused me to revise my opinion. It no longer requires my thumbprint. What could be colder than not even appending your name, your colophon to the deed ? This way I can run amok on the whole tiny-minded world ! Like everything else, it’s acquisitive and venal and therefore fundamentally a numbers game. For once in my life I have full access. Now I am imbued in my own right, with the meddling powers of the immortals. All thanks to t’internet (as one of my Northern conquests insisted on calling it)."
Friday, 1 May 2009
Linearity Breeds Contempt
"Why he had appointed it iterative enough to bookmark, was beyond me. Maybe for some light relief between all the hyper-spaced, hyper-texted, hyperantipathy. Not that a site offering refuge for battered women is a cause for relief to anyone, other than those who find sanctuary behind its actual walls. Maybe he was being ironic, though I think that will always remain beyond him. I know I could be a bit of a cow at times, but I don’t think his treatment at my hand could ever be said to diminish him, to a level where he felt it worthwhile to check out the equality of opportunity for spousal asylum. More like he was identifying with the bad guys, getting off on the abuse recollections of the victims. Not that I could really find any first hand, fist, or blunt object reports. I was in the process of perusing the founder’s mission statement, when the words started to deliquesce and welter in front of my eyes. Oh well, that was that. Some glitch in the programming or so I thought. Salvador Dali might have twizzled his moustache approvingly at the visual liquefaction I was being presented with. Think I was up a blind alley anyway. The nudge-nudge, wink-wink nature of our computer setup, cadged invariably after some software had fallen very hard from the backs of lorries, on to elastic pre-stressed concrete, meant that even if I credited him with the nerd nous to wipe his tracks clean, the computer configuration simply was not up to it.
As I listlessly watched the digital decomposition in front of me, I could not determine whether the letter sewage was being flushed out into the blue reservoir at the foot of the screen, or if the cobalt tide was actually advancing so as to wash over the alphabet shingle. The frame speed and resolution quality of the pixels was so low as to jounce, er rather, to slink one back to the happy daze of Space Invaders. The ziggurat of stunted motion was enough to make you travel sick.
I was about to disembark from my excursion into the yonder, when the blue swathe was suddenly (relatively speaking) stopped in its hobbled tracks. And after a tension-laden incipience, in which I wondered whether the whole gestation had done for the computer’s circuits, the aquamarine draggled wearily back into recession. Good, there was life in the old mongrel yet. More than that, something now seemed to be roiling the grizzled blank scarp of the screen. Indeterminate squiggles and strands, protruded their wormlike nodules from beyond the opaque bilge and began to flex their animation. I wasn’t certain that it was them incarnate, rather than their liquid crystal trails across the screen, that I was following. But gradually, due to my unprimed perception rather than software sag this time, I realised that they were ever so slowly shaking off their saturation and coagulating into new anatomies. Eat your heart out David Attenborough ! They were reforming into letters. The dismembered characters were reconvening themselves. Hooray for her! She’s back on the airwaves and refuses to be silenced! The mission’s back on track. Her oeuvre will out.
I tried to pick up the thread of where I’d been cut off from her impassioned appeal, but could not quite relocate myself. The text had changed ever so slightly. She must be live and on line here and now! With her fingers airily caressing the keyboard, she had planted her feet in the blue nowhere and turned back the tide. Cocking a snook at King Canute and all other bloated male egos!
As the frisson of profane delight started its vertiginous roll down the cresta run of my vetebrae, the screen shuddered and trepanned my pleasure, leaving me unhinged. While I slumped, each letter was turning tail on its axis, as if scalded. Here and there, one might sheer off into the soothing cold plunge of the void. The arrayed red-coated monograms around them buckling a little, as if to suture the breech of missing vowel or dipthong. Now detachments of surds were silently giving up the ghost and scuttling off into oblivion. Next a syllable topples, denting the lineament like a gap-tooth, before it was gradually excised into full root canal surgery as whole phalanxes of words cave in. It was swingeing and all-pervasive. Seems like she had been successfully gagged after all.
Or overwritten. Since clearly, even hyperspace abhors a vacuum. For filtering down the screen on fibre optic grappling irons and gossamer rope ladders, column after column of letters marched in. Leapfrogging over one another in their glee, as if racing to be first to occupy the vacated matrix. Was this a service provider reclaiming a squatted URL address? If so to what end, other than a point to point of proto-colic principle? For these new characters spelt out nothing but nonsense. The dead letter drivel of programming speak. Cold and metallic grey, unlike the spectacular livery of her florid prose. I had a virtual tear in my eye.
I prepared to bring down the curtain on the whole non-affair. Partly to dismiss the long engaged streetlamp, rubbernecking directly through my window, into my rubber stamped and silicon verified state of idle loneliness. But foremost in my mind, I was determined to pull the plug for good on this dissolute bazaar. Despite what I always steeled myself with in reference to the girls, clearly there was such a thing as too much information. Too much access. Too much disclosure. What used to remain in his cups down at the pub, he had been able to carry out home with him. A marketplace to trade spite, into more far reaching corners than mere spit and sawdust could reach. A whole brewery of hate in the still of this bedroom. Time to ditch the Red Hand veined Feng Shui.
It wasn’t through him spending so much time wedded to the net, that made me feel neglected. It’s more like when he got off it and sat in our non-chat room downstairs, quietly smouldering, that alarm bells clanged. My internal fume detector was tripped. Whether his nightly hate-in ratcheted up his animosity towards me; or that he already bore such pent up malice that he disgorged it into virtual violence, in order to head off the real thing, I wasn’t certain. But I wasn’t going to hang around to sift forensically through the ashes of a conflagration. That’s when I asked him to leave. I might well be constantly infuriated with life, but I couldn’t risk being around someone who was positively incendiary about it. After all, there were the the girls to think about too.
So now we’re under new management. And it’s time for a ritual incineration of a different sort -
But - she was back! Her lexical dragoons effortlessly retaking the high ground of the screen. Sliding down and sideswiping the incumbents. Rattling over letter for letter, like a train destination board flittering a new imminence. I almost applauded. The show was back on the road. A differing version yet of what had gone before. It had the thinness commensurate with being re-keyed in real time, but some of the constructions were also reedier, suggesting an earlier, less honed draft. Maybe we were going backwards in time. Why not, this is virtual reality after all?
Now some more personal stuff was drilling across my screen. Material I hadn’t seen before. She certainly came across as one wild, old bird. I’d first hand evidence, twice removed, as to her tenacity that’s for sure. And then once more, without warning, the countercharge. Her words started to wither. But I knew I only had to abide an intermission. She’d return unsullied and unabashed. For I realised that this was smart bombs and virus protection; firewalls, backdoors and catflaps. Digitised interdiction. With both parties probably absent. Off having a well-earned cup of tea while they waited to see the effects of their latest thrust or parry. I brewed myself a sustaining coffee and toasted our imagined triune in this spellbinding war of censorship. All texts should be written like this. Then the reader could be truly interactive. Our up- or down- turned thumb would really bear critical import. Authors would truly earn their corn. The payload of their words directly transmittable, delivered through the reader’s white-knuckled bombardiering.
The night proceeded to unfold in this fashion. Sometimes the purge and reinstatement would be in monotype, others by linotype, as the varying strategies were employed. But each occasion afforded me more and more detail about her past life. I was hooked. I felt I was privy to an immune system repulsing an invading bug. Found myself rooting for a benign diagnosis. Some of the things I found positively upsetting; she’d obviously had an awfully blighted life and was determined to publish it. They couldn’t break her.
By the break of day it dawned on me that this war was somewhat internecine and wholly nasty. Each occasion that they managed to score away another layer of her fabric, she’d exhibit further pentimento upon pentimento. Each palimpsest they impressed, she managed to copperplate her monograph over the top. It was as if they were trying to eradicate every last vestige of her existence, through to that egg in her mother’s womb, back to her very conception. (Freud would have had an orgasm!) This would go to the bitter end. Or some viscious eternal loop. I sent an e-mail to her website expressing my support. I didn’t expect her to have the time to open it.
Since I was filled with the presentiment that this was somebody else’s life flashing before my eyes, it occurred to me, that perhaps I should do something to preserve it as a record. However, on each occasion that I managed to squirt some paper between the rollers of the printer, the text had decomposed its legibility and the printer peeled off what appeared to be a laboured test run. Even when prepared, with paper in place, waiting for the next manifest, the resultant synchronised print-off was still garbled gibberish. Had the forces of darkness secured the printer outpost ? Or was the printer garrison still holding out, desperately broadcasting its coded warning as to the original errata ? Or had it gone native and veered off into its own hallucinatory discourse ? The period for her words to re-establish their cursive flow, was now becoming longer and longer. I decided to write some of them down. Contracted wrist giving way to longhand, as I reflexively moved for the weight of my journal. Albeit according her a fresh page at the back.
As I launched into amanuensis mode, I would be holed each time by the gobbledegook guillotine. Shredding meaning. Splintering intelligibility. I made myself memorise more for the record. Then dictate to myself from the afterglow imprinted upon my side of the retinal wall, once the image had faded from in front of me. Thus I knew my transcription would not be a pure one. More of a cross-hybridization. So be it. Amy’s plaintive greet-the-day mewl brought a natural end to my assignment. I rose to confront the day chock-full with purpose, stale from having spent a night under the tiles and pressed against the eaves. This time the monitor screen was wiped clear at my hand, rather than that of any second or third party.
I returned to my journal that night. Re-read my latest (borrowed) entry, anticipating it to be an annotation of the rest of the entire preceding contents. A foreword or afterword. A dedication. An acknowledgement of something or other. An imprimatur. But it failed to read that well or interestingly even. More akin to some dream you noted down before returning to sleep, only to read it through stupefied the next morning. It was no dream though and I’ll have the phone bill to prove it right enough. I guess you had to have been there. Which neither of us ever were really I suppose. The e-mail bounced back to me as undeliverable.
I didn’t return to the website. I don’t know if her digital Cheshire cat smirk managed to prevail. I unplugged the computer, faithful to my vow to reverse previous vows. I tried ripping out her page from my journal, but she put up her customary catfight. Eventually she was gone from my life, but she took with her half the folio’s anchoring twine. My journal now hung frail and played out. I told you she was a tenacious old bird. In union we’d not grafted. Only in divorce. Still, that was an advance on my ex-husband. He had barely ever merited an entry, let alone a dedicated page."
As I listlessly watched the digital decomposition in front of me, I could not determine whether the letter sewage was being flushed out into the blue reservoir at the foot of the screen, or if the cobalt tide was actually advancing so as to wash over the alphabet shingle. The frame speed and resolution quality of the pixels was so low as to jounce, er rather, to slink one back to the happy daze of Space Invaders. The ziggurat of stunted motion was enough to make you travel sick.
I was about to disembark from my excursion into the yonder, when the blue swathe was suddenly (relatively speaking) stopped in its hobbled tracks. And after a tension-laden incipience, in which I wondered whether the whole gestation had done for the computer’s circuits, the aquamarine draggled wearily back into recession. Good, there was life in the old mongrel yet. More than that, something now seemed to be roiling the grizzled blank scarp of the screen. Indeterminate squiggles and strands, protruded their wormlike nodules from beyond the opaque bilge and began to flex their animation. I wasn’t certain that it was them incarnate, rather than their liquid crystal trails across the screen, that I was following. But gradually, due to my unprimed perception rather than software sag this time, I realised that they were ever so slowly shaking off their saturation and coagulating into new anatomies. Eat your heart out David Attenborough ! They were reforming into letters. The dismembered characters were reconvening themselves. Hooray for her! She’s back on the airwaves and refuses to be silenced! The mission’s back on track. Her oeuvre will out.
I tried to pick up the thread of where I’d been cut off from her impassioned appeal, but could not quite relocate myself. The text had changed ever so slightly. She must be live and on line here and now! With her fingers airily caressing the keyboard, she had planted her feet in the blue nowhere and turned back the tide. Cocking a snook at King Canute and all other bloated male egos!
As the frisson of profane delight started its vertiginous roll down the cresta run of my vetebrae, the screen shuddered and trepanned my pleasure, leaving me unhinged. While I slumped, each letter was turning tail on its axis, as if scalded. Here and there, one might sheer off into the soothing cold plunge of the void. The arrayed red-coated monograms around them buckling a little, as if to suture the breech of missing vowel or dipthong. Now detachments of surds were silently giving up the ghost and scuttling off into oblivion. Next a syllable topples, denting the lineament like a gap-tooth, before it was gradually excised into full root canal surgery as whole phalanxes of words cave in. It was swingeing and all-pervasive. Seems like she had been successfully gagged after all.
Or overwritten. Since clearly, even hyperspace abhors a vacuum. For filtering down the screen on fibre optic grappling irons and gossamer rope ladders, column after column of letters marched in. Leapfrogging over one another in their glee, as if racing to be first to occupy the vacated matrix. Was this a service provider reclaiming a squatted URL address? If so to what end, other than a point to point of proto-colic principle? For these new characters spelt out nothing but nonsense. The dead letter drivel of programming speak. Cold and metallic grey, unlike the spectacular livery of her florid prose. I had a virtual tear in my eye.
I prepared to bring down the curtain on the whole non-affair. Partly to dismiss the long engaged streetlamp, rubbernecking directly through my window, into my rubber stamped and silicon verified state of idle loneliness. But foremost in my mind, I was determined to pull the plug for good on this dissolute bazaar. Despite what I always steeled myself with in reference to the girls, clearly there was such a thing as too much information. Too much access. Too much disclosure. What used to remain in his cups down at the pub, he had been able to carry out home with him. A marketplace to trade spite, into more far reaching corners than mere spit and sawdust could reach. A whole brewery of hate in the still of this bedroom. Time to ditch the Red Hand veined Feng Shui.
It wasn’t through him spending so much time wedded to the net, that made me feel neglected. It’s more like when he got off it and sat in our non-chat room downstairs, quietly smouldering, that alarm bells clanged. My internal fume detector was tripped. Whether his nightly hate-in ratcheted up his animosity towards me; or that he already bore such pent up malice that he disgorged it into virtual violence, in order to head off the real thing, I wasn’t certain. But I wasn’t going to hang around to sift forensically through the ashes of a conflagration. That’s when I asked him to leave. I might well be constantly infuriated with life, but I couldn’t risk being around someone who was positively incendiary about it. After all, there were the the girls to think about too.
So now we’re under new management. And it’s time for a ritual incineration of a different sort -
But - she was back! Her lexical dragoons effortlessly retaking the high ground of the screen. Sliding down and sideswiping the incumbents. Rattling over letter for letter, like a train destination board flittering a new imminence. I almost applauded. The show was back on the road. A differing version yet of what had gone before. It had the thinness commensurate with being re-keyed in real time, but some of the constructions were also reedier, suggesting an earlier, less honed draft. Maybe we were going backwards in time. Why not, this is virtual reality after all?
Now some more personal stuff was drilling across my screen. Material I hadn’t seen before. She certainly came across as one wild, old bird. I’d first hand evidence, twice removed, as to her tenacity that’s for sure. And then once more, without warning, the countercharge. Her words started to wither. But I knew I only had to abide an intermission. She’d return unsullied and unabashed. For I realised that this was smart bombs and virus protection; firewalls, backdoors and catflaps. Digitised interdiction. With both parties probably absent. Off having a well-earned cup of tea while they waited to see the effects of their latest thrust or parry. I brewed myself a sustaining coffee and toasted our imagined triune in this spellbinding war of censorship. All texts should be written like this. Then the reader could be truly interactive. Our up- or down- turned thumb would really bear critical import. Authors would truly earn their corn. The payload of their words directly transmittable, delivered through the reader’s white-knuckled bombardiering.
The night proceeded to unfold in this fashion. Sometimes the purge and reinstatement would be in monotype, others by linotype, as the varying strategies were employed. But each occasion afforded me more and more detail about her past life. I was hooked. I felt I was privy to an immune system repulsing an invading bug. Found myself rooting for a benign diagnosis. Some of the things I found positively upsetting; she’d obviously had an awfully blighted life and was determined to publish it. They couldn’t break her.
By the break of day it dawned on me that this war was somewhat internecine and wholly nasty. Each occasion that they managed to score away another layer of her fabric, she’d exhibit further pentimento upon pentimento. Each palimpsest they impressed, she managed to copperplate her monograph over the top. It was as if they were trying to eradicate every last vestige of her existence, through to that egg in her mother’s womb, back to her very conception. (Freud would have had an orgasm!) This would go to the bitter end. Or some viscious eternal loop. I sent an e-mail to her website expressing my support. I didn’t expect her to have the time to open it.
Since I was filled with the presentiment that this was somebody else’s life flashing before my eyes, it occurred to me, that perhaps I should do something to preserve it as a record. However, on each occasion that I managed to squirt some paper between the rollers of the printer, the text had decomposed its legibility and the printer peeled off what appeared to be a laboured test run. Even when prepared, with paper in place, waiting for the next manifest, the resultant synchronised print-off was still garbled gibberish. Had the forces of darkness secured the printer outpost ? Or was the printer garrison still holding out, desperately broadcasting its coded warning as to the original errata ? Or had it gone native and veered off into its own hallucinatory discourse ? The period for her words to re-establish their cursive flow, was now becoming longer and longer. I decided to write some of them down. Contracted wrist giving way to longhand, as I reflexively moved for the weight of my journal. Albeit according her a fresh page at the back.
As I launched into amanuensis mode, I would be holed each time by the gobbledegook guillotine. Shredding meaning. Splintering intelligibility. I made myself memorise more for the record. Then dictate to myself from the afterglow imprinted upon my side of the retinal wall, once the image had faded from in front of me. Thus I knew my transcription would not be a pure one. More of a cross-hybridization. So be it. Amy’s plaintive greet-the-day mewl brought a natural end to my assignment. I rose to confront the day chock-full with purpose, stale from having spent a night under the tiles and pressed against the eaves. This time the monitor screen was wiped clear at my hand, rather than that of any second or third party.
I returned to my journal that night. Re-read my latest (borrowed) entry, anticipating it to be an annotation of the rest of the entire preceding contents. A foreword or afterword. A dedication. An acknowledgement of something or other. An imprimatur. But it failed to read that well or interestingly even. More akin to some dream you noted down before returning to sleep, only to read it through stupefied the next morning. It was no dream though and I’ll have the phone bill to prove it right enough. I guess you had to have been there. Which neither of us ever were really I suppose. The e-mail bounced back to me as undeliverable.
I didn’t return to the website. I don’t know if her digital Cheshire cat smirk managed to prevail. I unplugged the computer, faithful to my vow to reverse previous vows. I tried ripping out her page from my journal, but she put up her customary catfight. Eventually she was gone from my life, but she took with her half the folio’s anchoring twine. My journal now hung frail and played out. I told you she was a tenacious old bird. In union we’d not grafted. Only in divorce. Still, that was an advance on my ex-husband. He had barely ever merited an entry, let alone a dedicated page."
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