Here are some thoughts from the blog area of my myspace page that kind of address what people have brought up in this string here on the Mboards:-
buying frenzy in digital ghostland
(UNIVERSAL INTRO: In this zone where there is only the almost real, distance becomes a kind of torrential everywhere. One ends up living in distance permanently.One's body no longer has a physical relation to distance. In this distance one's body becomes the screen not over which but into and through which distance rides. Think of all the radio signals going right through you now. The EMS call that is circulating in your knees. The pizza order that has been phoned through your liver. The air traffic control instructions that just rode into and out of your thyroid gland. Distance is seething all through you right now. Just shut your eyes and ride child. You've never been so far away from yourself before.)
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Alright. I've been resisting this one.
Friends as a kind of capital.
Your zone in this almost real space is a kind of bank deposit account of telelectric relationships.
A my space as a sort of stock market of (dis)sociability. Your cybersocial net wor(k)th measured in photoicons collected through a type of techno game of tag-your-it. You, an exploiter of synthetic neighborliness. The entire world of computer-owners a 'natural resource'. Each zone owner's worth calculated as a sort of retail outlet for that impossibly elusive commodity from the actual world, the 'friend.'
All of the similarities are so uterly blatant and over-easy to make it is not possible to deny an element of flat out truth. And, so what?
To live blind of some forms of truth is to be only half alive.
What can be actually beautiful about this almost real myspace place is just that, how it magnificently distorts the woeful shortcommings of the disappointing actual world. You can be happy here in a place that does not really exist. You can find friends by interacting with their electronic shadows. The principal social advantage here is being alone. It is wonderfully liberating, isn't it, to have stuck one's self down, immobilized, in front of a plastic, glowing box. All the human world now alive, only in the mind.
Hello Li Guo Liang, how is Mongolia today, so happy to have you invested in my relationship fund. Now, besides yourself, do you have a product, talent or service to offer? Never mind Liang. Just that you are even there is worth something.
Funny how a cold pleasure is so intensely promising. Almost like the feel upon one's hand of money.
This my space can make you rich and happy. And that is a form of truth.
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What we occupy as the cybernetically re-educated is a digital concentration camp. A camp tricked out as an availability resort for technopersonalities. But in this digital concentration camp there is no suffering at all. None. Only a radical reduction to a list of ingredients that facilitate perpetual examination according to criteria of a 'browse.'
And it is the very quantification of all of one's most unique, individual traits that lays one open to being absorbed by the data clinic.
Having the uniqueness of the individual personality converted in to an extreme standardized uniform, to uncritically worship a digital concentration camp is to be unwilling to acknowledge one's demotion to being a joyous robot, a standardized impersonality whose outlook and awareness have been absorbed in the statistic clinic. It is the degree to which your humanity has been polluted by the dream the happy cyborg has to be re-humanized. A dream you need not yet have.
Yes, one's self-aggrandizement through the statistic clinic may amplify a naivete about the attractiveness of the self and the marvellous efficiency of a statistic-based information dump. But the most important collective function of this almost real place is not how it persuades all to subordinate to continuous examination but how it acts as a barricade against disappearance.
For if you don't know, here it is possible to exercise an acute form of imprecision, wordless intuition, to speak with affect, to require code to continuously sound struggle against divisive power.
The primary merit of this place is its status as a temporary solution. An heroic postponement of your total erasure.
(c)pskiff 05