Tom Sherman on 28 Dec 2000 17:03:56 -0000 |
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[Nettime-bold] STOP THE INANITY |
STOP THE INANITY Stop the inanity, please. I'm being buried with meaningless crap. Crap generated for no good reason, by people going through the motions. Either they're under the illusion they're being productive by issuing personal statements on absolutely everything, or they're convinced they're actually bigger, more important people, because they're leaving their mark far and wide. Those who hold their tongue are soon forgotten. Those who hold their thoughts will simply be overwhelmed and disappear. People who choose their words wisely will be buried alive by the indiscriminate pontificators, those with identities maintained by spewing continuous personal diatribes on absolutely everything. They issue high volumes of drivel in order to assert, and maintain a case for, their very existence. These self-centred beacons of malignant personality are simply filling a social vacuum. Enduring long, socially bankrupt hours at their 'work-stations,' they enjoy a surplus of privacy in their respective remote locations, but feel a definite need to participate in a kind of simulated office banter. In this way listserves linking communities-of-interest simulate highrise office complexes, where co-workers actually still rub elbows over coffee pots and water coolers while simultaneously really keeping in touch through e-communication. Remotely networked co-workers also crave day-to-day contact with each other. In the absence of daily physical contact, this simulated office banter quickly revs up and becomes the surrogate display of the group's cohabitation on a specific network or list. Labour-nets provide the breeding ground for insider-attitudes, thus promoting the formulation of semi-coherent mission directives. There is another side to this simulated, surrogate-office scenario. Many of the most energetic, totally obsessive personal transmitters garner energy from their frustration with the banality of their screen-based 'day jobs.' Their outreach is driven by a negative momentum: a virtual workplace hostility. These individuals, if they make their living shackled to a keyboard and computer screen, find themselves perpetually on-line, and available for comment on absolutely everything. Designers, programmers, writers, animators, etc., etc., many of them self-employed and telecommuting, find their loneliness more tolerable if they are reaching out and making contact with others in domains supplementary to their compensatory labour. These peripheral, diversionary exchanges perforate and are feathered into normal workday routines. Unfortunately such attempts at interpersonal communication are often systematically pursued and practiced like advertising or other forms of pedantic, pushy influence. The last word is never the last word. Like an unsuccessful attempt to scratch out an itch, the transmission process amounts to nothing more than a persistent, relentless manifestation of presence, mere proof of existence, a vaguely self-affirming pulse, a bare-bones signifier of survival... A form of cranky S.O.S., a psychological Mayday... Tom Sherman _______________________________________________ Nettime-bold mailing list Nettime-bold@nettime.org http://www.nettime.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/nettime-bold