Bleat
Posted in Bleats with tags bleat internet rant bullshit on March 17, 2009 by Sumner Kagan
- The world’s smallest violin plays “Turkey in the Straw”
The plaintive bleat of the empty Internet rant: your classic cry for attention. At this point, it’s little more than quaint anachronism; eye-rollingly old when lonely souls uploaded their frantic search for meaning at 14.4 kilobytes per second on CompuServe. Now, on the web boards, a single image macro illustrates the final joke of our efforts: GO OUTSIDE. FACEBOOK IS FALSE INTIMACY.
John Varley once wrote, in defending the noble typewriter, that words generated on a computer screen are unloved words, existing only as ether, evaporating in moments of time too small to humanly measure. This ignores the transitory nature of conversation itself, of course, and offhandedly indicts the telephone, wherein our most profound spoken thoughts are converted to electrons and somehow convey meaning across blocks, miles, continents; status reports from Houston radiating into space, somehow all unloved. What then of blogs, Livejournals, and Twitter updates? Increasingly anemic chunks of disposable information, to be consumed and forgotten, the consumer no richer for having done; the Flinstones vitamins of communication.
Varley was being satirical, of course, so nevermind.
We can love our little digital words, even as much as we love those printed on dead trees; the difference is but sensory. Digital prose can’t be shelved, folded, used as a bookmark, shoved in the bottom of a desk drawer and forgotten, lost on the train, lent to a friend who died of a heart attack one sunny afternoon while picking strawberries, boxed up and auctioned because the check to the storage unit bounced. They can, however, be deleted, 404ed, archived, zipped, burned, ripped, uploaded, reformatted, and other Daft Punk lyrics besides.
What matters, ultimately, is the tiny rivulet they carve in the brain, like tiny William Gulls, surgeons of perception, tiny engineers rerouting rivers of thought, carving valleys of introspection, mighty Niagaras of passion, trackless oceans of self-important horseshit.
And now we’ve come full circle, in which the author points out the emptiness of his own exercise in an attempt to render it meaningful. How’d it work out, they ask? Actually, no they didn’t. No one read it.
Bleat!