Posts tagged internet
The Room and the Elephant - a must read

A must read, via The New Enquiry. lareviewofbooks:

 Sven Birkerts Man with Cuboid, M.C.Escher

Every so often something will break through the stimulus shield I hold up whenever I go online, which I do far too often these days, we all do, and for various reasons, one being, I’m sure, that the existence of the medium has created an unremitting low-intensity neural disquiet that we feel only the medium can allay — even though it cannot, never has. But it is an attribute of the Internet to activate in me, and maybe in all its users, a persistent sense of deferred expectancy, as if that thing that I might be looking for, that I couldn’t name but would know if I saw, were at every moment a finger tap away. That is the root of the addiction right there — and it is an addiction, sure, if only a lower-case one. To bear all this, therefore, to proof myself against the unstanchable flow of unnecessary information and peripheral sensation, I make use of this shield, which is really just an attention-averting reflex, a way of filtering almost everything away, leaving just the barest bones of whatever I happen to be looking at, and these only in case some tell-tale name or expression requires me to peer a bit more closely.

I practice this defensive, exclusionary scanning not only with the incidental flotsam I encounter — the inescapable digests of happenings in the world, celebrity divorces, killer storms, and so on — but also, more and more, with texts about subjects that ostensibly concern me. A recent case in point — I have it handy now because I finally printed it out — is an article I found online at The Awl called “Wikipedia and the Death of the Expert” by Maria Bustillos (posted on May 17, 2011). It came to me via several clicks at one of the so-called “aggregate” sites I sometimes visit to keep myself “informed.” I scan a great many articles in the course of my daily tours, but I am not avid. More often I scroll my eyes down the screen with a preemptive weariness — which is an angry and defensive posture, I agree — as if nothing truly worthy could ever be found online (I know this is not true), as if I will have conceded something to the opposition if I were to fully engage the Internet and profit from the engagement.

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4chan and the case for online anonymity

You may not know 4chan. It's an online message board. Users don't so much push the boundaries of acceptability as do the web version of running around naked, waving porn mags and shouting racist jokes. That said, what it does is important in a number of ways. Anonymity is - for me at least - an important part of internet subculture. Here Christopher "moot" Poole explains his side of things. He explains some of the memes that have sprung from 4chan and also shows how the "Anonymous" community, for all its flaws, has actually effected change. Yes there's often a lot of vulgarity, but... so what? There's a good chunk of free speech about to go down the pan if this sort of site is threatened. As Evelyn Beatrice Hall (not Voltaire) said: "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_1UEAGCo30] ps - when he talks about /b/, that's the name 4chan give to the random category, so basically that's where the boobs and willies (and worse) are. Point is, you don't *have* to go to /b/ to enjoy the site's benefits. There's a rather nice board that's all about recipes too. 4chan