this sort of thingWhat annoys me especially is that bull sessions are impossible online without assuming a persona: expressed opinions have to be squared with every other of one's opinions and defended for eternity. There is little room for speculation, experimentation and depersonalised debate.
not just online. that's all public discourse - all online discourse (besides p2p like email etc) being public discourse.What annoys me especially is that bull sessions are impossible online without assuming a persona: expressed opinions have to be squared with every other of one's opinions and defended for eternity. There is little room for speculation, experimentation and depersonalised debate.
an interesting avenue of discussion might be how online avatars compare and contrast to earlier types of masks
I agree about amplification etcmost of us now have access to huge audiences who respond very quickly
I like those moments when I'm in a certain social situation and everything is lovely and pleasant - because I'm acting according to the expectations of the immediate context - and then I start letting seep in some horribly weird or disgusting opinion and feel the mood change. If that moment of inappropriate excess can be integrated back into the situation as a whole or if it spurs others on to letting their guard down, it can feel like something real has happened.
It was midapril, Carnevale had been over for weeks, and Lent was coming to a close, skies too drawn and pallid to weep for the fate of the cyclic Christ, the city having slowly regained a maskless condition, with a strange dull shine on the paving of the Piazza, less a reflection of the sky than a soft glow from regions below. But the silent communion of masks was not quite done here.
On one of the outer islands in the Lagoon, which had belonged to the Spongiatosta family for centuries, over an hour away even by motor craft, stood a slowly drowning palazzo. Here at midnight between Holy Saturday and Easter Sunday began the secret counter-Carnevale known as Carnesalve, not a farewell but an enthusiastic welcome to flesh in all its promise. As object of desire, as food, as temple, as gateway to conditions beyond immediate knowledge.
With no interference from authority, church or civic, all this bounded world here succumbed to a masked imperative, all hold on verbatim identities loosening until lost altogether in the delirium. Eventually, after a day or two, there would emerge the certainty that there had always existed separately a world in which masks were the real, everyday faces, faces with their own rules of expression, which knew and understand one another—a secret life of Masks. It was not quite the same as during Carnevale, when civilians were allowed to pretend to be members of the Maskworld, to borrow some of that hieratic distance, that deeper intimacy with the unexpressed dreams of Masks. At Carnevale, masks had suggested a privileged indifference to the world of flesh, which one was after all bidding farewell to. But here at Carnesalve, as in espionage, or some revolutionary project, the Mask’s desire was to be invisible, unthreatening, transparent yet mercilessly deceptive, as beneath its dark authority danger ruled and all was transgressed.
corspey said this is how he operates socially too. drop a necrophiliac joke in the middle of the group like a horrible eggy fart.
I agree about amplification etc
but I think the immediacy of response - validating or challenging - is more important than scale
pre-Internet writers could reach huge and/or influential audiences but there was no immediate response
i get this too@EskimoKush says he has grown to find the mask'd visage enticing and enigmatic - what are you hiding behind that mask sweet stranger
maybe its a weed thingi get this too