Deleriously long post, AHOY!

I've had a lot of time to naval gaze lately, if only because finding out that the cool kids are all hanging out roughly a block from where I'm living has driven me into a misanthropic spiral from which there may be no return. Omg Jay Mccarroll! Do you think he saw me? Omg!

Anyway, I realize that my last post (about bums, and not the kind that you sit on... I mean, not the kind that you throw money at so they go away... I mean, not the kind that are made of you ass) was a little grim, but it was a pretty grim time. I've had a decent sum of time to naval gaze since then, and I've wasted most of it thinking about Blogging as a cultural phenomenon. I posted a lengthy rough draft of my ideas on my dusty old Livejournal some days ago, and I've realized that 95% of what I think is entirely different from worthwhile deduction, so whatevs. Anyway. One of the reasons why I like Elevennames is because it is, at least nominally, of more professional quality than livejournal. We have a title! Dammit! And neat backgrounds! In the end, I suppose I'm really just trying to justify some kind of imagined gentrification of the effing internets. Like the myspace vs. Facebook conflict that's older than the internet (roughly two months ago), the distinction is entirely arbitrary, yet I cannot deny the sheer potency of it's subconscious tidal pull. I am driven to think that one is better than the other, because my brain is, on a very fundamental level, broken.

Or, if you'd like, it's because I'm an all-or-nothing 'Merican.

Anyway. I basically approve of blogs, provided they are the children of effort and desire, and not just something that information is thrown at every so often. Note that these two things can look remarkably similar sometimes. But blogging is nothing more than publishing a Zine for the lazy - there's nothing more inherintly shameful or Harmful To Culture about the activity than there is in, say, posting that you want to sell your couch on myspace. Or that you are looking for someone to do nasty things to your orifices. Whatever floats your particularly sticky boat. The thing that old people don't like about it is the sheer rapidity that it takes culture to. Instant accessibility to any and everyone means that things accelerate at a truly ludicrous pace, and that, like all truly doomed temporal paradox experiments*, the slower paced participants are going to be passed by the faster ones.

*Wherein a number of creatures, initially the same species, eventually evolve into entirely different species based upon their personal predilections, including one that wants nothing more than TO HUNT MAN.

This is not really an apt metaphor. My own mandibles have woefully underdeveloped venomous pouches, so it is all entirely theoretical. Actually, this was a dream I had last night, and it had vampires in it, too! So wait, what?

In the end, it's not a matter of evolution at all - like all things* it's just an illusion, a matter of perception. To say that culture has a speed is to imply that it's something that can be measured, or that one can consciously see culture falling apart, when the entire proposition is basically madness. The only reason pissy Victorians didn't spend all their time posting images of themselves at Jenny's 21st birthday bash is because of a lack of resources.

*So sayeth Buddha.

It's not a matter, in other words, of us being the maintainers of society at large - rather, it's about our participation in it. To say that it's simply materialistic and shallow and that you don't want to participate in it is basically admitting that this thing of ours, our cosha nostra of the Halo set, has become something that you don't identify yourself with. Hence, it's something that, while you are intrinsically a part of it, you refuse to do anything to help it out, other than, say, level a bundle of pointlessly litiginous lawsuits or protest some chubby, overly pale fellows who make games about guns and aliens.

The natural (and sometimes good! Though often not!) narratives that accompany these games of alien ge-no-ciide are handily ignored, as are the blogs which encompass the full range of human emotion and experience, dealing with all of our pettiness and nobility, our wit and our grief. Of course no one wants to read On The Road anymore - it's superfluous (didn't I already use that word?) to our understanding. There are a hundred different author who interpret events in different ways. Certainly, Kerouac is to be praised for being at least a decent writer, but the parts about only liking the mad ones, the people burn through the sky like brilliant white spiders etc. etc.? Poignant poetry, but who's he kidding? There's no one around anymore who spends equal amounts of time in the library and in jail - it's a dead breed, like the Tazmanian devil, hunted to death by our parent's generation. Just like gentleman explorers or vikings, society changes.

And wearing suits and swing dancing every night does not make you evocative of a more refined age, it makes you look like a jerk.

Blogging is, in one form or another, incorporated into society, in the same way we've adapted ourselves to mass transit and television cameras - it's a young art, as is everything that we do as part of society, and they need work and study before their objective value can be determined, and what's successful is discernable from what's pointless and trite. But until then, it's a great rush, yes?