In defense of LOLcats
Shirky writes:
This article, while quite interesting, has the danger of being an elaborate rationalization of behavior. I'm not convinced that what I do (for hours and hours on end) on my laptop is categorically different than what I did (for hours and hours on end) with my TV in the 80s.
Occasionally, I post something on the blog, write on someone's wall, send a brief message, post a photograph, correct a piece of misinformation on Google earth. So, in that sense, it is active, rather than passive, but the majority of time I am sifting through large pieces of information which is irrelevent to my daily existence. I no more need to know the origins of the word hookah, than I need to know the theme song to Silver Spoons.
Still, I find this article comforting and reassuring. I guess that's what a good bottle of gin should do.
I was talking about World of Warcraft guilds, and as I was talking, I could sort of see what she was thinking: "Losers. Grown men sitting in their basement pretending to be elves."
At least they're doing something.
Did you ever see that episode of Gilligan's Island where they almost get off the island and then Gilligan messes up and then they don't? I saw that one. I saw that one a lot when I was growing up. And every half-hour that I watched that was a half an hour I wasn't posting at my blog or editing Wikipedia or contributing to a mailing list. Now I had an ironclad excuse for not doing those things, which is none of those things existed then. I was forced into the channel of media the way it was because it was the only option. Now it's not, and that's the big surprise. However lousy it is to sit in your basement and pretend to be an elf, I can tell you from personal experience it's worse to sit in your basement and try to figure if Ginger or Mary Ann is cuter.
And I'm willing to raise that to a general principle. It's better to do something than to do nothing. Even lolcats, even cute pictures of kittens made even cuter with the addition of cute captions, hold out an invitation to participation. When you see a lolcat, one of the things it says to the viewer is, "If you have some sans-serif fonts on your computer, you can play this game, too." And that's message--I can do that, too--is a big change.
This article, while quite interesting, has the danger of being an elaborate rationalization of behavior. I'm not convinced that what I do (for hours and hours on end) on my laptop is categorically different than what I did (for hours and hours on end) with my TV in the 80s.
Occasionally, I post something on the blog, write on someone's wall, send a brief message, post a photograph, correct a piece of misinformation on Google earth. So, in that sense, it is active, rather than passive, but the majority of time I am sifting through large pieces of information which is irrelevent to my daily existence. I no more need to know the origins of the word hookah, than I need to know the theme song to Silver Spoons.
Still, I find this article comforting and reassuring. I guess that's what a good bottle of gin should do.
posted by Jonah at 11:08 AM
1 Comments:
It's so Kierkegaardian (see his short piece "The Present Age). We work so hard, he thinks, to immerse ourselves in risk-free, commitment-free projects that are short, and which have little connection to the actual particular lives we are living. That's how I'm sure he would view abuse of the internet, and god knows I do it too. I used to say "but I don't watch TV much anymore" but don't say it anymore, given the sheer ridiculousness of the statement, in context.
On the basement dwellers, I can thankfully say, though, that I was never one of those. Though I have certainly known enough of them in my day.
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