Randomness

[laughed]

ha....caught you lost53....
Post #5361 - "Too drunk for this one...I'll have a look tomorrow!"
and right in between #5364 and #5365
"This message has been deleted by lost53."
nice.

[endersgame]

that sounds like the premise for a Woody Allen movie.

i was kinda flirting with her asking if she came all the way from spain to do other people's taxes. then she told me she's a competition ballroom dancer when she's not a CPA and classically trained in ballet. lol, what a riot..

[Faust]

damn, son. i want her to do my taxes too!

[Faust]

CJbreed, I think it's hogwash. One of those self-serving academic masturbations. Seriously, to say that tweeting and facebooking and putting shit on youtube amounts to a Marxist revolution is stupid and false.

[lost53]

i dunno makes sense to me. the essay starts like this:


[I]What all media, all representations—from street signs to photographs to emoticons—have in common is this: they pay attention to you, they address you.

I long for the day when images address me, and if they pay attention... I will sack my shrink and save a fortune!!

Laughed, well spotted son! Trust me.. it could have been a whole lot worse..or more interesting!!!
Macbook + wine =

Talking of which has anyone copped on the bay or the like and only remembered when a parcel appears...?
A few years back a parcel appeared at my door, it turned out to be an antique beer crate (a very nice one I must add), bought at about 4.30am on a sunday.. post club. In hindsight I do see the logic...

[cjbreed]

CJbreed, I think it's hogwash. One of those self-serving academic masturbations. Seriously, to say that tweeting and facebooking and putting shit on youtube amounts to a Marxist revolution is stupid and false.

well i didn't write it and don't really need to defend it because its not my dissertation or anything but i think u are zeroing in on one tiny silly part of the essay and missing the interesting parts. jesus just forget the marx comparison. leave it out. yes it is loaded up with that academic need to weave a florid tapestry of bullshit in an effort to sound intellectual, but this is nothing new and quite common among philosophers and authors that are still revered due to the power of their ideas. this is not a reason to dismiss it.

that being said, maybe i shouldn't have just plucked a few paragraphs out and planted them in here to discuss. i mean the article is about barack obama for god's sake. anyway the good points are being missed.

and specifically to faust there is one other thing, i know perfectly well that u know that the whole facebooking, tweeting, social media thing is indeed revolutionary. no doubt about it. not a "revolution" in a marxist sense. but revolutionary none the less.

one small point is this. MANY innate human impulses are based in selfishness. ONE of these is a subconscious feeling that one is indeed the center of the world. we all have a subconscious need for acknowledgment. significance. (i mean shit this is clearly a shared phenomenon. we thought the earth was the center of the universe for centuries.) our conscious mind can overcome this but for many (most) people this need or impulse goes up as our ability to satisfy, or at the very least, express, that need goes up. the more u can get, the more u want. if that weren't the case, these personalized mass media outlets wouldn't have exploded the way they did.

and another thing, i don't think i need to sit here and rattle off the countless ways that the ability for an individual to very very easily broadcast him or herself to the entire world has impacted society. from suicide as a result of internet bullying, to facebook-based self esteem issues and relationship issues, to actual revolutions that use twitter as a major organizational tool, to the complete inability of some cultures to organize a revolution because they're too fuckin appeased and distracted.

i mean damn, really? this doesn't make sense to u guys? i mean that whole essay is just a theory and could definitely be wrong or at best incomplete but for me a lot of it made sense and brought up good points worth discussing....

[theetruscan]

that sounds like the premise for a Woody Allen movie.

It sounds like the premise for Woody Allen's life.

CJbreed, I think it's hogwash. One of those self-serving academic masturbations. Seriously, to say that tweeting and facebooking and putting shit on youtube amounts to a Marxist revolution is stupid and false.

Agreed.

(totally unrelated) Twitter has done some cool things though. The text-to-tweet enabled some (nearly) anonymous organizing, that paired with TOR managed to make it so hard to trace/stop that governments were forced to decide between shutting down the internet and allowing anonymous organization. There were, and are, security holes in both systems, and means of tracking. But neither is lightweight or quick enough to track everyone, or to track on-the-fly. Neat stuff.

[cjbreed]

last comment and then i quit and leaving it to u guys. that tiny little marx name drop the author made has nothing to do with the essay. nothing. the only revolutionary thing he is talking about is the ability for the spectator to become the star. thats it. this is not about labor or class or government.

[lost53]

cj don't leave it that..

Let's start at the beginning...

"What all media, all representations—from street signs to photographs to emoticons—have in common is this: they pay attention to you, they address you. Sometimes generically, as with street signs, sometimes precisely, as with person-specific ring tones. And all that attention is flattering—indeed, it is a form of flattery so pervasive...... "

So cj if you are defending this.. Then perhaps you could please explain it?

Last time I went past a stop smoking poster.. it was anything but flattering me..

[cjbreed]

it is not flattering you but it is addressing you. the street sign is the starting point. the most generic "representation", meant for all people. it is on one end of the scale and the point here is that the representations on the other end of the scale have gotten remarkably specific and powerful. example - the personalized ringtone on your smart phone with its facebook and youtube apps. this is flattering because it is of you, for you, about you, etc...

As mammals, we are wired to respond to attention. Puppies respond to attention. But only human beings need recognition. A dog won’t get insulted if you forget its name. And people feel more and more recognized the more customized the representations that constitute their life-world become.

it should be noted that the bits i quoted are pulled from some assertions he is making to lay the groundwork for the bilk of his essay that has been totally left out here. these are 3 assertions he has made.

1. The Flattery of Representation (Media)
2. The Virtual Revolution (first came digital media then came narrow-cast digital media. specialization. individualization. options.)
3. The Moreness of Everything and the Rise of the Mix: Surfing the Options. This is an important one so i will quote more here:

In a mediated world, the opposite of real isn’t phony or artificial—it’s optional. Idiomatically, we recognize this when we say, “the reality is…,” meaning something that has to be dealt with, something that isn’t an option. The expression “whatever” arose and caught on because it captured so precisely the bivalent attitude we must adopt in order to negotiate the environment of options that are soliciting our attention so incessantly. On the one hand, it is a feast, a world that offers an unprecedented array of possible experiences, “whatever” you want—“no limits” as the SUV and technology ads all say. On the other hand, it is a world of effects. Each of us is at the center of it, but there is a thinness to things, an insulational quality—as if the deities of DreamWorks were laboring invisibly around us, touching up the canvas of reality with digital airbrushes.

Haunting the moment of “I can experience whatever I want” is the moment of the shrug, of “what difference does it make?”—of “whatever” in that register. That moment is essential to our mobility among the options. And we need mobility among the options because they are representations—even food and shelter partake of the representational, for how we live and what we eat says so much about us. But just insofar as entities are representational, they are no more than they appear to be. And so they are never enough. And so we move on—choosing among options, and creating more options, in an open-ended project of perpetual self-construction. Pastiche is what becomes of originality when just about everything’s already out there.

Complex processes of commodification and technological innovations under late capitalism have been driving these developments, of course. But at the level of content, the dominating effect is relatively easy to describe, though impossible to comprehend. Genres in general have collapsed under this pressure. Categories as fundamental as fact and fiction, news and entertainment, gender and sexuality, have eroded away. In literature and architecture, in cuisine, in music, in fashion and furnishings, everywhere, everything—it’s fusion and mix.


But haven’t everyday objects always been more than functional—filtered through culture, sending a message? Yes, but being aware of that is new. Awareness of “culture” used to be confined to a few reflective individuals; now it is common sense. What cultures traditionally provided was entrenched custom, a kind of necessity. Options are very different, as are the people who exist among them—people with “life-styles.”

[laughed]

This lady's gonna regret being drunk when this video goes major viral.
is this even real? jesus.

[jogu]

i live a few mins from there and i fuckin HAAAAAATE trekkin thru there an hour before and after a game . theres a shitload of idiots usually drunk and obnoxious and the girls are often worse than the guys when they been drinkin . once was walkin by there and some blonde pud was standin on the corner by cubby bear actin like a twat and hardcore drunk . friend shook his head and she saw him do that ... whewwww boy that was it she went into a rage like yellin at him . we just crossed the street to mickeyds , got my sundae and her ass was still there bein belligerent to people . god i wanted to smash her face thru the metal wall of an rv like friday the 13th jason lives . otherwise its a nice area and theres alot of decent places to eat , alot of pubs also but theyre all preppy as hale :( noooo maam

[laughed]

lol@cubby bear and jason lives



sup.

[lost53]

^ I love the celebration of differences in culture ^
Nice one laughed!

CJ, pm sent!

[Faust]

CJbreed, I did not mean to ruffle your feathers. I did not read the whole thing - just the bit you posted there. I don't think I want to read another essay on social media - I've had enough this year. I know it's not like me to back away from an argument, but I am just not interested. But if you (and theetruscan) are interested in the topic, you might find this of interest.