Zadie, Zadie, Married Lady

Truyuanfen over at LJ has posted great comment in re Zadie Smith's review of the Facebook movie. He's also posted a really good poem recently. He also wants to marry Zadie, as, pretty much, who does not?

And there's a new study, funded by the Girl Scouts, on growing up on Facebook. Will procure link. Our beloved fj and ceciliaj are keeping me honest (ish) on the bennies of the new media, but I still worry about the idea that one's immortal soul, its well being, and the beloved community (meatspace, NB) are what's thrown out with the bath water of fluid gender and queer performativity. The nihilism permits violence. The idea of children (read the comments on the Jezebel link, new media comments are becoming my true reliable source of zeitgeist material) forming several false personnas, as the Girl Scouts corroborate, to exist online is disturbing, especially considering that where there are aliases there is real violence. To gay kids and all the rest of us.

Here is Smith's essay.

In Facebook, as it is with other online social networks, life is turned into a database, and this is a degradation, Lanier argues, which is

"...based on [a] philosophical mistake…the belief that computers can presently represent human thought or human relationships. These are things computers cannot currently do."

We know the consequences of this instinctively; we feel them. We know that having two thousand Facebook friends is not what it looks like. We know that we are using the software to behave in a certain, superficial way toward others. We know what we are doing “in” the software. But do we know, are we alert to, what the software is doing to us? Is it possible that what is communicated between people online “eventually becomes their truth”?

What Lanier, a software expert, reveals to me, a software idiot, is what must be obvious (to software experts): software is not neutral. Different software embeds different philosophies, and these philosophies, as they become ubiquitous, become invisible.

....At my screening, when a character in the film mentioned the early blog platform LiveJournal (still popular in Russia), the audience laughed. I can’t imagine life without files but I can just about imagine a time when Facebook will seem as comically obsolete as LiveJournal. In this sense, The Social Network is not a cruel portrait of any particular real-world person called “Mark Zuckerberg.” It’s a cruel portrait of us: 500 million sentient people entrapped in the recent careless thoughts of a Harvard sophomore.

This may be, without thinking it through, the basis of my unquenchable antipathy to Elantraspeak, in which nerds co-opt words like "cookie" to make artificial intelligence warm and fuzzy.


( Zadie Smith on the Facebook Generation from NYRB )

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Gathering Moss

It's interesting to read Bill Wyman's encyclopedic auto bio (29 Aug. 1963 "...Janie, a pretty blonde friend...she stayed the night, she was a virgin, very sweet, lovely night....") with Youtube at hand on the belly puter.

A casual Google yields their second single, Lennon/McCartney's I Wanna Be Your Man, rather atrociously played by smooth-skinned youths, all but Keef firmly planted behind a standing mike (1963). A tiny spin around Youtube reveals, a mere 18 years later, Mick as the fully formed rock gorgon, waggling his ass, with Ronnie Wood and Keef acting like his pet monkeys on Start Me Up. In the back, never smiling, taking it all in, writing it down, walking his bass, the implacable Wyman.