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discussion about Discordia | 8 comments
[new] The positive side of Discordia (Avg. Score: none / Raters: 0) (#8)
by Aileen on Sat May 8th, 2004 at 01:54:40 PM EURODISCORDIA TIME
(User Info)

This strikes me as a wonderfully subversive approach, Amy. Of course, it could just be interpreted as a rationalization, or it might have more to do with my own personal problems with the "attention economy" of the Internet, but the suggestion - which I am reading into your description of the positive side of Discordia here - that posting to Discordia has no - or at least very little - "capital value" in this attention economy is something that I find very appealing. This also strikes me as a very fertile context for "remnants". I would see this as a kind of free space - free from the pressure of positioning oneself, enhancing one's reputation, etc. - where unfinished ideas can, in fact, be pursued, where "thinking out loud" is possible and others with pertinent, related or intersecting ideas and questions may join in or not, depending on their own interests and needs.

And of course the pond reference reminds me of one of my favorite poems by Emily Dickinson, which seems especially apt here:

I'm nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there's a pair of us - don't tell!
They'd banish us, you know.

How dreary to be somebody!
How public, like a frog
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!

(Apologies for the lack of references, this is one I memorized when I was about 14, and I still know it by heart.)

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[new] e-mail in bed (Avg. Score: none / Raters: 0) (#7)
by Aileen on Sun Apr 25th, 2004 at 01:01:21 PM EURODISCORDIA TIME
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When I was in New York over Easter, I bought myself a new toy, a Palm with WiFi capabilities. Although I was looking at what would have been extremely useful when I decided to go to Transmediale on very short notice and discovered that the laptop I rarely use is in a terrible state, since then I have been discovering other interesting things I can do with it. For example, now I can read (and of course write) e-mail in bed.

For years I have warned people that I don't care what anyone sends me on a Sunday morning from about 2 am to noon, because I don't go anywhere near a computer then, I just stay in bed and read (yet somehow the stack of books and journals next to my bed never seems to get any smaller, even though the stacks of books and journals waiting to go over to my office just keep multiplying). My three men are happy to bring me coffee and cookies so that I stay comfortably in bed and don't pay too much attention to what they are doing.

Amy, as I read your response in bed this morning (although the palm browser is a bit difficult to read on the little screen and the bedroom is the one place where our household wireless connection doesn't work very well), it sounded like a confirmation of what I was already suspecting: checking e-mail (and websites that might frequently be updated) in bed definitely falls into the category of Very Bad Ideas.

Given the excessive amount of time that I spend at the computer anyway and how it recurrently becomes a habit to go drifting through a stream of various sites when I get tired or bored with working - thinking there must be someone doing something more interesting somewhere else - I periodically recognize that this is not a good solution. It is not any kind of a real connection with other human beings. Thanks for the reminder.

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[new] hither and again (Avg. Score: none / Raters: 0) (#6)
by joerabie on Sun Apr 25th, 2004 at 11:42:18 AM EURODISCORDIA TIME
(User Info) http://www.magelis.com/joezone/

I liked very much your image of Walden Pond, Amy. It made me think of you as a little green frog, with delicate fingers, that one sees in pictures of (what remains of) the Amazonian Forest.

Your view of Discordia is intriguing, because it is so counter current. A web site's "sex appeal" IS measured by the manifestations of passage that it generates, in the case of Discordia, represented by postings. So I'll have to think of this a bit more.

Another aspect (I'm writing fast, before my son kicks me off his computer which I'm squatting) is that the "personal" is necessary for one's own sense of worth. When I post, do people find an interest in what I write, do they like it, have I touched them? Perhaps this is pure vanity, but inter-relationship is the fabric of our humanity.

When people use a style of pseudo-objectivity in their postings, remain impersonal thus "professional", the human link suffers, and the discourse becomes less taking.

[ Parent ]


 

discussion about Discordia | 8 comments
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