Dude, who even knows.

25th September 2018

Post reblogged from trees are harlequins, words are harlequins with 188 notes

nostalgebraist:

I’m intending to write a longer post on this once I get the chance, but quick version: I think there would be some value to a new metaphor for the internet which frames it as not real. Not in the old-school “haha online friends don’t count” way — but unreal like some shared dream space, or one of those trippy, creepy enchanted/fae realms that appear in a lot of fantasy stories.

The crucial thing here is to go beyond individualistic explanations of why people act weird (or appear to) on the internet, since the real explanations so often involve dynamics across many people, only a fraction of which anyone could possibly grok at any one time (after all, they are constantly changing). The metaphor should thus treat what we say here as “not the simple thing it appears,” like faery food, and related to reality in ways other than the obvious ones, like dream content. The question is not “why are you saying this strange thing?” but “why has the shadow realm shown me an image of you saying this?” (Of course, in literal reality, you did type the exact words you typed; the metaphor is trying to help me view this act in the appropriate way, which is not, for instance, “as though someone had just spoken those words in a room I am in.”)

Tagged: internet 3.0

  1. tadrinth reblogged this from the-grey-tribe
  2. iteratedextras reblogged this from the-grey-tribe
  3. taiey reblogged this from shacklesburst and added:
    there is an artificialness to everything online because always at some point someone had to deliberately press the...
  4. lipstickchainsaw reblogged this from the-grey-tribe
  5. phenoct reblogged this from shacklesburst
  6. shacklesburst reblogged this from the-grey-tribe
  7. matchazed reblogged this from the-grey-tribe
  8. the-grey-tribe reblogged this from fipindustries
  9. circletofcircles reblogged this from fipindustries and added:
    There’s this line that always stuck with from a paper about social dynamics on one of the MUDS back in the early...
  10. mylittlemexicanfriend reblogged this from fipindustries
  11. fipindustries reblogged this from theaudientvoid and added:
    there is an artificiousness to everything online because always at some point someone had to deliberatly press the...
  12. theaudientvoid reblogged this from nostalgebraist
  13. astergenius reblogged this from nostalgebraist
  14. reyyvelation reblogged this from nostalgebraist
  15. buddies-doing-social-media reblogged this from blueelkgirl
  16. blueelkgirl reblogged this from nostalgebraist
  17. bear-sheep-cat-hybrid reblogged this from baelpenrose
  18. nostalgebraist posted this