Who cares?
When I assumed my unbenightening position above in the early light of today's morning, I found another well-placed reprint from the New York Times, a column by that man who has such an interesting name, Verlyn Klinkenborg. A friend in White Folks' Bay who sends me many NY Times pieces, all of which are appreciated and some find their way down into the raccoon sewerage, has, I feel, hand-chosen me for the one that follows below.
It gives the editor of this particular piece of internet navel lint - the Sewer Raccoon News - an occasion to expound briefly, after which I will allow Klinkenborg's words to obtain today and evermore, for they are gilded. Him I read. Him I dig.
But:
We here do not give a fig for surface recognition in glimpses of the sort Verlyn alludes. Nobody reads the News, as far as I know, except me, here. I write it, I read it. It speaks to me. Period.
A company of one.
I don't ever check to see if there are any comments posted, and that is good because there aren't any, as far as I know. I conjure that any accidental readers about raccoon doings - and their underground affiliages - know, going in, that we here do not give a BR's A if we glean any gauzy following from Klinkenborg's cosmic target area.
Before the days of the internet we laid down a path in other organs via mimeo - Vulcan Weathervanes; YIBAWE!; etc. - that aimed to impart our assumed knowledge. What gall! Nobody much read those either. Like blazing a trail through sequoias with a jackknife, nobody saw the trail. And, did not need any trails of mine if there ever were any. I did not have the right tools, another minor thing.
That is understandable, for I know my (thy) self. The Sewer Raccoon News was conceived originally and continues to be a "random diary" - not a blog, a word I hate. Lodged in the eternal (?) internet, these ruminations are laid down for my children pretty much only.
............................................................^.^
By VERLYN KLINKENBORG New York Times
Published: July 22, 2008
One of my great surprises from roaming the library stacks during graduate school was discovering that every author, no matter how minor, was already the subject of a quarterly or a newsletter. I would stumble upon a new name — Felicia Hemans, say, or Edward Young — and find that there was already a society devoted to their work, even, in many cases, a concordance and an annual meeting with elected officers. I had the distinct feeling that I had arrived late in the day, after the literary teams had all been chosen.
Additional commentary, background information and other items by Times editorial writers I get the same feeling — vastly multiplied — from the many worlds of social networking on the Web. I get wind of a new site, pay it a visit and discover that it already has a population four times the size of some midsized countries — everyone speaking the local dialect, taboos and kinship patterns well worked out, a robust economy and brisk trading with other social-networking sites. I have begun to fear the result if one site declared war on another. What if Bebo fired upon fubar? What if LinkedIn threatened to blockade imeem?
I can see the appeal of a virtual community. I’ve joined three or four of these groups, partly just to see what’s going on but also to reconnect with old acquaintances and find new music. But some of these sites I don’t quite get.
I’ve used Twitter a couple of times since it came to the iPhone recently. The idea is to send short messages — microblog entries of 140 characters or less — to a group of people who are “following” you. The reason is so they’ll know what you’re doing. What I come away with is a mental image of 30 or 40 people following me around all day long asking “Whatcha doing?” while I’m trying to work.
One effect of so much social networking — so many overlapping communities of interlinked individuals — is that the language of actual human interaction begins to feel degraded. What can the word “friend” mean after Facebook, where it is really a synonym for “coincidence”? How subtle can the emotions be in a TiVo-ish world like iLike, where it’s thumbs up or thumbs down? There’s no room even for the hand-wiggle that means “meh.”
There is, of course, a pleasure in sharing the things you love. But the greater pleasure will always be secret sharing. You find a book you love, you tell your best friend about it and the two of you share the secret. Something is ruined if your friend tells someone else about the book. Surely you remember this from fifth grade. I hope there will be room soon for some anti-social Web sites — places on the Web where you can go to be alone, to hide from your “friends.” Perhaps that is what real life is for. VERLYN KLINKENBORG
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