I just read this great article written by Jason Netherton (Misery Index, ex-Dying Fetus) talking about how MySpace is so inviting for goverment supervision.


12/23/06

""You, you control the information age, welcome to YOUR world..."

Currently on newsstands, the new TIME magazine names its annual "Person of the Year" as "You." Obviously, it is a unique and interesting choice to name 'you' -as in 'all of you out there'-for Person of the Year. The entire collective mass of humanity could fall under that designation, but lets narrow it down to what they really mean: that global minority in the American Middle Class who actually think they are the center of the world, and by all accounts perhaps are. As the unconscious, yet clever, swathes of middle America and the rest of the 'West' would have it, yes they are changing the media landscape, and by golly they are doing it one shitty blog (this one inlcuded!), one goofy dance class mishap video, and one narcissistic, nauseating networking site at a time. Indeed, on the surface it appears that the social communication landscape is being upended and taken away from the bastard corporate media conglomerates that make and define the news for us...no longer we say, we shall 'become the media!'

Except, how do "I" control anything? Do we, the human mass, collectively embody some agency status in this assumption, pushing these new communication mediums to do our bidding? Or is it the other way around, as we are lured into seductive digital playgrounds where individuals explode themselves upon the world in some wild search for meaning in defiance of alienation and cold uniformity? Either way, to be heard inside this alternative universe you must scream louder than the next, and when everyone is finally screaming and vomiting themselves across the internet, one must then ask 'who' is being heard, and how is this a form of 'control'?

Additionaly, the internet is driven very much by proprietary forces, and most of the dominant communication interfaces being heralded as 'liberating' sub-mediums (Blog hosting sites, Google, Myspace, YouTube etc) are all corporately owned and driven by their particular business imperatives, among which is to sell advertising space. In the instance of Myspace and its 100 million plus members, it was sold last year to Ruport Murdoch's Fox behemoth. In the case of the much praised liberator YouTube, the joke is really on YOU because they have designed the perfect submedium whereby the users themselves create the content for no cost whatsoever, and after YOU upload it for them, they make the money off of YOU. Therefore YOU (the masses purportedly in control) are actually serving these submediums by providing them with free content, in addition to your own attention and consciousness which is also sold to advertising intermediaries.

So...a "revolution," or a new way for the corporate gatekeepers to reconfigure control? Millions willingly and passively engage in these fun and harmless interfaces to communicate with each other, sending emails under the umbrella of corporate messaging networks, putting their lives on display in their blogs, pictures and preferences, listing all their friends in nice orderly fashion, and having the network always know where and when they are online. Sounds like the perfect voluntary surveillance network?! Who should fear the Patriot Act anyway when we are willingly falling in line to hand over our lives to the 'lifestyle' of these corporately mediated communication interfaces?

On the side where the benefits are most obvious, namely the guerilla media footsoldiers who can rapidly publish news on a critical event or situation, whether it be evidence of police brutality, corporate whistle-blowers, or a politician getting caught in an unfavorable situation, the landmines still exist as the media's fractionalizing nature means that perhaps only the most radical of events get to go 'viral'. Of course, to have this outlet for expression and opinion has many benefits, but the hardcore basics of maintaining a healthy democratic communication system are inherently un-sexy, and as such need to be nurtured and cultivated over time with constant attention and effort. To bypass an accountable, structured media and let it dissolve into the vitriol of bloggery, or random and scattershot videos that are uploaded in thousands by the hour, adds up to a tidal wave of white noise masquerading as news. What then has value, meaning, and clarity here? Do the most sexy, sensational, and trivial succeed, while the laborious, complex and critical issues languish in the media morass?


Irrational Exuberance, Again?.


For idea exchange, the possibilities and hopes here are endless, but as these mediums, interfaces, and submediums expand, and simultaneously offer once more the mythical hope for the liberation of YOU, the individual, it is also a given that under a capitalist system, the true intentions will always prevail: the incentive will be to turn these new developments into a new mode of corporate control, that will in turn mean a new mode of producing profit. Time states in the outset of the article:

"...And for seizing the reigns of the global media, for founding and framing the new digital democracy, FOR WORKING FOR NOTHING and beating the pros at their own game, TIME's Person of the Year for 2006 is you." (emphasis is of course, mine).

In this declaration they perhaps sarcastically allude to the underlying theme of the entire article, which is mystified under the veil of the celebration of 'you', the individual. The point is already clear to the moneyed interests that correctly read what is happening, as the dream scheme of any business model is to reduce labor and production costs to zero.

And here we have it, folks, YOU have done it! Just like Donald Rumsfeld swept away the legitimacy of European obstinance to an invasion of Iraq a few years ago by stamping it as the worn out view of "Old Europe," so does 'Old Media' itself want to sweep away the costly burdens of its own troubled empire. The business imperative here is, in reality, the need to harness and reconfigure the mass explosion of self-produced and individually driven media forms into something controllable, and most importantly profitable.

So let us not be so enticed by illusions, as the capitalist base here will always give birth to the structural nodes of control that necessitate profit as the imperative for the continued existence and expansion of the system itself, which takes far more precedence over any notion of some middle-class driven myth of self-reliance through mediated interfaces such as the ones mentioned earlier. These are business models created with one purpose, and one purpose only. The liberation of the individual is not on the agenda, unless of course they can perpetuate the myth that these are user-driven phenomena that lead us to think we are engaging in some communications revolution, when we are in fact simply forwarding a new technological structure of control and profit.
-Jason

http://www.demockery.org/

He makes quite a good point about both MySpace and YouTube. Interested to hear everyone's thoughts as I know most of us have MySpace and everyone is quite familar with it.

And if you find politics and the likes boring, please don't reply.

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ouch

I just skimmed over this, I find politics very interesting (uhh...insert witty anti-gov comment here)

I'll post something legit when I'm not exhausted.

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What the fuck are they going to find out through myspace that actually matters?? If youre dumb enough to be posting truely personal things ON THE INTERNET you deserve to have your privacy invaded with giant governmental mutant alien dick monsters

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Annnnd we have our first contender!!!!

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im not dumb enough to put up things that i dont want people to know on the internet. the internet is for spreading information. not for hiding it. thats like walking around naked in a downtown city and yelling at people for being confused

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interesting, i can conclude that this thread will go to complete shit soon.

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Wow, just wow.

You know I was a quarter of the way into typing a response, but youre not worth it. Everything has gone totally over your head, did you even read the whole thing?

You figure after George Bush adds a nice little signing onto the new Postal bill that allows the goverment to look into ANYONE's mail at ANYTIME without having to EVER report it to a judge (they needed to do this within 72 hours with a reason under the Patriot Act) you might open up your fucking eyes.

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I was writing in response to the fact that you seemed to want to hear about myspace. But whatever, they can look through my mail, Ive got nothing to hide. All theyll come up with it "OH IS THIS MUSIC OW THIS HURTS" because I am very hardcore.

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...and another potentialy stimulating threads begins to go to shit.

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i read the article- its shit, nothing there i didnt already know, and id rather wish that i didnt waste my time reading it and possibly justifying having read it by responding.

as for the police state concerns, its too bad, coz the US and many of the western world is going the way of nazi germany did when the secret police took power over the populace, so accept you are an open book to anyone, and maybe you can use it to manipulate your way to the top or hide your sorry ass out of sight, whichever you prefer.
you either make the rules, or bend them, coz if you break em youll be noticed.

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Care to elaborate on how it was shit? I mean since you are in agreement with it...

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Now, now, don't let's be whiney and melodramatic because somebody considers your precious article a load of idiocy wrapped up in hypnotically repetitive and meaningless jargon-mantras. If somebody lightly dismisses something you consider important it could very well be because he's an idiot, but it does you no good to just assume that. If you post something, meaning it to be a conversation piece, have the damn conversations that come up.

As for the blog, it's basically the obverse of the Time bit, which is obviously deserving of chastisement. But because this one draws too heavily on modern day Marxist theory where the Time article drew too heavily on the stories the middle class tells itself in order to live, it's only use can be as a tool for the clear-headed in seeing that both views are too extreme and massively hyperbolic. But I'll be honest in saying that I don't anticipate this thread's engagement with the article to go along these lines.

people take myspace and that shit a little bit too seriously, yeah its a way for self-absorbed teens to feel important but teenagers have always been obnoxious and attention seeking. its a new portal, thats all

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My goodness! I tend to agree with Tranny. Only in part though.

As far as mail opening goes, if there's suspicion of any package the post office has a right to inspect it. It's been done here and people have gotten busted in this little burgh. Business have been shut down that were sending cash to other countries. The Patriot Act might make it more accessible to people's personal info, but that's the age we live in. If there wasn't necessity it wouldn't happen.

And I only skimmed that article. John Stewert's comments about the "You" issue pretty much were my feelings, too. It was lame.

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Whiney and melodramatic, no. what I was refering to was the chances are this thread will end up with a bunch of 5 sentence responses that consist of quite boring and standard views such as "I don't have anything to worry about so whatever." Maybe I should have been more clear witn it, but I wasnt, but I'm sure you won't be upset, you got to do your boring bit.

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Aww, I hurt someone's feelings by posting a boring two paragraph response to his dry, repetitive, and, most of all, copied 11-paragraph 'original' post (which was highly interesting and certainly not a cookie cutter application of latter day Marxist theory by a musician confusing intelligence and education). You're whiney and melodramatic and have shown it repeatedly in this very thread by overeacting, as though personally insulted, to a bunch of responses to the content of something you cut-and-pasted, and didn't write yourself, containing thoughts you didn't think yourself.

To keep my point from being the least bit subtle: You're reacting personally to impersonal comments made about something somebody else said. You're acting like a crying idiot (I'll do you the favor of assuming your aren't one), and I'll thank you to keep your tears from staining my forum, especially if you want your damn thread to be a constructive conversation. That can't happen if every response makes sob against the unfair world that finds your idea of depth shallow and of intelligent commentary quietly idiotic.

LOL...

relax.
WTF... you mailing illegal porn and anthrax via the mail?

lmao

Uh, if the government can open your mail they can get important private information like your social security number. Duh.

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if anyone wants to be the head of a pretty kickass web site simply copy the myspace bands format as a networking tool with added features that only promote bands,labels,venues....music related stuff.

itll be like a nynex telephone book of the music world<granted if alot of people catch on>, just more customizable, less paranoid and weird, and just straight to the point of its intended purpose.

its something that the metal archives could turn into or something, if they were so inclined.

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the government gave us our SS #... i hope this was sarcasm.

It was. Seriously, what can they get out of the mail that actually matters?

Credit cards, bank accounts, etc?

They're the fucking government. It's their money to begin with.

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You are taking it the wrong way. Honestly. I was not taking anything personally, I was just frustrated not with the fact the responses were negative, but with why they were negative, i.e. "Whatever bro, I'm not doing anything wrong." I understand your point and I agree to an extent(everyone familiar with Jason's stuff knows he felates Marx) but I was more talking about how it was quite interesting how easy it is to collect, organize, and monitor all the data people post on myspace, and how YouTube is so fantactic since the product being sold is submitted by thoes who are buying.

I should have elaborated on what I was looking to discuss, which was neither the Time article nor Jason's actual article, but what I've mentioned above.

I'm sorry I came off the way I did, hopefully you understand now. And I don't really think anything in my prior response to you suggested you hurt my feelings in anyway, except the remark about you getting to do your bit, which is far from offensive, it's just boring these days.

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reread the first line of my post.

agreement and acceptance is different. i dont necessarily agree but i accept the way of the world.

heres a remotely semi-interesting article about myspace
http://www.smh.com.au/news/technolo...2.html?from=rss

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Yes, but it appears that our administration is just blatantly toeing further and further to the line between outright democracy and outright dictatorship. Its only natural, however, that our government would seek to gain access to things such as Myspace : Ever since the advent of the internet, we're going to have more and more mediums in which people can interact, and a government being forced to change with the populace it masters is going to govern accordingly. Being as how a Myspace is an extension of a person's individual ( even if shallow and contrived ), if I were a collective ruling entity such as our administration, I'd be interested too.

But for the citizen with a healthy suspicion of his/her rulers, it means that there is now one more way that the government could easily decide to incriminate and detain anyone that it sees as a threat to its sovereignty. Not that they were'nt already capable of it.

Hope I made sense, I've been up way too late.

internet sites are privately owned and they can hire the fbi to snoop if they want to. which myspace already did

as far as government survalience, we are heading back to the 60's and 70's, which like alot of things the government is gonna relearn the word "futile" or "complete waste of time, money,personnel and resource".






people share video, most of which is shows,music vids, stuff that would cost money.......thats why the shit is popular and why they make bread off it. its not like its a fucking mystery or anything......and you know, you can just sign up and not share anything and reap the benefits of viewing copyrighted material that would ordinarily cost a pretty penny.

its not like its just home videos. if it was, it wouldnt be as well known. its not like i made every episode of nightrider,every episode of south park or some shit.




im annoyed by this.......because most of it is either empty or could have been said in a far easier way. the whole article could of been clipped down into a paragragh. i agree with most of the points made, its just so chock full of pretensious, completely unnecessary technical termonology it makes me want to say.....


fuckin uplug your shit and shut the fuck up. maybe if the government monitored you, then theyd realize what a dumbfucking waste of time it is snooping around like they did in the old days.

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worst than the information are all the shitty oversized pics, huge animated gifs and YouTube videos that made my browser crash the first (and only) time i went to MySpace.

regardless, it's just a fad. it'll be over sooner than later.

Well, if PST was running it it wouldn't have all that crap and it would be used for it's initial intention!
(And that was sarcasm with a bit of truth.)

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Hey, I work with what I'm given. If you people ever brought something worth talking about in instead of the same dull tripe, I'd give you something to think about. In any case, I'm still a lot less boring and repetitive, taken as a whole, than that article (especially if you know where he's cribbing from, making it boring and repetitive before it started).

If you wanted to just talk about myspace you could've done it. You wanted to be associated with this opinion and now don't like how it's gone and are having second thoughts, doing damage control. If this is sounding familiar, well, guess why.

And what the hell have I ever done to get anybody to think I deserve to run anything? I get irritated dealing with a relatively small internet forum.

my computer cant handle band myspaces and most emo kid myspaces because theres always like 3 simultaneously running rap videos and sparkly gifs and all that shit

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Overwraught neo-Marxist spooge.

Disclaimer: I like his music very much.

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Really? Hardly noticed.

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While the article is over-the-top and a bit repetitive, there's some decent points such as MySpace and YouTube cashing in on other people's work for free, all while (somewhat) creating the feeling that they're taking the power away from the 'old media' when its the media moguls running the show on both fronts.

All that being said, he never really mentioned that people are using these 'sub-mediums' to their benefit too. I saw on the news (or what constitutes as the news these days - boo hiss), that an unknown band made a nice, heart-warming video, posted it on YouTube and it became popular overnight. Now they're signed to a label (awwwww ) . All that shitty time of making unheard demos and playing nothing gigs is cut out.

Sure it doesn't happen with everyone and they're just being used to ram more ads down viewers unsuspecting throats, now to be whored out by a record label but that's how shit works. Viewers/listeners/consumers, musicians and corporations all come out of it feeling they've gained something. Everyone uses everyone for their own needs, even if some are unknowingly getting fucked in the arse.

Leading on from this, Jason Netherton is signed to Relapse. Every single fucking Relapse cd I open is filled with leaf-litter, whoring off t-shirts, magazines and other cds (including Dying Fetus and Misery Index). Try going to relapse.com. You have to click through 2-3 pages, advertising new releases and tours (including Misery Index's/Necrophagist's Epitaph tour). Nearly all of these pages links to the bands' MySpace pages and advertises magazines (terrorizer, metal hammer... etc). This all perpetuates the shit that he's speaking out against. If Netherton was truly serious about corporations cashing in on other's work, he wouldn't be with relapse. I'm not suggesting that he should tell labels to go fuck themselves and sell his cds from the back of a van, I'm just showing that everyone uses eveyone for their own gain.


As far as my own view of MySpace goes, I can see it's uses but I try to avoid it as much as I can. I've gone on it twice to get music where i couldn't elsewhere. I don't know why I stay way from it and YouTube. Maybe coz they're big fads and it's 'uncool to be cool' or that I'd feel guilty being another MySpace bitch, selling my soul so a couple of people could hear my music. but it's not like I'm perfect or innocent either

Meh, I'm tired with this...

Basically, the world's shit and will only get shitter. Not even a long-winded, self-righteous rant will stop it

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Of course he plays the game like everybody else while pointing out (obvious) flaws and ignoring (again obvious) benefits. The point of that article wasn't to inform anybody or analyze anything; it was to assuage his feeling that, as an extreme metal musician, he's assumed to be unintelligent, while he knows he's actually much smarter than any whip, by writing something that superficially resembles critical argot in a post-Foucaultian Marxist mode but is really, as noted, repetitive, empty, and obvious, and which deliberately ignores anything that goes against its thesis. Like a pretentious, underground version of the Time article, except with the opposite thesis.

PERIODS PERIODS PERIODS , PST!!!

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Yes, my post had three periods, which is appropriate to its three complete sentences. How observant of you to notice, though it would have been better if you'd also noticed that the one sentence which was longer than usual wasn't made out of two complete sentences strung together carelessly.

To give you an idea of how long a sentence can go on without being grammatically incorrect, here's the opening sentence of Stanley Cavell's The Claim of Reason, which is almost three times as long as the longest in my last post. Enjoy:

It made my day.

thanks pst that paragraph/sentence was a real delight

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How about if your privacy is that important to you, just dont have a myspace?

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Whats the purpose of creating an obnoxiously long, mind puzzling long paragraph of a sentence if other than to be either an asshole and or testing your abilities of grammar? (actually probably more like testing loop holes because circumnavigating the usage of periods although grammatically correct appears to defeat the purpose of grammar altogether. Self defeating maybe?)

Edit: Or sixsic just dont' use the internet cause there is plenty of "phishing" and collecting information that people are unaware of, which is why these advertising companies still exist.

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.....but...no inter net means.....no MT

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i was getting more like an william gibson/psuedo-orwellian/niel stevenson....sciene fiction dystopia vibe from the writing. perhaps even those authors were influenced by political writers like Marx. the whole paraniod conspiratorial, luddite-speak stuff with those guys<the sci-fi authors i mentioned> was good for novels that had deeper meaning, had a morale, a metaphor to put across.



id be fine with the writing style if it was song lyrics or literature. the words themselves are art in the context of music or fictional writing and that shit flies with me.......hell, i posted far worst in the poetry thread. but if you gotta say something, make your case, make your argument convincing.......its best not talk to folks like they are robots with the "mediated interfaces" and stuff.

if you read howard zinn or chomsky, they dont go over your head with this whole cyborg lingo/robot jive<it isnt really thier thing anyway, alot of anarchist stuff usually is tho> or even the boorish academic-speak of political writers and activists<well, lets say they try as best as they can>, these are guys who if they wanted to......they can go way over anyones head with mumbo jumbo, but in doing so the writing would seem condescending, sneeringly academic and snobbishly high-brow. it would alienate actual living, breathing, humans who dont have thier education and vocabulary.


when you write shit like this, what matters is the points being made, how convincing your debate, your analysis is presented,how clear and understandable it comes across. as long as you have good<unlike myself>grammar<kinda ironic here , im barely literate for god sakes>say what the fuck you mean, get to the fucking point, its a matter of the quality of communication, not 5$ words and obscure/unneccessary/obnoxious terminology.

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Definately. Although you dont' neccesarily need good grammar (or spelling, i know you didn't say it but i'm chiming this in). I think fair grammar is probably best. 5$ tend to muddle the point and so does 5$ sentences for that matter.

I have a bad habit of thinking and typing at the same time. When that happens by the time i've gotten over half way throught he sentence i don't remember what the other half said haha. So sometimes my tenses can get mixed and like i said sometimes i'm thinking in mid sentence and just completely lose all grammatical sense. (thats why rereading a post before posting is generally a good thing to do, even though i'm guilty of not doing it 80% of the time)

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You're absolutely welcome, Tranny.

Well, when a language philosopher interested in expressing the unexpressable like Cavell writes a sentence of that length and complexity it tends to have to do with how complex and coherent the thought expressed needs to be. In the case of that particular sentence, it's long for two reasons: because he felt that the various obvious possibilities had to be raised and rejected before he could ask the 'then' part of his 'if-then' question, and, having made that decision, to keep from having an epistrophic rhythm to his sentences ('...then where/how are we to approach this text? ... then where/how are we to approach this text? ... then where/how are we to approach this text?, etc'). In the case of my sentence it's because I wanted to pack information into dependent clauses that commented upon the body proper of the sentence. In any case, if somebody who knows how to write chooses to write a long sentence it's usually because it's the only sentence that does the job.

Chomsky is actually quite abstruse in his writings on linguistics, which is his academic field. But, yes, he realizes that his political writings are better served by clarity. Though it should be noted that the people Netherton's aping actually do (occasionally) achieve a certain profundity through difficult phrasing that isn't possible with clear phrasing (you can get the jist in a parse but can't understand the full extent of it). Which is also true of Chomsky's writings on linguistics and all sorts of other stuff. There's always a trade-off between being understood by as many people as possible and being as accurate and breaching as deep as possible. It's a shame in many cases. It's most a shame when somebody whose position should be to make simplified, clearer arguments based on work done by obscure, profound (though this might be the wrong word) writers doesn't understand what he's doing and transposes their jargon without bringing along any of that stuff they developed a specialized language to discuss. Like somebody using obscure terms from inaccessible worlds in physics and math to try to tell you that objects fall when you release them.

Short answer - Noone. Noone needs "1984" when myspace is around.

PST i was going to add that into my question but now i'm not sure why i didn't. Refering that its possible that a sentence of that "magnatude" is needed to fully convey his thoughts, and although that might be and "probably" true there appears to be (at least to me) intuitive thoughts that its still not the best way possible?

Nevertheless maybe because I'm not 100% up to speed on the people /fields you are talking about that I'm not fully understanding how something can not be conveyed in other terms and still maintaining the integrity of the thought.

I know there are (maybe this is similar) words in other languages that have meanings that there is no "direct translation" to, but even still i would imagine even the seemingly simple or broken down words or thoughts can still be broken into longer easier to digest pieces. No?

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The basic idea is that 'the way this work is written is internal to what it teaches,' making the way it's expressed a part of what it expresses. So the idea is that two ways of phrasing what's basically the same thing, depending on the thing of course, are shaded in different ways. So a parse that gets at most of what's said can still miss the important things conveyed by how it's said. But, since such parses are necessary if any kind of general good is to come from specialized work (just as popularizers of science are as necessary as the people writing abstracts few of us could ever understand, whose work they make comprehensible to the laiety), my answer has to be: no, what they say can't be said any other way, and yes, it can and is. Because most people only need to get the gist of what's being said, but things still need to be explored in their full richness and talked about with all their nuance and subtleties kept intact.

Nobody has ever needed 1984.

i do alot of impulse posting where i type,send then look at it and if what i wrote is somewhat readable i move on. ill overlook alot of mistakes.

grammar,capitalization and correct structure, to me, is counter-intuitive to the impulsiveness of typing as fast a possible to get the shit done without much interruption.

its only when im in the heat of a serious debate where ill take a little time<only a little, im still not good at writing even if i try> and try to give the impression that above any type of argument im making, im not some barbarian motherfucker posting from a cave.

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Hmm.

What i think you mean, let me draw a parrallel here, is that the tone in which somebody speaks changes the "meaning" or "adds" something to which is being said even though the same words said with a different tone still have the same "meaning" yet can differ? And that this example is somehow similar to the one you suggest?

The only thing i can tackle is the word gist in that last sentence. Gist refers to the meaty portion or the main thought. By saying that sentence with that word it makes me still feel at odds with what you say. (maybe because i'm slightly hardheaded, and i'm at a lack of examples)

I'm actually kind of at a loss of what to say especially after rereading your original quote. Maybe, although i have an appreciation for knowledge, I lack an appreciation of sentences/thoughts conveyed with the utmost extreme care and handling in order to convey a certain (strict) message. I feel i'm not a "realist" or a "theorist" but somewhere along the middle and because of this i can find some desire for knowledge and or ideas which aren't readibly useable(Not realist), and on the same hand do not understand the "purpose" (bad word choice i feel) of knowledge and or ideas that are purely theorical in nature. (Not Theorist)

(side tangent)
This is something that i'm most definately at odds with Xgrafs brother because hes highly into theortical math and i just don't understand the purpose of doing math purely for doing math that will never have a practical nature to it other than doing it.

Oh and i own 1984 i got about 30 pages into it while I was on duty at Intel School..... (thats the only time iv'e read for pleasure) That was the last time i was on duty at the school so.. It'll sit underneith my desk until i feel like reading it.

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haha. Yeah i hear that. I've actually looked back at a few arguments i've made over time and i'm just like uggggh. If i had thought about those few words for a few seconds longer theres no way i woulda have used them.

I'm not a person that "enjoys" face to face debates so much, (i mean i do them daily all the time) mostly because when i'm doing a for real debate i want a little bit of time to gather myself.

Granted i also don't like doing it so much on metaltabs because sometimes i have to wait a day to get a reply or never at all. UGH. haha

Almost all of my typing is COMPLETELY and totally finger memorization. i can type 129 words a minute (i checked it out one time, only made i think 11 errors whcih took off a word per minute) So it was really "140." At speeds like that you can't fuckign even think about moving fingers. Its kinda like doing fast sweeps. Sometimes you have to stop and just think for 2 seconds then get back to trying stuff haha.

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I thought it was gonna be a lot better. About Youtube and Myspace, how oblivious do you have to be to not know the shit he "points out"? I don't know, I guess I was expecting something a lot more enlightening.

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYlM...related&search=
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9Sa...related&search=


chomsky is a wolf in sheeps clothing. the dude talks straight......i understood everything he said, cant say the same for the other guy.

you all may not agree with everything he says, but the guy can cite sources and spit out facts on nearly every issue,country or war. his points are clear, this is not to say the other dude didnt have valid arguments whatsoever......its just he did alot of accusations,digressions and interruptions<wierd facial expressions too>.......did alot of "television debate tactics", pulled out some words id have to look up in a dictionary, all this without really actually refuting anything factually stated and cited.


this is what im talking about, its a good example of communication and clarity.

its one of the reasons why chomsky is widely read and respected.

edit:sorry about the attempted thread hijack.

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It's not tone precisely, since tone has to do with inflection as well as word choice. It's just that, to say precisely what you mean, you sometimes have to use specific (and therefore usually rare) words and write odd sentences. For example, when I justified Cavell's lengthy sentence I gave two reasons, one having to do with the 'form' and one having to do with the 'content.' But, if we look at them, they both have the same result, which is to list all the usual but inadequate possibilities before asking the question that results when you've rejected all these possibilities, with the other option being to ask the question, probably repeatedly, before showing the kind of search the question rises out of. I hope it's clear that there would be a substantial difference between these two ways of writing the sentence, in such a way that a different form would hold sufficiently different content, even though he'd still be listing a bunch of different approaches to the Philosophical Investigations, his objections to them, and asking where and how one could approach it. Is that clear?

And 'gist' is used as a kind of general point; that is, to 'get the gist' of something is to understand its general point well enough that you can follow. But you don't 'get the gist' of something you understand fully, you 'get the gist' of something that's still partially or mostly unclear. For example, I get the gist of quantum mechanics and can discuss it superficially, but there's no way in hell I could get in depth about it, and an in-depth conversation about it will leave me confused. And if I try to talk in-depth about it as though, based on my superficial knowledge, I really understood it, I'm probably going to spit absurdities.

Another example comes up in a lot of the recent debates about evolution and leads to all sorts of damaging stuff in this country, where people understand science and evolution enough that the former's understood as material investigations into the physical world and the latter as a process by which species change over time, sometimes into other species, which are both good enough generic descriptions. But specific points get wildly misinterpreted because getting the gist of what science is doesn't necessarily include knowing that a theory in a scientific context is something that it's very hard to become, or really anything about the scientific method. So, no, I don't consider the gist of something to be its meat, but rather its skin, or maybe a thickish patch of hair, enough to grab hold of but certainly not the essence of a thing.

Research in pure math comes back and benefits everything that's based on math. Same with every other highly specialized area.

Chomsky's much clearer when he's doing his political commentary thing than his linguistics thing, and I've slogged through enough S-structure, D-structure, wh-form, trace theory, and plain opaque orthographic stuff to know that. In the former case he wants to connect with and convince as large a number of people as he can; in the latter he wants to be scientifically precise. There are different vocabularies for each want and he shifts accordingly, though his natural inclination is certainly for lucid, informal discussion. But that's not always possible.

Well I finally gave this thread a look through, and I think Jason didn't give enough discussion of those two internet sites--just a few small references. I am really curious about what more he could've said about corporate america.

Big question:

How does the money process of Myspace and youtube work? You give them free content without paying to register, and they get rich off of your contribution; I don't understand how this is possible.

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General process is: websites sell ads, which pay a specified dollar amount for each hit. It's, as far as I know, a small amount and usually ends up just covering the costs of owning a website, but if you're a website with all sorts of attractive content that gets millions of hits a day, it adds up to a lot of money. With most small sites, the people who produce the content also make the money, but in the case of myspace or youtube, the content is all produced by the members. So the owners of these sites make their money by having a place for other people to put some content, which attracts people to the site, which brings in money; people are attracted by what the members, not the owners, put up. But the money still goes to the owners.

Now, in the specific case of youtube and myspace, I'm not sure if they sell ad space, though I think youtube does (I don't myspace), but some similar mechanism is at work: people go to the site to look at their own and each other's shit, and the hits generated gets turned into money which goes to the owners, rather than the people putting up the shit.

And ad sponsors means censorship and bent knees, so the sites can't be as free, content-wise, as they are presented as being. But few sites don't have ads, and an ISP provider or somebody who owns servers can hypothetically censor even those without ads, so there's a certain capacity for censorship inherent to the system (I think that this idea came from another discussion here, but I can't remember who said it so my apologies for not giving credit). It's a little ridiculous to flatten the whole situation like that, but it's still good to keep in mind.

And, of course, since it's actually not trivial to provide a space to host all this shit - for example, struggling bands are saved the expense of buying a domain but still have all the benefits of having a website - the whole deal isn't as one-sided as made out. But neither Netherton nor Time want to deal with that.

For me it's like reading unanything's poetry. Just to pick on the first thing I thought of. I get some ideas enough to ask some questions about it and possibly comment on it, but I don't know how the stuff originates or what the metaphors are until I ask more questions. Sometimes it works and sometimes I research it further. Sometimes that doesn't even matter because I'm still lost.

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ENOUGH WITH YOUR LITTLE WORTHLESS POSTS!

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The worst part is not only is the abstract is the easiest part to understand but the stuff to get 'popped' is usually non-technical and of human interest (evo psych, medical case studies, simple gene manipulations) and usually excludes the much more forbidding subjects like hardcore inorganic chemistry, molecular biology, perception/cog. psych, number or systems theory etc.

(For some reason, this excludes physics and cosmology, which are both tremendously complex and frequently oversimplified for toothless popular consumption.)

This is where I derive the FBS Rule of Science Journalism: People who aren't scientists and write about science should be beaten three times a day until Parousia.

Just for fun, here's something today's Arxiv:



Becoming a scientist means in part recognising the fact that there are many, many things you just don't have time to understand.

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Altough I agree with the article, it's so obvious it's hardly earthshaking.
But it's actualy very poorly written, the author is just making intelectual masturbation and tries to sound more 'above-it-all' using grammar in ways thats just spells sado-machosism.

Real insight needs not be hidden behind unnatural syntax.

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It's actually fairly precise writing.



+1

That Arxiv article looks like something to with enzymes.

Maths gets weird, you can see some maths kids jizz over a bunch of letters with the odd number, like 1/x = d/dx (ln x). I remember jizzing over something similar: e^x = d/dx (e^x). Or that 100/(49C6) is the percentage chance you have of winning the British main lottery. John Mansley will get this if he reads it.

Quantum mechanics, well...
One thing, Bohr was right. If you aren't shocked, you haven't understood it at all. You have to let go of your world view to even begin to conceptually digest it. Although the maths for it ain't so bad... at least to the stage I've got to.

My only complaint is that people call it abstract. Just because we cannot directly witness this stuff in motion, it doesn't mean it isn't there. It's humans centralising the world around their own assumed views.

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Most popularizers of science are scientists.

The article doesn't have particularly unnatural syntax (it certainly doesn't give us another pretentious internet 'need not'), and the vocabulary isn't particularly obscure. The problem is that it's empty, and that the vocabulary's specialized enough that people who haven't spent some time with the real thing won't be able to tell this apart from the more interesting stuff it's imitating (think of the Bogdanovs). It's got that certain faux-intellectual stink that people who desperately want intellectual cache (and they can have mine if they'd just ask for it) run miles to douse themselves in, metalheads in particular for some reason. But it's dull where real thought is endlessly fascinating.

I'm hoping that you're not implying either that when we're discussing an abstract (noun) we were calling things abstract (adjective), or that the adjective 'abstract' implies that something isn't there.