This about sums it up…
This needs to find its way from an iron-on transfer, and from there onto a t-shirt for little ole me:
Posts Tagged ‘lolcats’
Further Consideration
A comment left on my last post by none other than Jason Scott got me thinking (thanks for stopping by, Jason! I feel a little starstruck!) While I agree with Jason’s point that justification of any activity is sort of useless, I’m still puzzled by the “why” of some of our activities in the first place, especially concerning online identity. Justifying what we like to someone else isn’t really necessary, true. I can spitball what people find entertaining, just as easily as they can spitball what I find entertaining. Ed, for instance, will never understand why I find LOLcats - or Sockington for that matter! - so amusing. I just do, because it’s retarded and funny and burns fifteen minutes of my workday here and there. He shakes his head and sort of gives me his silent, pitying “I know you’re really intelligent so I’ll just let this one slide” face. I’m okay with that. I’ll never understand how he can like horror movies. It’s a wash.
Hell, I am all for enjoying oneself, even in supremely strange ways such as grabblin’ and cosplay, that I will never understand and maybe shouldn’t… you’ll be happy to know that the person under that cosplay outfit? Is a dude. But hobbies, even the really weird ones, usually connect you to other people, even if they’re as delightfully fuckin’ offbeat as you are (Japan has a whole cosplay CONFERENCE… one event I will never visit for fear of being permanently freaked out by empty faces of fixed comic glee.) While the cosplay thing does border on my forthcoming contentions, at least these guys are getting out of the house.
Anyway. Got distracted, sorry. My whole contention is, there is a whole culture of self-effacement that is evolving with social media, massively multiplayer gaming, and the internet in general. I first started pondering this effacement a while ago when I tried out Second Life after hearing about it from a co-worker. For the uninitiated, Second Life is a “game” developed by Linden Labs - I’m not really sure why, but I think it had something to do with sucking the soul out of humanity. I could be wrong on this count. Anyway, Second Life is basically as it reads on the tin: It’s a virtual world with its own currency, society, etc. You basically wander around the virtual landscape, making your “avatar” interact with other “avatars” in a variety of ways (btw, link is NSFW). ::::shudder:::: Just to let you know, my Second Life experience lasted about twenty minutes. I made a person who looked pretty much exactly like me (okay, I might have given her way bigger jugs, but that’s a whole other story), wandered around flummoxed for a while, and eventually accepted a script from someone I didn’t know, which forced me to fly around the world with my head jammed up my own ass for a few. I finally got someone to fix me, just so I wouldn’t leave the world of Second Life with my face forever in my own pooper, but the glamour was lost.
It’s supposed to be real life, only pixely. And if you stop at Jason’s contention that it doesn’t matter what it is so long as you get pleasure out of it, then okay I guess you’re not hurting anyone. But I’m still baffled by this concept of creating a digital cocoon around yourself, and pretending to be someone else. Most people aren’t logging into Second Life to live a pixely version of their own life; They’re doing it to get completely the hell away from their real life. The same rule applies unfortunately for the majority of people who blog/tweet as their pets/fake celebrities/fictional characters, or MMO players who live and die by the travails of their 47th level Paladins with kick-ass-plus-5-against-orcs swords. It’s an all-consuming escape from being a regular person. Furthermore, these are activities that can take you away from other real people. The siren song of a preferable alter-life can be fairly intoxicating.
I know that there is a percentage of people who are completely normal, workaday average guys and gals like the “rest of us”, but the fact still remains that we are using technology to replace ourselves with things that don’t even exist, people that are created out of the minds of writers, anthropomorphized versions of our pets. The idea that you can be “anyone you want to be” on the internet is stunning to me, perhaps because I’ve never wanted to be anyone but myself. Even though the real me is shit at math, will probably never live in the UK as much as she direly wants to, and can burn rice like a champion, I’m okay with it. Our technology, however, seems to be giving people the ability to separate themselves from themselves in ways no one ever could have predicted. A few minds are looking at this with at least a small amount of concern for what it says about us as a society. Why are we so willing to give up on our real persona in favor of a constructed, “ideal” persona? In the end, it’s all well as long as nobody gets an eye poked out, but it doesn’t stop me from being utterly baffled.
