Content with Content.

[Triple Zero]

Know how it goes.  You're bored at work, and there's 20+ people on the board, and NOBODY'S TALKING.  They're all "Viewing", which means (I think) that they're AFK.

I don't understand. To me, this is a forum, not a chatbox. That means it's a suitable medium for people to communicate out of sync with time or timezones. Some discussions happen in hours and some in weeks. But the ones that happen in minutes are rarely worth reading.

When I'm "Viewing" I am not posting, but not nearly as often AFK as you'd think. Wanna know why that costs me so much time? Cause I'm wading through the inane chatter of the discussions that happened in minutes last night for the sake of all the people that demand a forum to be just like a chatbox, because they're "bored at work" (only in America, BTW).

And then, when I'm done or I decide I've had enough, my head's spinning and I'm not capable of writing anything thoughtful anymore, and then you get whiny crap like this post and a bunch of others you might remember. In case you wondered, that's where they come from.

I don't mean people should post less moronic yammering or chatter less about dumb shit--can't stop them, don't want to either, this is what they want.

HOWEVER it truly puzzles me when someone demands more of that shit because they're "bored at work"--my blood boils a bit and I throw up a little, for many different reasons (spending one's time at an internet forum because you're "bored at work" seems to be an American cultural thing, so I'm not to judge that, no matter how insane it appears to me).

I'm honestly confused here. The sentiment I'm getting is, you prefer people wasting their work hours with meaningless chatter just enough to keep their and your dopamine gland triggering all the time--the same mechanism that TV and Twitter and Crackberries use to keep you from Thinking, but you know this, I know you know this, because you wrote about it--you PREFER that over the forum being silent a few hours in the day? Maybe, okay. But it also sounds like you PREFER it over the forum being mostly silent except for those few minds that are allowed their weekly original thought, and actually manage to write it down before it gets washed away in a tsunami of tweets.

Maybe you believe that you can have both? Is that so? Maybe you can, maybe there's two kinds of people, some with blown fuses and some without.

Or maybe I'm the only one unable to form a coherent thought when everyone is screaming and I'm just pissing on your parade because you get to ejaculate on your cake AND eat it too. And maybe everyone wants a wild storm of whitenoise to keep their minds occupied because otherwise there's just nothing to do, at work, except watching the clock tick, and in the mean time someone will write something brilliant and they'll all be able to find it with their minds fresh as ever, read it and continue screaming and laughing, think about it, scream and howl and laugh and drool, then write something thoughtful about it and cackle and bark and cry about sports, the weather and clothing, and keep yelling and screaming, and as if by magic (or is it chance?) something intelligent and insightful occurs, they will write it up and post it and everybody will see it and the cycle of cacaphony continues--without me, unfortunately. I can't do that.

The above part of the post cost me 1.5 hours to write. Hope you liked it, hope you can explain a few of my questions, too.

Maybe I'll be able to post the one interesting thing I'll have to say this week over the weekend. I wrote half of it on monday on a notepad. And maybe I can find some peace to continue the thread about brands next week.

---

Now for a bit of feedback on LMNO's rant because it's his thread

It's beautiful imagery and writing.

I have no idea what it's trying to say, though.

It sounds awfully depressing and it sounds really a lot like bullshit. Very pretty bullshit. At least, if the OP is about yourself? I get that feeling, if it's not, then I completely missed the point and please disregard my commentary entirely. LMNO, you're a majestic writer, king of words, but the person in the OP needs a firm kick in the butt.
When I peel off one layer of metaphor, I get images about a guard in a concentration camp who's feeling sorry for himself that he's got such a shitty job, wondering what happened to his childhood dreams. He deserves a bit worse than a kick in the butt, IMO. Maybe something like Col. Hans Landa's fate, give him a uniform he can't take off when he gets home.

But say you'd explain it to me, in very small words, without metaphor, without similes, just what are you trying to say? Try it man. I think it's more powerful if you did it that way, because the words are just covering up trying to make something seem more pretty and heroic than it is.

I will try--where does it go? Don't get angry if I am misunderstanding what you wrote entirely:

I am a corporate employee. I'm just doing my job. What is my job is decided from higher up, who are cold and uncaring, possibly evil. And it has been decided that my job is to be cold and uncaring, possibly evil, to those below me.
But this is worth it, because advertisements tell everybody they should buy stuff, and I believe those advertisements, and my job allows me to buy all that stuff the advertisements tell me I can buy.
And if having to be cold, uncaring and possibly evil to those below me isn't enough, I also believe that I am expected to play a certain role and act the personality that is expected from someone in my position (you might want to check yourself btw, is this actually expected or does taking up a different persona make it easier to distance yourself from what you do?).
The job doesn't make me happy.
I dream and pretend this part of my life doesn't exist and I wish I would be more successful at that. At home I try to leave it all behind, but I can't.

So LMNO what are these terrible things you have to do at work? Fire people? Crack metaphorical whips at them to make them reach targets? Order people below you to tell customers horribly bad financial news? Bankruptcy?

What's so soul-crushing about your job you have to get it out here, but don't dare to unless it's wrapped in five layers of metaphor?

---

This second part of my post cost 45 minutes to write.

I think I don't have time or energy to read or write anything anymore today. My sincere apologies (not) to all of you who must have been terribly bored at work while I was writing this and not making inane one-liner comments every 5 minutes in Apple Talk.

[LMNO]

First off, thanks for taking time to write out what you're thinking, instead of saying "fuck this, see you later, whiners."  I'll try to answer, but I may blend your questions into a single response.

Anyway, the work i do is intellectually unstimulating.  PD at it's best is very stimulating*. So, in order to stay focused on my work, I need to kick my frontal lobes into gear with some PD content.  It's not that I want to read what people are listening to/eating/sticking their dick in.  It's for the occasional witty one-liner to such things, or a newly revealed perspective.  I'd prefer some insightful commentary on the nature of being human, but that takes a lot more time to create so I'm not expecting an essay every hour.

Ok, so.  No one was posting, and I decided to open up my brainmeats and just freewrite, linking interesting sounding words which lead to images which led to themes.  It's pretty much stream of consciousness, with no real meaning, metaphor, or narrative.  Consider it Lynchian.  So, I guess that means that any associations or metaphors you find in it are Law of Five-ish, which I find to be really cool.  I'm sure you could make the case for it being a snapshot of my brain, but in all honesty I was just going where the words took me.  I'm not even sure I was making intentional links between the paragraphs as I wrote it.  I couldn't say that the guard at the beginning is the same person at the end.  

Yeah, I suppose my writing tends towards the dark side of things, but it always has, and that was pre-eyeliner and Joy Division.  But that doesn't mean I absolutely hate my job, nor that I think my boss is some sort of evil Nazi.  In fact, I don't remember thinking about my job when I wrote this.  I was just creating some words to fill the time.

To address (what I think is) your final question, my "demand" for more inanity and bickering was slightly tongue-in-cheek, which I tried to signal with my self-deprecation and all caps.  It was a plea for more content, a jibe at the latest board drama, a poke at the fluffers, and a self-effacing comment on my own writing.  You might say that if there was layered nuance anywhere in this thread, it was in that post.  I didn't really want people to post fluff and nonsense, but at the same time I grew tired of refreshing the page and not seeing anything new.  Maybe it is a dopamine thing.  Maybe you're right, and we are killing the board.

It's an interesting question -- should PD be a depostory for ideas, or should it be the equivalent of TV?  I'd like to think it's both, and that one tends to influence the other, but I could be wrong.



















*
 

[Triple Zero]

First off, thanks for taking time to write out what you're thinking, instead of saying "fuck this, see you later, whiners."

I should clarify when I wrote "whiny crap like this", I was completely referring to my own post. Not yours (which was really cool) or other people's.

It's for the occasional witty one-liner to such things, or a newly revealed perspective.

Same. Though I find myself less capable of filtering through all of the stuff these days. Partly because of increased volume (I thought the amount of posts/day has been steadily rising over the years I've been here, but I might be wrong), but probably also because my head's still not recovered from that burnout a few years ago.

So, I guess that means that any associations or metaphors you find in it are Law of Five-ish, which I find to be really cool.

Same

I'm sure you could make the case for it being a snapshot of my brain, but in all honesty I was just going where the words took me.  I'm not even sure I was making intentional links between the paragraphs as I wrote it.  I couldn't say that the guard at the beginning is the same person at the end.  

funny because as I was writing the critique, near the end of it I was also wondering, "wait a minute, am I sure that this is LMNO writing about himself?".

Maybe it is a dopamine thing.

I'm quite sure it is. Or at least, I read a couple of articles claiming the same thing about people obsessively checking their emails every 10 minutes (years ago), doing the same thing with their blackberries (more recent), then social networks, and today with Twitter and smartphones. If the articles got it right, then I think refreshing the board to see if there's anything new, anything, amounts to the same thing. Some Dutch weblogs call it "F5-ing", referring to the keyboard shortcut to refresh the page.

It's an interesting question -- should PD be a depostory for ideas, or should it be the equivalent of TV?  I'd like to think it's both, and that one tends to influence the other, but I could be wrong.

Well I said something about how forums allow for discussion that is separated from real time, as opposed to chatrooms and instant (!!) messaging. This was a really big thing on the +Seekers boards (now wastelands). People from different timezones talked with hours in between, sometimes discussions would take place over the course of weeks (partly because they were paranoid hackers that weren't interested in fluff talk that much).

Funny thing is, if you came late to such a discussion, and read it in its entirety--save the timestamps--you really couldn't tell the discussion was time-dilated strung out that much. Posters appeared to be smart as foxes, because everybody could easily spend half an hour on crafting a well thought-out reply, which gave others yet another reason to think extra hard about what they would write. Out of reverence, there was a lot of that going on too (I don't think people here would have liked that very much, but it was the shape of the community), like how once in a while someone here says everybody is so much smarter than them

On the other side of that, if it happened that two seekers were reading and posting at the same time, you'd sometimes see a string of very short oneliners (threads were organised as trees, like Reddit has them, not ehm threads like most standard forum software), but it usually wasn't very interesting to read, and often very cryptic "insider" talk because they felt like having a private discussion, nearly speaking in code sometimes (again, paranoid hacker mentality) (very interesting though, because the reward of figuring it out was usually high enough).

If you look at my earliest posts on this forum, I bet you can spot a bit of that mentality in my writing as well. It took years before I dared to post a photo of myself, or speak more detailed about my personal life than roughly coming from the Netherlands (being used to Seekers I assumed people would discover that from my writing "accent" soon enough ).

While that is one extreme, and PD is a completely different place, I still think that back in the day when I just joined, PD was a littlebit more like that (a really tiny little bit), and not at all like that today. But I might just be projecting. Even so, there were quite a few people secretive about their identities, and today there still are (Cain comes to mind, but also RWHN in a way, and you never really explain what your actual job is about either :P) Roger's identity was a big mystery in my early days (not that I tried to find out btw), I remember when Payne managed to dig up that first pic of him for the WOMP vault It really seems like these days everybody just opens up without too much of hesitation, much more than a few years back.

I'm not saying we should all go anonymous to eachother, not at all (and I can think of quite a few good people would really resent that if it were to happen), it's just an observation. I'm not entirely sure if it's the only way to improve on having more intelligent conversation, either. Actually, it would just be a really bad idea for our community in general.

[Jenne]

Well, back when forums were places to just post content and leave, then come back and check and read, yes, more time was taken because there were significant lag times in TIME SPENT ONLINE.  So if you have the "freedom" to be online, A LOT, with a fast internet connection, and an even faster computer, and a job that allows you to be paid to surf, post and read...yeah, interaction is going to go hell for leather and be diversified and not as in-depth.

That's not to say that some interaction doesn't warrant the deeper, longer silences and posts.  Some is more like foreplay, some is more like a longtime relationship and romance if you will (jesus christ, never thought I'd describe PD.com in such terms, but so be it).  The foreplay tends to annoy those not engaged at times, I noticed.  It's what happens in Apple Talk a lot, and though that subforum is set aside (it seems, anyway, through its description) for that sort of interaction, it STILL gets dumped on as "fluff" and there's many a complaint on "signal to noise ratio."

Though, any datamining of the yesteryears of this forum seems to indicate that this type of "fluff" is certainly not rare.  And in fact it happened everywhere.  The cooking subforum, the literature forum, the OMF forum...all were subject to insider trolling.  And let's not forget the "alts."  The one true mission of the "alts" were to destroy any sort of comaraderie anyone had on here.

Remove these barriers, and there'll be deeper intimacy.  A sweeter (ptooey! you say--but it's true) feeling ensues, and people open up.  And then posters who feel this intimacy are warned it's fluff, or page 6 or blogging...and confusion about what the purpose of being here, posting, and what's IMPORTANT! about interacting here causes some sort of melee, storm or rip in the current gestalt.

I've personally tried to walk a fine line here of being open and being closed.  I don't go on the internet to many more places than this.  So I've homed in on the feeling of closeness to some, yet take liberties to distance myself when I need to.  I hate imposition of behavior on this place, in any sense, other than to just be yourself.  Because to me, that's what PD.com sells itself REALLY well as.  A place to be yourself.

That doesn't mean if you're an asshole, no one will call you on it.  If you shit where you eat, you deserve to be made to clean it up.  Period.  But the intimate atmosphere here has fostered relationships on this board--both here and eb&g--where people venture out and MEET and EAT and DRINK IRL.  Offer each other places to stay, etc.  Risky behaviors, yet enjoyed and cherished.

So...while there's such a high volume to content ratio for some, I'd posit that, really, the content is about the same.  The posting probably is, too, looking at 2004/05 when a lot of you met.  You've all just moved and changed WITH the board, and there's a bit of nostalgia for when it was a rougher, meatier environment.  And you know, anytime you bring women on board, well, it's bound to be a bit softer in tone and less agressive overall (I think Nigel pointed this out, once upon a time)...

[maphdet]

Ok- So. Two things here.
1. The OP
2. The response to the OP


And here is my response to both.

1. LMNO, your post Started me, thinking about something that I thought as a kid growing up. That people were watching me. At All Times. (it creeped me out). Then the post pulled me to middle aged wanting.

-Funny how when I read a post, I understand and see things in it that i could associate with in myself. I wonder if that is human nature or if I am that self centered/fuckedup.

2. Jumping to a responce. Trip, I was thinking about something recently and that was, how electronic communication has caused a cease in spontanious conversation. I say this because, in a setting like, say, a forum, people have the opportunity to carefully think out dialogue or a responce to dialogue. People can also go over and review, edit, add, remove and fully disect what they think, prior to their release of thought. (unlike irl, where your responce is instant and unreviewed, unedited).

This imo causes a lack of spontaneity in expression.

Not saying it's right/wrong, good/bad, or whatnot, just sayin.
(btw, makes me wonder how insecure or not, future generations will be in interacting with people In A Real Life setting.)


Also-I would be interested in seeing what an irl conversation would be like with people i have encountered online. Specifically people I have encountered here, through PD.
It would almost be like a free for all of sorts. Maybe.

Fuck, I wanna get everyone here in a room without electronics. And for that I thank All of You.


Anyway-Thanks for keeping the shit intriguing folks.


LMNO-I enjoyed the OP and Trip, I enjoyed the response.

[E.O.T.]

E.O.T.

          suddenly in love with 0.0.0.

[Placid Dingo]

Lmno: loved the tone of it, felt like it owed a lot to slam poetry.

Maphdet; agreed. I know I'm a lot different in person as I use my voice and expression a lot in communicating, speeding up slowing down etc. I've met Rem which was great, and hope to meet more.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

I spend a fuckton of time with people in person, and have been online since the days of dialup BBSes, and have to completely disagree that "electronic communication has caused a cease in spontaneous conversation". Discussion forums, especially ones where argument is a staple, in my opinion serve the function of college classes where research is done and arguments presented in essay form; they, if anything, make people sharper, faster, and more able to deliver an intelligent and well-reasoned critique or sustain half of a discussion in face-to-face conversations. I've met a lot of these PD forum and other online people, and had interesting, stimulating conversations with them.

[Triple Zero]

I was thinking about something recently and that was, how electronic communication has caused a cease in spontanious conversation.

I would amend this to "electronic communication has allowed for 'less spontaneous' conversation", because there's forums and email that allow for the "less spontaneous" sort (not sure if that's exactly the right term, but we know what we mean here), but on the other hand there's instant messaging and in some sense twitter, facilitating the more spontaneous kind.

Though the time-dilated aspect of online communication always intrigued me. I know I preferred ICQ back in the day to MSN because it had offline messaging (MSN has had that feature for several years now, but not at first. I dunno about AOL, only got one much later, as it obviously wasn't very widespread outside of the USA).

I say this because, in a setting like, say, a forum, people have the opportunity to carefully think out dialogue or a responce to dialogue. People can also go over and review, edit, add, remove and fully disect what they think, prior to their release of thought. (unlike irl, where your responce is instant and unreviewed, unedited).

This imo causes a lack of spontaneity in expression.

Could you expand on that last sentence? I'm not really sure what it means, cause even when I write a well thought-out email or forum post, I still allow for "spontaneous" expressions, figures of speech, some made up on the spot, I also count puns in that category btw. Or maybe that's just "creative" and not "spontaneous"? Even though they occur to me spontaneously and often I leave them in (sometimes polished a bit).

Also-I would be interested in seeing what an irl conversation would be like with people i have encountered online. Specifically people I have encountered here, through PD.
It would almost be like a free for all of sorts. Maybe.

Fuck, I wanna get everyone here in a room without electronics. And for that I thank All of You.

My personal opinion about meeting online people IRL is that it's pretty much what you'd expect, except quite a bit more fun The demosceners I met at demoparties were more fun to hang around with than the average nerd (because of the artistic streak, I suppose), the Seekers were very well-spoken people with various very interesting opinions and ideas (that were easier to dig into IRL) and the Discordians so far have been exactly as much fun as you'd expect (moreso, actually).

The only barrier with Discordians were the ones I couldn't understand because of accent. Liam and P3NT to be exact Which is a shame because I'd love to have been able to pick their minds more.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

It times past, people used to write letters to each other and send them by mail. That was pretty time-delayed...

[E.O.T.]

It times past, people used to write letters to each other and send them by mail. That was pretty time-delayed...

TRUE

         However, letters are not only romantic, even in a platonic environment, but letter writing allows for much more determination, as well as thoughtfulness in a response. Currently, we may say that the paper, the stamp, the U.S.P.S. handling, is all an environmental waste, in regards to sending a letter, but "back in the day", wasn't that exactly the point? One scribed the words, physically, themselves, onto a piece of the real world (paper) and everything about the process was an extension of the human element.

NOW A DAYS,

         when I receive a text from you, I'm not always convinced that you even meant it for me, or that YOUR PHONE perhaps, sent it for no reason other than someone grabbed your ass and therefore whatever last log you entered flew out to the world like a digital fart



         

[Triple Zero]

It times past, people used to write letters to each other and send them by mail. That was pretty time-delayed...

Yes but not in groups, and not with people they hadn't met beforehand. Sure, both happened, in the forms of respectively newsletters and pen-pals. I used to have pen-pals as well, often kids I met at holiday when camping with my parents. But a bit later I had an email pen-pal, never met him, replied to a letter in a comics magazine. So I can say I have experience with both, and for me email was definitely superior, because paper letters do not allow for easy quoting what you reply to. Just that simple thing allowed us for much more in-depth discussion.

Not to say the paper pen-pals weren't a lot of fun either, mostly because we could share drawings and cartoons Too bad the girl I wrote a lot of letters with, the contact watered down after a while, and some years later I got a few postcards how it might be fun to start writing again, but she didn't write her address on the cards so I couldn't reply She must have thought I wasn't interested anymore. I could probably track her down via Facebook or Hyves.nl though. Same as the email guy (whose address I still got but I doubt he uses it anymore).. hmmm.

Still, I think you shouldn't ignore the importance of the quoting function in email and newsgroups. The sort of discussions I had that way would have been impossible on paper.

[maphdet]

This imo causes a lack of spontaneity in expression.

Could you expand on that last sentence? I'm not really sure what it means, cause even when I write a well thought-out email or forum post, I still allow for "spontaneous" expressions, figures of speech, some made up on the spot, I also count puns in that category btw. Or maybe that's just "creative" and not "spontaneous"? Even though they occur to me spontaneously and often I leave them in (sometimes polished a bit).

How many times have you been in an instant chat where you thought wtf, is it the servers or the other person delaying. (and really there is no way to know.)
Yeah, I would say that adding the figures of speech and puns are more so creative, than spontaneous. How many times has a reply been written out and then re worded or taken out completely. That is what I think we are losing. The stuff that just would come in irl on the spot. The stuff that once said is said and you cannot rewind to go back and edit or delete what you just said/expressed.

I don't know I guess I mean that we lose the 'in the moment' if you will. We lose the chance to go back and forth between sentences without losing the feel for the conversation. We lose the chance to interrupt and say what we are feeling at the  moment without going back and re-reading what we wrote to make sure it is clear, grammatically correct, spelled correctly or just plain ol corny or whatnot. For example, the instant reply that I might have responded with, has instead become a reply a few days in the making. When I could have irl just said what I was thinking right, straight away.  (minus the polishing and pondering). Not to say I think everyone sees it like this, just the way I do.

Anyway- not sure if that explains my statement or not.

Btw-Know how many times I thougth about just scraping this but only posted today, most likely because i've had a few.    (might be me then, eh.)
Btw also- Don't get me wrong-I do not have an issue with being online and interacting in forums and such. I just think that I lose a lot of what could have been really good conversations. At the same time though, I've had lots of really good conversations online too. A chance to Really think things through before responding.

[Cainad (dec.)]

It times past, people used to write letters to each other and send them by mail. That was pretty time-delayed...

TRUE

         However, letters are not only romantic, even in a platonic environment, but letter writing allows for much more determination, as well as thoughtfulness in a response. Currently, we may say that the paper, the stamp, the U.S.P.S. handling, is all an environmental waste, in regards to sending a letter, but "back in the day", wasn't that exactly the point? One scribed the words, physically, themselves, onto a piece of the real world (paper) and everything about the process was an extension of the human element.

NOW A DAYS,

         when I receive a text from you, I'm not always convinced that you even meant it for me, or that YOUR PHONE perhaps, sent it for no reason other than someone grabbed your ass and therefore whatever last log you entered flew out to the world like a digital fart

"digital fart"

Cainad,
7 years old

[Cainad (dec.)]

Also, OP is swote. Very striking.