“Today there are, by one count, more than 100 million blogs in the world, with
about 15 million of them active...”There are political blogs, confessional
blogs, gossip blogs, sex blogs, mommy blogs, science blogs, soldier blogs,
gadget blogs, fiction blogs, video blogs, photo blogs, and cartoon blogs, to
name a few. Some people blog alone and some in groups. Every self-respecting
newspaper and magazine has some reporters and critics blogging...”
Hmmm...to the artist creation is elementary. But I wonder whether generations to come will appreciate that the history of western literature in the 21st century is essentially one of plagiarism. By which I do not mean breach of copyright (the greatest writers have pawned off other men’s ideas). But semantically indoctrinating people to become mere followers of hyper-link-connectivity, is like announcing the end of personal ambition. It’s a mass derailment measure. A prelude to literary genocide. You may have your own views on this, but something in this process reminds me of The Invasion of the Bodysnatchers. I can see no escape from it. Nothing to oppose it. Global conditioning is all but complete.
It has led to the creation of a world of self-obsessed, withdrawn individuals communicating only with their hypertexts and exceeds, unless I am mistaken, the force of the human intellect. Billed as a “visual and auditory cue”, it more accurately represents a death knell for the idea that intelligent life might one day exist on the planet Earth. The meaning of schizophrenia is a broad one and interpreted with great flexibility by psychiatrists and medics alike, but the problem was as well stated by the Sunday Times correspondent who wrote:
“There's something, technically speaking, poetic about links.”
Though I can't vouch for the truth of it, some scientists who have studied religious experience also claim that closely monitored brain activity reveals what is going on during the experience of hyper-connectivity. Such research apparently shows that the brain deactivates the networks used for critical social assessment and negative emotions while it bonds viewers through the chemical reward circuitry.
“I find myself itching to insert a link.”
Just which neurochemical suppressants are responsible for neutralizing the critical faculties of the brain is not clear, albeit that Serotonin has been mentioned. I am not a medic, but your fears have been verified: You become deranged and lose your ability to reason. It is difficult for me to describe adequately the horrors of the technological revolution. But there are in fact one 100 million potential psychos out there. I should know, I happen to be one of them.
(My 'Hmmm' at the beginning of this post is a good example.)
Some bloggers, of course, merely have loss of concentration. Others, as you well know, hallucinate - whereas possible side-effects can range from acne and personality changes to headaches, tinnitus and red lumps on the face. It’s quite mad, admittedly, since some of these symptoms are more usually associated with dengue fever, the West Nile virus or PMS. More significantly - and I will say at once that the submission I am about to make is not covered by any express authority - I’ve received startling information that the US Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency (Darpa), considers the collective suppression of critical judgment one of the most brilliant political strokes of the age.
That’s how well informed I am (unauthorized link withheld).
So I cannot help thinking, with my limited grasp of social engineering, that every successful blog is of necessity a part of mass population management. For no matter where you are on this planet (with the exception of the occasional South Sea island, perhaps) a way is always found to beam a link into your home. Maybe I was not supposed to reveal this, but I cannot, in all decency, withhold from literary history what has not been concealed from myself. How otherwise am I to explain to my future readers why the world went into acute anaphylactic shock, chronic intellectual recession and permanent academic decline. And don’t post any comments rebuking my excess of large-scale vision. Your own future as well as the welfare of our culture is at stake. You might feel irritated now, but one day you’ll thank me. And that’s what keeps me blogging...
Dreamy
6 comments:
Somewhat depressing for a Monday morning, Selena. though I've considered this same thing many times. This is, indeed, all about large scale vision. Hyperlinks too easily allow the reader to escape the thread of an argument. They change the way we read and think. Our universities are already producing too many people who believe that reasoning is a matter of cutting and pasting chunks of documents and produce a hypertextual mess.
More worrying is my fear that the masterminds behind blogging are the publishers and literary agents. As Elberry said in a previous comment: 'the blog thing sates my hunger for readers'. The blog thing consumes too many of my own hours. How many of us waste our energies working for a medium which is little more than a form of self-abuse?
Ahh Richard, as ever, eloquent and perfectly to the point. So much appreciated.
Bloggers are too distanced and uninvolved, everything happens by proxy. They flirt with myriad themes, but the flirtation remains hypertextual and rarely succeeds in guiding their purpose in any significant way...
Thank you for your comment!
I for one have a myriad of readers - most of whom are there to be entertained and informed.. I have only just discovered how to insert a link anyway...
Absolutely, Mutley, I'm one of your most loyal readers, and if I knew how to do links, I wouldn't be so uppish about the darned things...xxx
Do you have any jobs going at your West End advertising agency at all? I am getting desperate and would even sink to advertising...
Of course, of course, Mutley. I’m in need of a chauffeur. The toughest part of this job is that while I’m getting tied up, spanked or sodomized indoors, you would be waiting outside, sitting in my limousine....
Would that be suitable...?
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