How will you spend your Thanksgiving break?
Probably one of the most interesting phenomena happening as a result of this new media business — you know, that nebulous phrase that most of us preoccupy ourselves with when trying to describe, say, a blog to our baby boomer mothers — is "the wall." An impenetrable forcefield of words separating you, the reader, from a writer's very soul. We cannot expect, of course, that any published piece of work is wholly indicative of every bit of an author's true feeling.
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Though we do anyway.
Take, for example, my recent "Rubulad" critique on these very pages. What could have been a relatively minor criticism of an exceedingly minor party ballooned somewhat into a more significant piece of uncontrollable vitriol as comments and "one word responses" (sometimes stretching to include sentiments as specific as "damon beres wears a diaper") took their toll. Suddenly, because of YOUR opinions responding to MY opinion, there was a little more weight to my claim that, "Even the thrift-store-shopping, warehouse-renting Brooklyn punks are miserable profiteering bastards in 2010."
Who knows what I'm thinking beyond those 600 words, beyond that chunk of cynicism, beyond what Washington Square News presents as "Damon Beres?"
No one really does — least of all those who claim that I may, in fact, pad myself with Depends at this tender age — and considering the openness of our supposed discourse, that seems somewhat ironic. I have a personal blog, I'm published weekly on these pages and I have a Twitter and Facebook; shouldn't everyone know everything about me?
Certainly, these are hardly the days of old-fashioned journalism. We don't get the paper on our stoop and pass judgment on commentators every now and again. We check our Gmail incessantly, neatly organized by label, swoop on over to Gawker and then spray overpriced brand-name coffee on our fresh MacBooks when someone says something controversial. Everyone is subject to a snap judgment on his or her character with each passing status update.
But we all have this wall. We all selectively choose how we present ourselves, down to what we allow to pass the filter of our Last.fm scrobbles. One might say that, in 2010, each social networking individual opts into this world of privatized publicity.
Still, we ignore this as we tear into each other, through comments and through our "IRL" friends. We all get pissed off when some heinous individual steps beyond their boundaries and says something stupid.
Maybe we should all take a step back, if only for a moment. We all know this world moves SO FAST. Maybe we should all appreciate that plastering "poopsicle" next to a headline speaks a little louder than the article itself; we all have precious little time, of course, to read and form thoughts for ourselves, to digest writing without its third-party commentary.
Of course this is going to be read as the poor columnist bemoaning the abuse that any online writer suffers in the 21st century. But to be frank, I can take the odd suggestion that I plumpen my trousers with my own human byproducts; I myself have left an ASCII penis or two on some World-Wide-Writing. Hey, I'm human.
But Jesus, is this the self-invested douche generation or what? What's the point of having mass communication at our fingertips if all we do is shove forth our own meager agendas? God bless those precious few critical comments — the ones that might bemoan this treatise constructively — but how few and far between are those?
Mass discourse my foot. Can't we all do better?
