what do you think of your internet presence

I was thinking about things like twitter accounts, which eventually kind of morph from impulse to impulse-archive, & I wondered how everybody else felt about theirs. or the history of their blog writing, or ilx posting, or whatever. I think anything else one contributed to with similar frequency, only maybe more deliberately - anything on paper; anything you sit down to do - would usually merit some kind of reflection at a distance, a feeling about its success or a realisation about the thing's purpose, but I'm not sure online things do, so much, even though they can increasingly have a real cogency and posterity

embarrassed

that would seem not unusual! I feel like so much is about the unintended, unconscious accumulation, just the eventual quantity & how it can paint a more revealing pattern than whatever specific things the subject matter concerned. there are obviously really big differences between platforms, here, like I am constantly reading google-returned 2009 blogspot posts, but meanwhile my tweets just roll away like waves. it feels like there aren't the behaviours, yet, either to protect things you made or else to forget them

posterity will little note nor long remember what we tweet here. even the NSA won't gaf.

ilx as an archive of emphemeral thoughts resembles that paul bunyan story where the winter got so cold that words froze as they were spoken and were swept into the corner of the room, where, when the spring thaw came and the words melted, they just made a cacophonous babble.

hm I don't know. I think that re: capital-p posterity that's maybe true enough, but that one characteristic of some online writing is its changed scale, in which you can connect with something small or intimate through your interest in it. so you google around & find the textiles blog the guy made by scanning library books five years ago, its currency not meaningfully diminished to you, though obviously to everybody else, sure. & ilx, I don't know. a lot of this is about digital archiving practices, probably, & maybe ilx is finite, somehow. a lot of this relates to the eternally intriguing will-they-listen-to-the-velvet-underground-in-the-year-3000 thing but either way I feel like there are lots of things that are, however awkwardly, worthwhile & relay insight & will linger. even: Abbott's praying thread was just bumped, I was so engrossed, the conversation can happen again but it's still valuable testimony, for me. or I like coffee dad on twitter. he should be proud but the thing he makes may ebb. like chartres, c/o Orson Welles.

wrt ILX, I spent an hour this morning reading every thread that returned a result for the word "liminal", oldest first, because I used it in conversation this morning and wondered which subjects that word was most used. (It seems to be a word that every boarder has used once or twice, but not regularly.) Found an interesting thread where Momus tried to make "screengazer" happen, another started by anthony that was Bataille vs. modern porn industry, a couple of discussion of where particular suburbs in London starts or end, a thread where Nitsuh talked about what it was to write like Sterling. Lots of little social ephemera, enriching stuff afaic. I can't and don't think of this board's records as being anything like Orson Welles or even testimony, just a digital record of ongoing chatter amongst some friends/acquaintances/strangers, and it has its own place. Can't really think about boarding-for-posterity any more than I could wish that the world had heard, say, a thrilling conversation I had last night about Wanda Jackson.

Twitter is different though, I try not to think about "success or a realization about the thing's purpose", because I'm not at all sure what it's for

ilx as an archive of emphemeral thoughts resembles that paul bunyan story where the winter got so cold that words froze as they were spoken and were swept into the corner of the room, where, when the spring thaw came and the words melted, they just made a cacophonous babble.

― Aimless, Sunday, 26 January 2014 04:24 (40 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is a folk motif of the yakuts/sakha of eastern siberia

never been able to decide whether i envy future historians or not

i don't envy future anybody

an archive of emphemeral thoughts

An oxymoron

i think it would be chill to be a historian in the year 5000, once civilization reconstitutes itself. there will be a lot of stuff for them to sort through.

They will find rings of a Treeship

somewhere in here i was born... and there i died. it was only a moment to you, treeship... you took no notice.

I actively avoid anything I have written online after it has been posted. I do occasionally need to go back and check blog posts or paid-for music writing, and more often than not think they're rather good in retrospect, but it doesn't seem like a healthy thing for me to dwell on. Part of that might be a fear that I'll come across something I really hate but ultimately I'm just not interested enough by my past thoughts to get much out of it.

ILX is the weirdest of these things for me, it's like a record of every intellectual (or otherwise) pose I've struck for the past 14 years, a fragile reminder of the ways we write and rewrite our own histories and how fallible memory is. To the point where sometimes I search the archives for a topic I'm interested in, start reading a long post, and a couple of sentences in, think "who is this idiot, so utterly flamboyant with their own RONGness?" and it's mine own self from a decade ago. It's a constant reminder that there is no such thing as the self, just odd refractions of whomever one is representing themselves as being at that point in time. (It's also odd to see how much friendlier others were to selves I now can't stand.)

My blog(s) are more interesting, as a document of personal histories, and things I had forgotten. I find my blogging self more likeable than the ILX self of the same era, though perhaps less "true" as a representation of how I come across. But I've recently had a horrible experience of a loose cannon of an unpredictably violent family member digging up a blog post from 5 years ago (which was written as a form of exorcism or therapy or something) and quoting it out of context in a calculated effort both to make me look bad, and hurt another family member. (In this case, I'm only glad that I deleted my MySpace to save it from being used this way, and that I have no Facebook.) I don't know how to protect myself from things like this. The only way to try is to keep changing your name and changing your URL to stay one step ahead of them, but in that case, they kind of... *win* because what an abuser like that wants is to shut you up and make you disappear.

Twitter. Oh, the cause of, and solution to, so many of life's problems. Twitter is, in many ways, for me, the literal externalisation of mine own OCD. It's a way of ticking a thought "complete" and putting it away, so that it doesn't grow into a horrible, brain-eating thoughtworm. And in that, it is a godsend, both a way of coping with an otherwise debilitating mental illness, and a way of connecting with others who understand what's going on there. But it is also horrifying, both its publicness, and its "permanent searchable and commodifiable record". OK, everything on the internet is commodifiable for marketing research purposes these days. But when people who don't know that I do, often, use it in that way, go and pick out little tit-bits, and hold them up and go "THIS IS WHO YOU REALLY ARE!!! OMG WHAT A MONSTER!!!!" and start to argue and pearl-clutch about them, it's like... you know, if you want to have an argument with the externalisation of a mentally ill person's manic delusions, you go right ahead, but be aware that you are arguing with phantoms. That's the price I pay. OCD is such a horrible fucking thing that having something, anything, that provides some easement of it is worth any price. Yes, it's cost me friends and relationships, which hurts and is horrible for both sides. But on the other hand, I don't know that a friendship with someone who doesn't get "these are the things I have rattling around in my head all. the. fucking. time. If I don't vomit them up somewhere, they destroy my mind and literally make me crazy" is really a friendship that's going to work very well. Maybe I should have two twitter accounts, one for talking and chatting to friends like a normal human being, and the other for OCD thoughtworms and manic delusions - but the boundary between mental illness and "real life" is messy and not always clear cut. Sometimes both these things exist at once in the same space. And one thing my twitter is most effective for is promoting my artwork, and my artwork and my "crazy" are *completely* inseparable. They are the same thing.

Then there's my Flickr. That had its own thread on ILX for a while. If I'm remembered for anything, I hope it's the drawings, crazy though they might be.

I probably shouldn't post this, despite having typed this out. ILX in general is *not* very understanding of major mental illness that goes beyond a touch of depression. But, still, there it is. My internet presence is the opposite of the urge to archive. It is the urge to get these demons out of my head, get them somewhere else I don't have to have them inside my head all the time.

tl;dr Branwell is crazy, you already knew that

thank god for your "crazy", you rule, you know that

I don't know it or believe it at all, but you are a sweetie for saying so. x

i think that my internet presence is rather passive. i started a blog about 12 years ago in order to practice writing--i stopped updating it about two years later (minus a few posts here and there every coupe of years). I started a twitter account god knows how long ago, near the beginning of twitter. i try to post and engage with twitter but im not good at it and seem to be more comfortable re-tweeting. i've been posting here on ILX sporadically since 2001 (and reading since the days when it was just I Love Music)--and it's probably some kind of record for the longest tenure here with the smallest number of posts. i dont have a facebook--i cancelled it when it started to seem to me like a forum for building some kind of monument to myself.

not sure what to make of all that! i think in some respects i dont like the conflict that seems endemic to internet discourse. in other respects i feel a bit ghostly, that the paltriness of my internet presence compared to the amount of time i spend reading the internet is probably weird. but on the other hand, maybe it's more normal than the people who tweet all day, write blogs, and post here more regularly? maybe most people read a lot on the internet and dont feel that it's required of them to *contribute* something in return?

to put all that in perspective i think perhaps my "internet presence" such as it is speaks to my repeated attempts (and failures) to really create an internet presence.

i usually really enjoy your posts tho ryan; maybe there's a problem area between "internet presence" and individual acts of posting stuff on the internet

Ryan, you make me think that long-time lurkers are probably much more interesting people than us blabbermouth conversers.

mine should be zero

thanks guys! I hope my posts didn't come off as wanting some kind of affirmation but I'll take it anyway.

I wish I could find that Hume bit where he tries to determine what his "self" is but finds nothing there.

you card