| Wednesday, August 29, 2001 |
 | Ah. This makes more sense. Currently obscured by a double tag on NotSoSoft:
Case in point: there is someone I don't know well enough online or offline to know whether I like him or not, but based on what he writes online, I'm veering towards not liking him very much at all. And I really don't actually like disliking people - because stupidly, I want to believe that people online - you know, the personal publishers, the geeks, the big happy family, the ones who actually get it - are generally decent and generous and clued up and passionate and believe that there's more to be gained from working together - collaboration and community and all that mallarkey - than bitching about each other - in public or private. But evidence proves to the contrary and it irritates the hell out of me - especially when experience takes the form of random, public, personal attacks. What's the point in that? Christ, I want to feel positive about people, I really do, but some individuals just make it bloody difficult sometimes. This is the woolly liberal dichotomy in me again, don't you see? One of these days I'm going to have to wake up and come to the inevitable realisation that some people in this world are just surly cunts. That's all. And I wish like anything that it wasn't true.
I do believe she means me, readers. Which is a little confusing. Personal attacks? I see no personal attack. A personal attack is....ooooh.....something like calling somebody a "surly cunt". Which, before anyone gets agitated, has not occured. Meg is describing a hypothesis which she wishes not to see proved. although at some point in the future it will become inescapable. No harm, no foul.
So, let's try to dialogue what might have led to this. Well, the mimetic "case in point" suggests that the cudgels are being taken up in relation to this. Which is unfortunate, really, not to say a little bewildering. This may perhaps be down to a confusion of the words "unexceptional" and "unexceptionable". The latter means "to whom or to which no exception can be taken". I have, to follow the sentence structure, never observed anything other than unimpeachable goodness of character in personal dealing with P. And yet (and stay with me here), certain of the posts on his highly readable weblog do sometimes make me slightly antsy. Generally, posts in which the "mass" are located as other to some confederacy of the enlightened make me antsy. It's a thing. To describe this as a personal attack would be rather like my flatmate interpreting my failure to vote Tory in the last election as a personal attack on him.
Make no mistake; I do find generalisations about the people (and hey, people is the operative term here. Not gimps, not fuckwits, not even cunts, but people) who attained degrees of a certain class at a certain place or group of places antsy-generating, but I don't assume that people are hologrammatic - that their entire personality is expressed in miniature through every action and feature. The aforementioned flatmate is a Eurosceptic Free-Market Conservative who believes in several things which I find not just antsy-making but actively repugnant. He is also intelligent, funny, brave, loyal and a damn good friend. The two are not mutually exclusive.
So, I'm not a fan of P's exclusivity, he is not a fan of my pedantry, or probably my wishy-washy humanism. Which is where the idea of online personae comes in. People display different facets of themselves in different situations. The status of a single "I", a single, default self, has been under question since Modernism and before. What is a little disappointing is that the passage above seems to have focused on the least important part of the entire question of limited access to other people's personalities, the snapshot effect caused by anything other than 24-7 weblogging - the example. And, again I say without rancour, to have misread that. The concept is the thing here, not the subject. No offence, and certainly no attack, was intended. I simply believe that a degree of honesty in why you are pondering something is often as important and as useful as the question itself.
On the bright side, getting some interesting comments on the original question, which is well worth incurring the wrath of UKBlogging's most influential couple. Meep.
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