Venusberg | That's not your heart, it's a piece of helicopter casing

Tuesday, August 28, 2001

Metablog warning:

Meg wonders if it is OK to dislike somebody - at times - based on what they write on the Internet. To which the honest answer is "God, I hope so". But this seemingly innocent question can be broken down in all sorts of crunchy ways. For example, somebody whom you just plumb don't like is naturally likely to be just as hard to like on the Interwebnet. Ian Duncan Smith is no more lovable a proposition over the ether than on the soapbox.

The pattern breaks up when we start talking about people who are both attractive and repulsive at different points in their online presence, or for that matter people who present very differently on the Interwebnet than in other media, which may be because of specificities in their approach to the medium of writing, or the medium of the Internet, or any number of other possible factors. To what extent can one be said to "like" or "dislike" such a phenomenon?

Case in point. Whenever I have met Paul, I have found him to be entirely unexceptionable company. And yet the parts of himself that he presents on the Internet are at times, on a purely subjective level, abrasive. Just as he has at times become agitated by the parts of myself that, for example, question the morphological fixity of prose. Case in point: high GCSE results give stupid people false hope.

There is a lot in this entry which I agree with on a politico-social level. I agree that there is probably too much tertiary education, and/or that education is canted towards academic subjects which already have too many graduates rather than practical or vocational skills. I sympathise with the view that a degree in, say, automotive retail (available, last time I looked, at Loughborough University of Technology) may be less useful than three years selling cars. I believe in a robust and functional system of apprenticeships. I know the statistics for media studies graduates actually working in the media, and so forth.

But I also believe that this can only be done with any sense of equality or equity if academic success is deprivileged to the point where people who could be very talented and able in a variety of fields do not instead throw themselves pointlessly into unprofitable degree courses. And that it is slightly disingenuous to preface the contention "this isn't elitism, snobbery or any other misused lexeme you care to throw around; it's realism" with the prior contention "the fact is, I don't want the fact I've got a degree to equate me with some gimp who's got a 2:2 in Stairlifts from Basingstoke John Inman University". Because once you start cutting the cake that way, where do you stop? Can the holder of a first feel cheapened by the fact that people who were only clever enough to get 2:1s feel entitled to claim that they too are possessed of academic qualification? Can holders of degrees from Oxbridge Academy, London claim entitlement to feel violated by people with qualifications of a comparable class from a "New University" like, say, Birmingham or Bristol appending the same initials to the end of their names? At what point does the desire for acknowledgement bleed into insecurity?

And at what point can an online identity be said to cohere sufficiently to be considered a persona able to generate or sustain value-judgements of liking or disliking? Tell me.

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