John Shirley Blogthoughts…rants…irony…fiction…observation…

At the new MICHAEL MOORCOCK’S NEW WORLDS MAGAZINE…here: http://newworlds.co.uk/nonfiction.php?nonfiction_id=4

The magazine also contains a new John Shirley short story. The interview is free and open. The rest of the publication requires a payment made to the publisher.

Religious rituals don’t have the point, the meaning, they originally had. So it seems to me. Perhaps they’re still of value to some of you. To many people, if not most, they’re misdirection, and mere conditioning. Once, long ago–millenia ago, in most cases–rituals were a device, something like a symbol mnemonic (or legominism), for remembering that we’re connected to something higher, and that those who engaged in the ritual had a goal, a fundamental wish to remain in conscious connection. But the meaning in the ritual was lost over time; the original meaning wasn’t accurately transmitted through history’s endless “game of telephone”. Ritualism is a flawed system. The practice of self-remembering works better.

Self-remembering doesn’t involve “selfishness”–it is remembering to observe the self, and my state of presence or lack of presence; my connectedness or lack of connectedness to the world around me, in the moment, along with the state of my inner life. It relies on ideas, and good habits, instead of ritual. It’s a system that’s more integral to daily life.

It’s easy to see the rhythms of life in dance, even ballet; it’s not as easy to see the music, the rhythm of dance, in mundane life. It’s been suggested, though, often enough, in musicals; maybe people on a street hawking wares, in a musical the cries of mongers are alternatively repeated, becoming a song; a group of sailors with mops on a deck turn their swishings into dance, and so on. One can see something like that in daily life; my wife and I shopping, putting things in baskets, her and then me, stepping aside for other people in a reasonably graceful way, she opens the car trunk while I lift the groceries, I put them in, she closes the trunk, we step into the car, her and I almost at once, the doors closing slam/slam. The movements of my body around the yard…

A lot of it has to do with moving one’s body in the environs, the space co-composing the music with you, I move around this object, to get at this one, and the most mindful way to do it is fairly rhythmical, there is just a *hint* of dance to the motion, especially when linked with other motions…If I pay attention…

I had an elaborate fantasy about Hilary Clinton today. No, not that kind of fantasy. I envisaged her giving a press conference: “The tragic violence at the embassy in Benghazi will not and should not be forgotten. There is plenty of blame to go around. My department was complacent about security, some were slow to respond, Special Forces were frustrated in attempts to reach the embassy (frustrated through no fault of theirs), and Republicans in Congress failed to provide enough money for embassy security upgrades. However most of the current microscopic perusal and rehashing of the tragedy is happening for one reason. The Republicans believe I’m going to run for President so they hope to smear me, in a way that will prevent me from winning when that time comes. But in fact I already decided not to run–oh, I left the door open a sliver, for a while, because Bill wanted me to, but I have now closed that door. I will not be running for President. As a consequence, Republicans can now drop the Benghazi distortions and get back to the real work of Congress–perhaps now they can be freed up to work on, say, rebuilding infrastructure, instead. Again, I will not run for President. I would however like to make an endorsement. Elizabeth Warren for President.”

A week or two ago my friend Terry Bisson took me to the Stock Car races in Antioch. I know little of races of any sort but I was fascinated by the scene. Early on a version of the national anthem was played over loudspeakers, and everyone stood up and took off their hats, put their hands on their hearts. I saw two fellows in cowboy hats during this; one knocked off the other’s hat because the fella couldn’t take it off himself, as he had a beer in each hand. No disagreement ensued–it seemed quite sensible to the one who couldn’t get his hat off…

It was a dirt track, not very big, and when the cars raced around it their wheels spun up clods of dirt and mud that pattered over the people walking near the fence.

There were several kinds of stock cars; the first ones were all battered, some with their numbers hand painted on the sides. They tended to spin out a lot. Others were slicker, customized Torinos or Trans Ams; another race was something called Sprint cars, almost like midget race cars, running on methanol and frequently backfiring. Several women drivers took part, and there was a driver said to be 85 years old, 60+ years in racing. We sat in bleachers, open to the crisp night and a lot of car exhaust–we were high over most of that, with a great view.

Beer was consumed, and Terry ate one of the hamburgers, which he said was pleasing for the price; I will now confess that I ate a corndog. I’m not supposed to eat corndogs. This is between me and you. Don’t tell anyone…

The announcer calling the race could not be heard over the roar of the engines.

We had a fine time.

There are people who believe that “everything we do is for a selfish reason”–and on the surface they’re sort of right…but look more deeply and it’s far more complex. They often use some variant of the transactional psyche concept–that everything is a natural exchange for something else–as a rationale for predation. Selfishness in itself is not a viable life philosophy except for mosquitoes and ticks.

Yes, a great many people do engage in selfish selflessness: “I must go, no time to chat, I’m needed at the food bank” and really they’re saying, “I’m a really good person, have you noticed?” They’re volunteering out of vanity. (Better than not volunteering at all, of course.)

Of course, some people may be boastful or show offy about volunteering, but also have empathy and genuine kindness. Some people are a mix. Most volunteering, in a genuinely good cause, is a fine thing.

But there are people who are innately kind, or who learn to let compassion flow from some inner wellspring–from a place connected to the aquifer of consciousness itself. They’re on a path. They don’t dismiss their efforts–they’re wise enough to shed false humility, another form of pride. Kindness flows from them, partly out of benign social instinct, and partly because that’s who they’re becoming, more and more. Those people are rare, but they exist, and rare or not their very existence is quite significant indeed…

This is from today’s Tech Investor News:
“Market recovers after hackers tweeted from the official AP feed that two explosions had hit the White House…Wall Street collided with social media on Tuesday when a false tweet from a trusted news organization sent the sent the US stock market into freefall. The 143-point fall in the Down Jones industrial average came after hackers sent a message from the Twitter feed of the Associated Press saying the White House had been hit by two explosions and that Barack Obama was injured. The fake tweet, which was immediately corrected by Associated Press employees, caused a sensation on Twitter and in the stock market. …”

Going back a few months, it’s now thought that the reason CNN and Fox mistakenly reported, at first, that the Affordable Care Act mandate had been struck down by the Supreme Court… was simply because some chucklehead pseudo-reporter in the room TWEETED the wrong information. (CNN et al may deny this—I don’t believe them, as the indications are strong.)

The “reporter” heard a couple of preliminary remarks and, on impulse, reported them as a conclusion. Since Twitter remarks go out as twitchy impulsive responses, rather than as reasoned assessment, the tweeter 
simply sent out the first hint of a decision, rather than the real SCOTUS
 decision.

Out of a desire to be first with the news in a twitchy, headline-sick nation, CNN and Fox ran with the tweet, expanding it into fallacious news stories… even before Roberts had quite finished speaking. The absurdly inaccurate “Dewey Beats Truman” newspaper headline of 1948 is becoming a 21st century way of journalistic life.

Which brings me to my question, WHAT GOOD IS TWITTER?

Sure, it’s useful to publicists and to lonely people stricken with egregiously short attention spans, but who else does Twitter help, in any serious way? If you’re trying to hype a new Sham-Wu! cleaning product, or tell your fans your new country music album is released, fine; and it has been used for quick updates about people in disaster zones. It has some occasional, fitful usefulness.

But in the big picture, what good is it? Isn’t it actually a deleterious, corrosive influence on people?

The internet itself is useful—it has its destructive side, but it does more good than harm.

Twitter, in my opinion, has its useful side, but does more harm than good.

Twitter is mostly designed for use with mobile devices. Everyone knows that the excessive use of mobile devices is now a corrosive lifestyle influence. Smartphone fixation is ridiculed, satirized again and again. The obsessed are embarrassed by it–yet we keep leaning over that vat of corrosion; we keep falling in.

At a café this morning, I looked over at a lady breakfasting with her two small children. She was staring into her smartphone–I could glimpse a Twitter feed. The children looked bored and unhappy—they kept glancing at her, waiting for her to come back from the “feed”. She was on it the whole time I was there. The kids ate breakfast but, ironically, they clearly felt unfed.

That woman was not in the same room with her children. Just being a body sitting in the same booth is not being there. Of course, there are degrees of detachment, aloofness, even without a smartphone in your hand, but Twitter, texting, and other addictive smartphone media, are inevitably going to extend
those distances.

This is going to sound self righteous, a moral one-upmanship, but I’ll take that hit, because it’s the nearest example I have: I have an iPhone; I use it almost entirely for phone calls, and not too often. I choose not to go on the internet while using my smartphone, unless I need directions or have to check the traffic.

I mention this just to show it really is possible to use the damn things sparingly. I’m going to post this very article on the internet—I do most of my writing research on the internet—but that happens at my desk, where I spend enough time, and not too much.

I’ve been through the “too much” phase, and I left it behind. I’m bearing witness. I’ve shown it can be done. Others have as well.

It may be that Twitter is the most corrosive influence in smartphone media. It creates a false sense of public notoriety–people imagine that they’re “Twitter celebrities”. Of course, a lot of real celebrities use it—most celebrities have short attention spans anyway, so it’s natural for them–but I think the majority of people use it because they mistakenly think it might help them become celebrated.

And I suspect that at least some of them—faux celebrities and real ones alike–secretly hate themselves for consigning so much of their attention to Twitter… Twitter is, in design, superficial, fragmentary. One cannot form a long thought on Twitter. It’s a medium for froth. There’s a place for froth—but this particular froth is choking us.

Just look at CNN—they are constantly referring to Twitter accounts, they run lines of Twitter commentary below the main heading. Now we’re seeing the fallout from all that exposure. Bad reporting.

CNN leapt into Twitter headfirst; it rapidly succumbed to the trendoid desire for constant electronic update, to the extent that tweets trumped journalism.

Human beings were already prone to impulsiveness, to blurting, to chattering, to speaking without thinking. Twitter over-feeds (so to speak) that proclivity; it stimulates the part of the brain wired for impulse. It jolts the human brain into releasing stimulant chemicals at regular pulses so that the user tends to return to the tweet process spasmodically, compulsively.

Comedians have lost their careers through a single impulsive tweet; more importantly, Anthony Weiner, a good man, lost his congressional seat through succumbing to mindless Twitter impulsiveness.

Twitter rewards short attention spans; it tugs us away from actual thinking, nudges us toward reacting. Craig Newmark, talking to WebProNews, recently observed that Twitter pushes us away from fact checking:

“People often hear rumors, report it on social media, and then the news outlets scramble to get on top of the story and sometimes things are not fact-checked enough in today’s battle to scoop the news first. Overwhelmingly, I hear that people have kind of given up on trusting political news.”

And I’d better give up on this article—I can’t go on too long. I’ll lose too many readers before the end… they want to check their Twitter feed.