The Online: Increasingly Real or Unreal?

[versh]

Stumbled across something particularly intriguing last night, maybe @sufi knows more about it. A proposed independent state within Sri Lanka called Tamil Eelam which has a virtual presence online.

The history of computing podcast I mentioned in 'the old internet as psyche' have done an episode on it:

Virtual Tamil Eelam doesn’t connect itself to a physical label. Instead, it petitions to be recognised as a nation-state by publishing its heritage and cultural histories, diverse news, forums, distinct map designs and symbols, and suggestions for communal activities on websites that date back to the 90s. Ana describes how the Tamils have found creative uses of the web’s varying information dispersal techniques, and the girls chat about how that addresses their national sentiments as autonomous, legitimate and independent.

https://www.ourfriendthe.computer/posts/tamilnet

 

[sufi]

was in lazy suzy (coffee shop) in JMZ train bushwick today, it's like this pretty big clean lines bright light big windows coffee shop. there's about eight tables against the wall, six places to sit on stools against the front window, and then one big shared workbench with about ten chairs in the middle. every seat was taken by someone sitting alone on a macbook. except two girls who were sat chatting to each other about trying to hook up with some barwoman. the people talking to each other were the who looked out of place. there was no other chat in the place. most people had headphones on. the girl sat next to me was making music i think.

i was there to do exactly the same thing (but on a standard issue lenovo). there's a whole category of coffee shops which are essentially workspaces. everyone has to work and that's what a lot of work is now. so much of it is online. when your livelihood is involved the online is very much real. caffeine and emails and calls, all of that produces affects which spill over into people's souls i think

.... aaaand another thing
how internet Reality impinges on offline Reality is the social proof effect = pics or it didn't happen, almost a sense that if it's not online it doesn't exist.

most obviously this is tripadvisor, g%%gle reviews and so on - if that bar/restaurant/business/attraction/whatever doesn't prove it's existence online with positive up to date reviews which people beg for everywhere , then the customers won't show up (til it no longer exists)

 

[versh]

Offline Reality is shrinking

And somehow, so is the internet. I'm sure there are millions of sites out there, but the extent of it for most of us is some spread of the same handful of streaming, shopping, banking, dating, news and social media services.

There's potentially a whole universe and we're knocking around in a single galaxy.

 

[yyaldrin]

https://x.com/MsMelChen
Melissa Chen

@MsMelChen

I am utterly convinced that internet people and offline people are right on the cusp of diverging into two entirely distinct reproductively-isolated species that no longer have the ability to communicate meaningfully with each other


Last edited1:06 PM · Jul 25, 2024
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[0bleak]

It's a commonplace observation, but people born before about 1970 getting onto social media en masse has been a total disaster, hasn't it?

Although I commonly say that things were better before everyone and their grandmother was online, I don't know if it's an age thing as much as what we call "social media" in general has been a total disaster post-myspace although I'm not sure if I should really let myspace or livejournal off the hook either since they were probably just born too early.

 

[william_kent]

It's a commonplace observation, but people born before about 1970 getting onto social media en masse has been a total disaster, hasn't it?

I'm sure the downfall of the internet can be traced to Eternal September in 1993 and that was people born before 1970 complaining about youngsters polluting the stream ( it was people born before 1970 who actually created the 'internet', don't forget )

I have friend who says that the internet went downhill with the introduction of the inline gif ( edit: I'm tempted to agree - this was when advertisers realised the internet could be a "billboard for the entire world" )

edit: there used to be technical barriers to entry which were removed by the FAANG corps who are to blame for the cess pool we are wallowing in...

 

[Mr. Tea]

I'm sure the downfall of the internet can be traced to Eternal September in 1993 and that was people born before 1970 complaining about youngsters polluting the stream ( it was people born before 1970 who actually created the 'internet', don't forget )

I have friend who says that the internet went downhill with the introduction of the inline gif ( edit: I'm tempted to agree - this was when advertisers realised the internet could be a "billboard for the entire world" )

edit: there used to be technical barriers to entry which were removed by the FAANG corps who are to blame for the cess pool we are wallowing in...

Let's face it, people in 20 years time will probably be talking about "the golden age of TikTok."

 

[william_kent]

Let's face it, people in 20 years time will probably be talking about "the golden age of TikTok."

have you seen "THREADS"? people won't even be talking as we understand it....

edit: more context - every morning on Sky news they drag out some old military duffer who tells us the UK has to prepare for "land war in Asia" within 3 years

 

[Ian Scuffling]

I'm sure the downfall of the internet can be traced to Eternal September in 1993 and that was people born before 1970 complaining about youngsters polluting the stream ( it was people born before 1970 who actually created the 'internet', don't forget )

I have friend who says that the internet went downhill with the introduction of the inline gif ( edit: I'm tempted to agree - this was when advertisers realised the internet could be a "billboard for the entire world" )

edit: there used to be technical barriers to entry which were removed by the FAANG corps who are to blame for the cess pool we are wallowing in...

The modern equivalent of this is version inviting his discord friends to post here

 

[dilbert1]

The modern equivalent of this is luka inviting version’s discord friends to post up at his

 

[Mr. Tea]

The modern equivalent of this is version inviting his discord friends to post here

I initially read this as "version inventing his discord friends" and thought, huh, figures.

 

[versh]

The last few days of rioting seem very much a point in favour of increasingly real as it's difficult to picture all this happening and happening as quickly as it has without social media. We may have had some of the less reputable papers whipping people into a frenzy in the past, but they could only dream of the reach and immediacy of Twitter, Facebook and group chats.

I've just been reading an old Erik Davis piece on the online response to the Oklahoma City bombing in '95 and a major difference between what he was describing then and what we're seeing now is the audience. The kind of racist and paranoia-drenched discussions he reports as happening among small groups on obscure webpages are now happening across mainstream platforms among thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, and spilling out into the real world.

Barbed and Wired Net - Techgnosis

Dispatches from the Net in the days following the destruction of the Albert Murrah Federal Building in 1995.

techgnosis.com

Taken individually, many of the posts were just the angry, ignorant, or sad barkings of ordinary men and women. But collectively they took on the dark obsessive drone of a fever dream. Charged with emotions bordering on atavism and whipped up by the unholy speed of information exchange, a host of demons, fetishes and vengeful archetypes crawl onstage straight from white America’s political unconscious.

No-one knows where people stop and information begins. Datastreams and impassioned rhetoric are some of the perceptual feedback loops that compose human beings, and feedback loops can spin out of control. On Nightline, a scraggly and furtive neighbor of James Nichols named Phil Marowski mentioned Day 51, a recent Waco documentary that savages the government, and described how folks with Tim McVeigh’s pissed-off mind-set could watch it over and over again. “Half the time you’re watching Day 51, and half the time you’re talking about it with your closed group at gunshows or wherever. Something’s gonna blow.”

How many people ending up in the street are flicking between social media, YouTube clips from GB News and TalkTV, and their mates, either IRL or in group chats? Quite possibly all of them.

 

[versh]

 

[Murphy]

Bit like rarely recoverable stage 4 cancer

 

[wg-]

Christ she's just had her lips done and put a bit of make up on, it's hardly world war 3

 

[Corpsey]

You know that feeling you get when you're wearing new trainers and they're really working for you

Imagine that feeling, but you've got a new FACE

 

[versh]

Christ she's just had her lips done and put a bit of make up on, it's hardly world war 3

Nah, she's had a bunch of cosmetic surgery. That isn't the point though. The point is the stacking of copies. You've got a digital face based on surgically-altered faces based on another surgically-altered face which is sat on top of the original. It's just a tongue-in-cheek way of illustrating Baudrillard's four stages with a well-known example.

 

[wg-]

Did you make it?

 

[versh]

Did you make it?

No, you can see the watermark in the top right corner. It's from some Kardashian account.

 

[wg-]

That might be you.

Making the endless posts on sub-niche one subject obsessive accounts like those are probably the most online you can get in a way, right. Developing a thought pattern over a series of posts to fit a small sensibility that only works in two or three online-only mediums, to the tiny audience that gets it. Kardashians are obviously massively famous so i guess this one has a lot more crossover and is more "successful" i guess but equal effort goes to such tiny narrow burrows.

Quite admire it in a way