The point of my blog...

[johnny9fingers]

Given I no longer have the sort of readership/interaction with other bloggers I had in the Golden and Silver ages of blogging, what keeps me doing this? In the old days, on LJ, folk participated in communities, and wrote and pasted pics or vids; but they wrote. Now folk blog on facebook and youtube with vids and cams, and interact through twitter. I miss the writing, however. And I am not on FB for reasons of identity. I refuse to give FB my birth name; I have been Johnny Ninefingers on the net for almost 20 years - we can thank my youthful penchant for far playing too many notes giving me the appellation of one too many fingers... there may have been some implication of too many fingers actually tripping over each other.

Oh well. Some habits die so hard.

Some of my non-musical chums knew me of old and still occasionally address me with my birth name on here, when they pop in to say "Hi"; but that is rare these days, and mostly happens on the LiveJournal crossposting; because LJ was where we all were to begin with.

I'm Johnny Ninefingers on The Gear Page. On Google. On Youtube etc and etc. But that's ok, as FaceBook won't be collecting or collating my data and sending it on to Cambridge Analytica. 

The DreamWidth exiles... well we are trying, sporadically. And there are some interesting new folk I've met in this haven for the LJ diaspora too; folk who can write. And moreover who can express their personalities through their writing. Sometimes I wonder if I over-cultivate idiomatic repetition to emphasise personality traits. I know I love beginning sentences with a but or an and. And I think that says something about me.

So, can we diagnose ourselves through literary criticism? And should we want to? Metasolipsism writ large. (I'm pleased with both the coinage and the conceit, btw.)

Comments

[mallorys_camera]

Are you familiar with the John Wyndham novel Rebirth?

In the UK, it was published under the title The Chrysalids.

It's your basic mutant telepath novel. 😊

I read it for the first time when I was 10 or so, and it imprinted me so much that when I first stumbled upon the Internet, Rebirth was my operative metaphor for the online communication experience.

I was a member of what was probably the first social media hub, a thing called the Well. It was just an amazing experience to exchange all these confidences and thoughts with people whom I did not really know and whom I would not have recognized had I passed them on the street! The Well was a text only thing. The nearest thing I could imagine to telepathy.

Now that the Internet dominates everyone's life and is basically, as you note, an apparatus for collecting marketing data—and this year, marketing data surpassed oil and natural gas as the world's most lucrative product—that frisson is mostly gone. I suspect that's what you miss.

I'm glad your old habit hasn't died and that you don't struggle too manfully against it because I quite like reading what you write (even when I don't comment) and would miss reading it if you disappeared.

So, you have one faithful reader at least. 😊

I will also add that quite a few people I know use fake names on Facebook. And fake genders and fake other things. I tell FB that I live in Turkey and get many amusing advertisements that way.
Johnny9fingers is just a bit too obviously fake. Not that I'm encouraging you to join FB necessarily. Though FB does have its uses.

[johnny9fingers]

I was fourteen or so when I read the Chrysalids. That and Colin Wilson’s “The Mind Parasites” were my two teenage psi/telepath novel signposts/introductions to thinking about such things in a non-magical narrative.

Did you like Iain M Banks “Culture” novels? I assume you’ve read widely in the genre. The Culture is one of the few literary conceits I’d be happy to live in, along with: Wooster’s world, and Jasper fforde’s literary meta fictional world. Austen’s world is too close to the shit and death of the late C18th - no thank you, thank you very much.

[mallorys_camera]

Ah! Okay. So, we can use the same metaphor for our communications: We are two telepaths relaying thoughts to one another while our respective worlds slowly implode. 😊

Have not read Iain M Banks. Traded science fiction for detective novels in terms of light reading about 20 years ago.

Did you ever read Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time? Piercy is kind of an annoying writer whom every aspiring feminist of my vintage was forced to read. I don't think anyone reads her now. But the utopian future in Woman on the Edge of Time was one I wouldn't mind living in: All cultural, ethnic, religious, gender etcetera differences celebrated (with love!) as a kind of cosplay but nothing more.

[johnny9fingers]

I shall check out the Peircy book. An early GF of mine from Wesleyan was doing her year out at Imperial and forced me to read Atwood's Handmaid's Tale. (I have a first.) I scoffed at the absurdity of it all; given that it was 1982, and the GF in question had right-wing, gun-friendly, and libertarian leanings. But it did give me an early insight in the complexities of the American national psyche.

BTW the ex GF is now a professor somewhere in the vast university network of the US. I hope her political opinions have become more nuanced with time; and I hope she imparts any gentling wisdom to her protégées too.

[mallorys_camera]

I liked The Handmaid's Tale actually. 😊

[johnny9fingers]

It has come into a relevance I never imagined at the time.
I now regard it as an important novel of an unfortunately prescient kind.