Thinking Allowed

IRL

What does this acronym really mean? What does it say about the platforms where it is used?

Is social media really so "fake" (IFL)? Is it fake like drugs or alcohol are agents of fakery -- stimulants that allow us to open up, say what we're really feeling, while at the same time allowing us to not be ourselves? Isn't a court of law similarly structured -- a process designed to get at a truth?

Even before the Gerald Stanley and Raymond Cormier trials many Twitter users who read and write carried a negative view of due process.

To suggest social media is fake is to get the benefit of reality without having to face the consequences.

Twitter is not real life, but it is part of the dominion of real life insofar as it has real life consequences. But if it were real life (like Roland Barthes's 1977-1980 Collège de France lectures were attempts at creating a "fantasy"), what would that life look like?

A building that looks like a dormitory but is in reality a gymnasium bleeding into a food court. There are no private rooms, only ear plugs and blindfolds.

People wander around in their pyjamas. In one hand they carry a flare gun; in the other, a phone. Around their necks is a whistle.

Authority is expressed in quantifiable terms, through Followers, Likes and Retweets.

Social media is not a tool but an amalgam of collaborative multi-genres that are closer to dramatic narrative (theatre, film) than poetry or prose. If it is edited, it is edited by robots fed on algorithms. Where its information goes and how that information is used will be revealed to us after we are done with the Holy Roman Empire that is Facebook -- and after that, telepathically, in the "dark age" that will invariably follow.

Declarations oscillate. One moment the Twitterian can be "thrilled" about inclusion in a market that trades in commodified forms; the next, disgusted by a "shit bag." Sometimes these declarations are broken by a selfie, with the eyes of its taker not on the eye of the camera (the viewer) but on the image it is about to capture (the taker). Sometimes that selfie is an animal or a well-known personality, either in still form or in GIF form.

Elders can be respected one minute, then reduced to "a shitty white woman" the next.

Twitter is full of contradictions, like life is full of contradictions.

Outside the building is a dumpster, which everybody knows is the basis for a metaphor that, in our mixed drink world, went viral ten years ago and continues to spread -- like wildfire.

I think I have only the slightest idea of what I am talking about. But as most thinkers know, it helps to write things down. Whether that makes us writers is part of it. Most of those parts can be found on Twitter.