Texting ideas

I recently had a bit of a revelation in terms of the implications of texting to modern American society. I had previously always believed that the gloom-and-doom sociologists who were saying that texting was the death of the English language, as well as modern Western society, were simply full of it. However, I had an interesting experience while dining at Southside a few days ago. I had just finished eating, when I got up to take my dishes to the dish depository and turning my head I noticed three female students in the booth behind me. What caught my attention was that they were all just sitting there and not talking. Now, I understand that in some circles it is good manners and considered polite to simply eat one’s lunch and not talk at the table. However, these particular students were not observing polite table manners. Instead, they were not talking because two of them were texting and the third was simply sitting there with her cell phone on the table. I began to think about it and I realized that I had not heard a continuous conversation coming from that booth the entire time I was eating, only the occasional word or phrase. This brings me to one conclusion: that texting had almost completely eliminated the desire for face-to-face speech between these students in their “down time.” Essentially, this group of girls was completely content to carry on communications with what amounts to a web of friends through their cell phones. This web of people is continuously in contact, sending messages back and forth to many other people within that web, and for one single person to stay in this social network, as it were, they had to continuously engage in these little one-liner messages back and forth otherwise they wouldn’t be savvy to the newest information inside this network and would simply fall out of the web. I think that humans are inherently a social creature and that staying in contact with each other is the only way to maintain a society. Therefore, people within a society have an inherent need to stay within that society. There is in fact a term used for people who do not participate in this behavior: antisocial; this is considered a disorder in psychological terms. Getting back to the point, however, people are in need of social contact and cellular phones, in particular texting with cellular phones, enable people maintain a higher level of social contact. The problem arises with the fact that text messages are very short because of the character limit and therefore cannot convey a lot of information like a deep thought. The second problem is that there is an amount of time spent waiting on the text that one receives as a reply. This means that it is very difficult to convey a long deep thought over the course of several messages because it comes off as disjointed, awkward, and very difficult to tie together. Subsequently, texting is very suited and, in fact funnels one into, making short, flarfy one-liners back and forth between people just to maintain contact. However, because this is the kind of communication that people get used to, they are then fairly incapable of keeping up long, deep, face-to-face conversations with people. Instead, even in a face-to-face situation such as eating lunch together, this group of students communicated to each other in speech just as they would with texting: in short, concise, humorous one-liners with long spaces in between replies such that no continuous conversation was happening. This has very interesting implications in terms of the ability of this and future generations to communicate deep, meaningful thoughts. As a result, those gloom-and-doom sociologists don’t seem so loony anymore.

Flarf in class freewrite

I choose the second topic to write about. I will take the word "lol" as a prime example of a Flarfy word. The word "lol" came about on the internet, it is a product of online communications, of chatting over the internet. In this way, it is precisely like Flarf in that it is the direct product of the internet. The meaning of the word has taken on many abstractions from the original "laugh out loud." Now, like many words in the English language, its meaning is dependent on context. However, because it is an online term, and context can only be determined by vocabulary, "lol" creates a context, it immediately triggers in the receiver a set of emotions.

Flarf poem

Euro Scumbag, champagne and cavier, techno bullshit
WITHOUT. god, techno lyrics suck. XDDD "you touch my mind in special places."
Sounds like the so-called Eurotrash-techno to me and that hurts my ears
Pulsing with a techno intensity that only Eurotrash could love
a Euro Trash night-out!

Call me Max
Music non stop, techno pop
I'm thinking what I'm giving,
I'm giving what it takes
Max, Max, Max,
Elektroklänge überall
I'm in love with you and I love my ex
I love you both, and to be true
I don't know what I'm gonna do
Decibell im ultraschall
I gotta warn you,
Max, don't have sex with your ex
It will make your life complex,
Music non stop, techno pop

Flarf and Spoetry

Spoetry and in particular Flarf is, in my opinion, the best thing to come out of web 2.0 thus far. The fantastic creativity of the authors in combining their source materials, whether Google searches or other internet tidbits, creates a unique kind of sense out of the internet as a whole, its culture, its dark side and is just plain hilarious. I spend a lot of time on the internet: I surf just for fun, when I’m bored, any time I need to find something out, etc. I am, therefore, quite in tune with the culture of the internet and that makes reading Flarf and Spoetry a kind of sarcastic look at myself and the culture I’m familiar with. It brings to light the kind of things that I take as normal but are in truth very absurd. The emphasis on vulgarity is particularly effective because the internet is so full of it. After a while, a person is desensitized to it and then it loses some of its meaning. However, reading Flarf and Spoetry is a like an antidote for me, something to keep me sane through all of the insanity. In particular, I liked the poem “Truckin’ Poem,” by Chickee Chickston, not necessarily because it has any of the qualities described above, but because it is so light-hearted, effective and hilarious. The repetitiveness truly does bring to mind long hours on the road. The way the lines are mixed furthers this effect by bringing to mind how road travel is just a mix of the same actions (left turn, right turn, honk, stop, go) but in various often different combinations. The lines of the poem act like mile markers, helping me get through the poem’s monotony, and yet, it’s a monotony I love and wish there was more of. Perhaps I also like it that much more because I do love road trips.
I even thoroughly love how Flarf poetry came into being: as a sarcastic bating of Poetry.com. There is perhaps nothing more omnipresent on the internet than sarcasm and disgruntlement towards the real world and even towards the internet itself. This is what produces all of the flame wars and internet memes that are a hallmark of all chat rooms and anywhere else that internet culture is prevalent. Even the way that the original Flarf Collective communicate, through email, is distinctly founded on the internet. This makes Flarf completely and fully rooted in the internet and that makes it particularly suited for the social commentary it provides. In perhaps a similar way that poetry and song-writing in the 1960’s provided society a mirror, Flarf is providing the internet a mirror in a form that can be taken seriously in literary circles and gives the internet a kind of legitimacy at the same time as showing its shortcomings as well. More importantly, it seems to be a warning against taking the internet too seriously and what might happen to a person through overexposure to internet culture’s negative influences.

In class response to "Carnival" by Steve McCaffery

In response to the first prompt, about the destruction of a book to create a panel, I have to say that I thoroughly enjoy the procedure described. Really, what is a book? If one takes clay and shapes it from a square to a rectangle, it is still clay. I find that the same would be true about this book, and about the physical manifestation about writing. If a word is written, but the letters are all out of place (for example, instead of helicopter if one wrote cpeltiorhe) then the word remains, however its meaning is lost. McCaffery's book is not about the meaning of the words though, but about their form, their structure, their letters or lack thereof. Therefore, I would say that one is not destroying the book, just changing its shape. To destroy the book, one would have to do something to the book that would make it impossible for a reader to understand the writer's intent or meaning in the work. It is interesting then that the author uses the word "destroy" in the directions. I think this means that the destruction is of the form "book", the sequential nature of the pages, not really of the idea "book".

Visual text

The Iron Whim and Carnival

In reading Darren Wershler-Henry’s The Iron Whim, I couldn’t help but continuously think back to the first chapter in which he describes the destruction of a typewriter by throwing it out of a car window. He makes the point that in the destruction of an object (once it is trash) one can fully understand the meaning of that object as a cultural object. Essentially, he means to look at all the parts, rather than the whole. The collection of anecdotes that is in this book is a continuation on this theme. Wershler-Henry investigates each little snippet of a story about typewriters or writing machines and then the reader can make a whole meaning from that if they choose. I, for one, love this approach and don’t feel obliged to make a “whole meaning.” The interest in the details is enough for me and, to use a Foucaultian phrase that Wershler-Henry also employs, I would like to focus on the discourse. The freedom to ponder the little details is I think what the typewriter really is about. Each key is one letter, one little part of the whole. This means that one would have to throw a word out of a car at 90 miles per hour to understand the meaning of its construction and not just the meaning of the word in the language that it’s in. However, throwing a word out of a car is perhaps not as practical. The medium that the word is made in, for example: ink on paper, becomes the object that gets destroyed, not the word on it. This then leads to the question of how to destroy a word, which, to me, is answered by Steve McCaffery, in his work Carnival. There are two different panels, each from a different time period, that are essentially large canvasses covered in letters, sometimes whole words, that are constructed and destructed in progressions. However, the words are often arranged to form shapes, but, to me, look like the result of driving a car over the canvasses and throwing letters out onto it at 90 miles per hour. The strange shapes produced by the words are the work of the author and perhaps indicate at what time and in what succession McCaffery threw each word out. One of my favorite examples comes on the second panel when the word “flower” is written and then under it, the word “flow” appears and towards the bottom of the progression, simply an “f” and then the word “lower” slightly below it and to the right. Not only does one get a feeling for the word’s meaning in the language, there are other words with separate meanings within the word “flower” than can contribute to its construction and perhaps inform the reader of subtle nuances of meaning. More importantly, the reader notices the letters used to write the word and immediately begins to think of the actual manner in which those letters are produced: the typewriter, the whim of the writer.