The Tweet-storm, in the new era of President Tweet, remains a nostalgia-inducing afterimage of the blog and of the era of President Blog, but it may also portend a return or attempted return to coherent, accountable, and consequential civic discussion in a mass society, back from the Great Flood of clicks.
A few months ago, I noted a technique for stripping Twitter embeds of extraneous conversation, involving setting the tweet attribute “data-conversation” to “none.” What I provided was more hack than add-on, and required a somewhat laborious process of copying the…
…the dis-assembling assembly of disconnected yet interrelated not quite anythings, not quite somewhere, with which one might or might not perform something approaching or in some ways vastly exceeding, yet not possibly entailing, disagreement.
We or more of us than we suspected, a muster that will in time include many for now wrapped up in shock, and grief, and fear, and rage, and despair, seeing at best only the glimmers of new or renewed possibility, have welcomed or will welcome, will someday come to love the fire for revealing who if anyone is in fact out there.
Bridget O’Neil directs us to this signature, from a letter written in 2007 to the LA Times by this year’s Republican Party nominee for the Presidency of the United States of America:
…mounting the barricades in his mind and shouting down all within hearing – moving, in undeniable if also undeniably trivial form, by sheer necessity, from the denunciation of competing perspectives to the proscription of those about whom, as he avers with conspicuous pride, but disproves in acting to prove, he could not possibly care less.
In short, blocking self-indulgently, whether out of laziness or anger or boredom or trifling annoyance or whatever obscure motive, amounts to a special kind of trolling: a narcissistic negation of discussion that, like most trolling, would be impossibly embarrassing to a contemptibly contemptuous perpetrator if attempted in “3-d life.”
