About Tyggers

Found this on BlueSky (Twitter for nice people) and it made me laugh but also made me think once again that so much humour depends on getting two separate references, a bit like my favourite joke, which demands a passing knowledge of both Star Wars and French baked goods. But we’ll get back to that some other time.

PS: And just as I post this, I remember my first term at university and my tutor, the lamented Chris Brooks explaining Blake’s concept of innocence and experience by reading the last couple of pages of The House at Pooh Corner.

About online wrongness

The Oxford Word of the Year is “rage bait”, defined as: 

online content deliberately designed to elicit anger or outrage by being frustrating, provocative, or offensive, typically posted in order to increase traffic to or engagement with a particular web page or social media content.

But I’m trying to be less consumed with rage these days, even if recent events feel designed to provoke it: analogue rage bait, if you like. What I do notice instead, among all the AI capybaras is stuff that appears engineered to induce a bit of mild eye-rolling, a sigh, an outburst of pedantry; that time when an exasperated parent loses patience and says, “never mind, let me do it.” It’s a variant of Cunningham’s Law, which holds that “the best way to get the right answer is not to ask a question; it’s to post the wrong answer”. Except that nobody cares about getting the right answer as long as they get those eyeballs.

The whole issue is confused by the lurking presence of AI; are these cynical attempts to engage with wrongness, or just bots swallowing up online dumbness and spitting it out again? For example, this list of the best ever Test batters, which starts OK, then descends into increasingly hearty portions of word soup. It looks like AI slop, put out there to provoke – but then we recall the Japanese Nintendo game that was peopled with bizarrely-named baseball players, all without the assistance of AI. Might Gariel Btogby not be a distant cousin to Bobson Dugnutt?

And then we see posts like this, claiming to be a video of “Jingle Bells in Indian” which is nonsensical because there’s no such language as Indian, and in any case the song being massacred is ‘Sleigh Ride’. Pedant bait? Well, not really, because someone who points out the solecism is slagged off for being a killjoy Karen. This was a post born of slack-jawed ignorance, pure and simple, and it’s bad manners to mention it. To be honest, why do we need digitally-generated stupidity when we have the real thing?

About paparazzi

In a complicated world where we’ve lost the notion that we can assume everybody is aware of a core set of facts, it’s considered rude to point and laugh at someone’s ignorance. But does this apply when that person not only draws attention to that ignorance, but attempts to implicate the rest of us in it?

On Threads a couple of days back, one Melanie J Tait asked: “Remember how we didn’t know the word ‘paparazzi’ before August 1997?” To which there were many responses, most of them variants on “We did, actually.” Several pointed out that the word has its origins in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1960) and was also the title of Jacques Rozier’s 1964 documentary short about the making of Godard’s Le Mépris; its use became ubiquitous during the heyday of tabloid journalism in the 70s and 80s. Very few were actively hostile or contemptuous of Tait’s lack of knowledge; they just said she was wrong. Some charitably pointed out that there was indeed a large spike in usage following the death of Princess Diana but nobody fully supported Tait’s statement because it was empirically untrue (unless the pronoun “we” here refers only to Tait and her immediate circle, in which case a more appropriate response would be, “so what?”)

Tait (who describes herself in her bio as a playwright and screenwriter) could have graciously accepted this as a learning moment. Or she could have ignored the responses, or just deleted her post. But no, she had to double down, with a hefty dose of sarcasm: 

I certainly don't remember it being the word used in conversation around photographers and media. But I'm obvs not a linguistic genius like you and several others who've loved remembering which words they knew thirty years ago.

So knowing and remembering are acts of hostility all of a sudden? It reminds me, inevitably, of Donald Trump, who claimed that nobody knew that Lincoln was a Republican, or had even heard of Lesotho. What he meant of course was that he didn’t know these things, or hadn’t until very recently; but he has to claim that nobody else knows it either, because this excuses his own lack of intellectual curiosity and general failure as a sentient member of the human race.

Tait isn’t this bad, obviously. And ignorance isn’t a sin. But ascribing ignorance to others as an act of self-preservation comes pretty close.

About Vonnegut and Herron

I’m back to my bad old habit of thinking I’m re-reading a book and then realising, often to my shame, that it’s actually my first time (did I just see the film?) and this time it’s Slaughterhouse-Five. And I see something on the first few pages that I’m sure I would have noticed it first time round, although when first time round happened (although, do please keep up, there wasn’t really a first time round) I wouldn’t have spotted the apparent prefiguring of Twitter and the like, because Twitter and the like didn’t exist. Anyway, the quote:

I have this disease late at night sometimes, involving alcohol and the telephone.

Also, prompted of course by the Gary Oldman-fronted TV series, I have been dipping a cautious toe in Mick Herron’s Slow Horses universe and in the first volume we encounters a downgraded spook reduced to tracking “the mutant hillbillies of the blogosphere” and then

To pass for real in the world of the web she’d had to forget everything she’d ever known about grammar, wit, spelling, manners and literary criticism.

and my mind goes back to the late Noughties, to what we felt at the time was The Golden Age Of Blogging, or maybe even of Meta-Blogging since much of what we typed about was the nature of blogging itself. What was it? What distinguished it from journalism, of old media? If a representative of old media launched a blog and it all went horribly wrong, were we supposed to point and laugh, or explain nicely how to do it better (hoping there might be a real live job at the end of it)? 

And then it all stopped. 

So it goes.

PS: And further into the Vonnegut, I find this:

The spit hit Roland Weary’s shoulder, gave Weary a fourragère of snot and blutwurst and tobacco juice and Schnapps.

And I wonder whether I should really have called this blog “A Fourragère of Snot” or “Snot and Blutwurst” or “Blutwurst and Tobacco Juice” and, for the time being at least, it’s got a subhead again. And yes, I did have to look up what “fourragère” means. And so will you.

About Gregg Jevin

Today is the 13th anniversary of the comedian Michael Legge creating and killing the enigma that wasn’t Gregg Jevin in a single tweet and as such a piquant reminder of when Twitter was good. And, yes, I only know this because Facebook reminded me. 

About Twitter

I was an early adopter of Twitter and loved its rambunctious vibe for many years. It even brought me a brief moment of notoriety. 

I was relaxed about the change of ownership but gradually sensed a coarsening of the texture, hearty debate being replaced by shrill chanting, like a digital Millwall match. So I used it incrementally less and then, about a year ago, I stopped using it entirely. Few people noticed, I’m sure, but reports from those still in the trenches suggested I’d made the right move. I’m now on Bluesky which, for the time being at least, is more to my taste. And, since the recent US election, and Elon Musk’s prominent role in that unfortunate occurrence, a lot more ex-Tweeters have come on board.

But that’s just my take. Brian Klaas puts things into historical context (did you know about the lunar bat people of 1835?) and explains exactly how Musk weaponised his acquisition and why we should worry whether we use it or not: 

Our attention is finite, and the more we divert it to sensationalist lies, the more that we aid and abet actual conspiracies and corruption that warrant harsh public scrutiny. If we aren’t careful, we’ll meme ourselves straight into dystopia. Unfortunately, amid those embers of a dysfunctional society burning itself down, it’s clear that those who lit the match on the internet will inevitably become rich, now with the help of Musk.

About pumpkins etc

Far from new, stolen from Facebook, but it belongs here, I think.

And while we’re here, this can come out to play as well.

And then...

(And all the time I’m simultaneously worrying about and luxuriating in the exclusivity of all of these. Are they funny in spite of the fact that a lot of people won’t get the gag, or because of the fact? And somehow this ties into the most depressing article I’ve read this week, Elle Griffin on how nobody buys books any more.)

About Wrapped

The years when your musical tastes truly mattered to your identity are long gone, we are constantly told. The younglings no longer define as metalheads or b-boys or goths or disco queens or indie shambles; they just leave themselves at the mercies of the blessed algorithm and let the music play, a title that only comes to mind because I heard Radcliffe and Maconie play it yesterday on their 6Music show, which shows how old I am, doesn’t it?

And yet... and yet. The continued success of Spotify’s annual Wrapped, which gives users a handy summary of their listening habits over the past year and – this is the important bit – encourages them to share it with everyone else, suggests that people think the things they listen to do actually matter, do actually express something about the listener, even if they happen accidentally. To this extent:

About Quora

When the Web arrived, and more specifically when it spawned social media, there was general optimism that it might effect a digital enhancement of Habermas’s public sphere, serving as a forum for discussion and debate in which we could all gain knowledge and understanding of our fellow users and their lives.

Then Quora happened.

About TikTok

Every generation is told that its own crazes and foibles are the equivalent of vogueing while the Titanic goes down, and then 40 years later, they see the apocalypse happening live in the actions of their children and grandchildren. So it’s probably just a sign that I’m very, very old that the end of this article by Barrett Swanson resonates so much: 

TikTok is a sign of the future, which already feels like a thing of the past. It is the clock counting down our fifteen seconds of fame, the sound the world makes as time is running out.

About Neil Patel

Because what the world needs now is not just mediocrity, but mediocrity that thinks it’s bloody brilliant.

When someone posts content, “like” it. It doesn’t matter if it’s amazing, you should “like” the fact that they are trying.

— Neil Patel (@neilpatel) June 10, 2021

About a website, the name of which escapes me

Many years ago. if I saw an online article I particularly liked, I’d enter it into my account on a website specifically designed for the purpose; I could give each piece multiple tags, so if I selected, say “US politics” or “post-structuralist jollity” it would bring forth a ready-made list of relevant texts. It came in particularly useful when I was writing my book about the Noughties, as the bulk of the articles were about that decade; I even namechecked it during one interview when I was asked how I did my research.

And now, for crying out loud, I can’t remember the name of the bloody thing, can’t find any trace of it in my browsing history (forgetting the name doesn’t help here) and realise I’ve probably lost an intriguing trove of about six years’ worth of writing about well, stuff, really. And if I do find it, I’ve almost certainly forgotten the password, haven’t I?

So, unless or until I remember where I left them, I’ll just stick these down here, as examples of the sort of thing I would have entered into the site, whatever the hell it was called; Gary Younge on why all statues, not just the nasty colonial ones, should be torn down; and Will Vigar on why psychogeography has had its day, thanks.

And if anyone does know what I was talking about, please advise.

PS: One more: Princeton students can now major in classics without studying Latin or Greek.

PPS: And if you look past the clickbaity headline, there’s some merit in the notion that yes, the lives of the Mitford sisters were structured reality avant la lettre, with Nancy running the show.

About description

Very belatedly I’m becoming aware of the importance of image description in social media, a courtesy that allows people with sight loss to engage better, especially with image-centric platforms such as Instagram. Either one can rely on the platform’s inbuilt object recognition technology, or write a brief description of the image, which sight-impaired users will be able to access with text-to-speech software. Of course, the principle has long been used in audio-description for films, and in audio guides in art galleries and it’s certainly a good way to make such art forms more accessible, although inevitably it has its limitations; it can tell you what’s depicted but the wobbly heft of a Rubens thigh, or the wild, mad intensity of a Van Gogh yellow may be harder to put across. 

There is art, of course, where such subtleties aren’t really the point; where the whole reason for the work being there is something that can be wholly encapsulated in a paragraph. Indeed, the object itself is secondary to the idea. In fact, maybe this could be a useful rule of thumb, a sort of Turing test for art. If an image description can entirely and satisfactorily communicate a work of art to someone who can’t see said work, then that work can be categorised as a piece of conceptual art.

[image description: black-and-white photograph of a white porcelain urinal at a three-quarters angle, signed along the bottom left rim “R. MUTT 1917”, against a black background]

About Phil Spector and Lana Clarkson

I’m seeing lots of simmering rage across social media that journalists are getting the balance wrong in their coverage of the death of Phil Spector, or maybe just put things in the wrong order; he was a convicted murderer, they argue, who also produced some records.

Clearly, he was a profoundly damaged monster, even before he killed Lana Clarkson; the evidence of his wife Ronnie, and numerous others who crossed his path over the years, would back that up. But the fact is that the reason we are even acknowledging his death is not for his crimes, but because of his music, because he was at the desk for ‘Da Doo Ron Ron‘ and ‘River Deep, Mountain High’ and ‘Imagine’. If he were a moderately successful double glazing salesman who killed someone, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. And I entirely sympathise with those who want to commemorate Clarkson’s life rather than Spector’s; but – in pure news terms, to those who didn’t know her – the most notable thing about that life is that it was ended by Spector. 

PS: Thoughtful contribution from Sarah Ditum.

About sea shanties

Sea shanties are suddenly in the news, apparently because somebody started performing them on TikTok. But it’s telling that many of those detailing the phenomenon in the news media feel the most pressing need is not to explain what TikTok is, but what sea shanties are...

About punctuation and masks

As is the way of such things, the above tweet prompted first healthy respectful discussion and disagreement and then within hours things got nasty and Ms Cosslett deleted the whole thing. My response was that yes, I’d become aware of this a few years ago when a younger colleague asked if she’d done something to annoy me. It turned out that my use of (what I thought was) correct punctuation had expressed grumpiness too her; as if I need a full stop to be grumpy.

Cosslett’s real point was that online communication is developing as a distinct linguistic ecosystem and rules that apply elsewhere don’t necessarily need to be used. But why, I wonder, do “younger people” get to call the shots? They didn’t invent the medium. I first sent a tweet in 2006, a text message in 2000, an e-mail in about 1992 and nobody back then told me I overpunctuated. I’ve learned not to call people out for their spelling/grammar infelicities (unless they’re criticising educational standards or the supposed poor English of immigrants, in which case they deserve both barrels) so I’m rather hostile to the idea that I might be called out for actually getting things right.

Is the problem, I wonder, that younger users perceive orthodox punctuation, sentence structure, capitalisation, etc as a passive-aggressive rebuke to their own, apparently more free-form language? Deep down they know they’re in the wrong, but they project their self-loathing outwards because it feels better that way. A bit like – in the context of the current pandemic – non-mask-wearers yelling abuse at those who cover up. As also happened to me yesterday, by a charming gentleman who wished to inform me that covid is a myth created by the Illuminati and something vaccine something Stonehenge blah blah sorry I can’t hear you with my mask on. And no full stops.

PS: More here, from proper academics and that.

About Parler

The new-ish social media site Parler is, according to who you ask, a) an oasis of free speech and a refuge from the woke cancel culture of Twitter or b) a previously uncharted circle of Hell where people compete to demonstrate how much they love Donald Trump. I hate to rely on hearsay, so I actually went and had a look and let’s just say that this is pretty much the most representative post:

About Klout

Many years ago, there was a thing called Klout, which looked as if it might become a very big thing, but didn’t. It aimed to quantify an individual’s social media influence across various platforms, as a score out of 100, and to offer rewards to those who scored high. Anyone who saw the Black Mirror episode Nosedive, about a dystopian future in which everyone’s worth is determined by the vagaries of likes, will be relieved that Klout is no longer with us.

I wrote a blog post about the app, musing about the fact it judged me to be an expert on some mysterious entity called “#pak”, which turned out to be a reference to two or three tweets concerning the 2011 Cricket World Cup. And there the whole thing would have rested, until I received an email this morning from one Sarah Miller, editor of something called Fitness Volt. The missive is headed “Love your article about back pain! (and a proposal)” and goes on to explain:

My team actually just published a comprehensive article on Lower Back Pain: Common Causes and Prevention For Athletes which I think your visitors would truly appreciate and add value to your awesome article.

It’s not as random as it seems. The title of my original post was “Klout: I get a pain in the back of my neck”, a reference to the profoundly old Cleese/Barker/Corbett class sketch and a reference to the idiotic hierarchies that such apps support. What had happened, presumably, is that Ms Miller conducted a massive search for blog posts including the words “back” and “pain” and hoped that one or two of the authors would be interested in the “added value” she could offer. The funny thing is that her blunderbuss approach made the same error that Klout did, scooping up some random text and trying to squeeze it into the desired meaning hole, even if it didn’t fit. Back pain is the new #pak. She did actually unearth something that could have been useful to her; if only she’d got round to reading it.

About soaps

An article with the hook of two big TV soap operas having significant birthdays this year provides a window on the extent to which fandom and the act of viewing have become primarily performative acts:

“I watch EastEnders, Emmerdale and Hollyoaks but Corrie is the one I have to watch live,” Moran says. “I have to be alone and in silence so I can tweet reactions to my followers. Then I rewatch each episode so I can properly follow the story.”

About blogs (birthday edition)

Apparently blogging is 25 years old but the current landscape looks very different from what the pioneers came up with, or even what I encountered when Cultural Snow took its first baby steps in 2005. In The Guardian (the only British newspaper that really got its head round the idea, integrating blogging into its news/views mix at a very early stage), John Naughton looks at the early years through the idealised prism of Habermas’s public sphere and obviously there are still people keeping that faith.

But social media and, more significantly, money have combined to piss on old Jürgen’s chips. Blogs aren’t dead but the phenomenon got so mixed up with other digital platforms that you can’t really see the join. There’s now a magazine (Yes! Dead tree media! The very thing we were supposedly endangering!) called Blogosphere but it’s not about the sort of blogging I remember, where we’d collectively ponder the meaning existence, but also have time for complete gibberish like this. No, it’s “all about influencers and the influencer industry” which is essentially people with very white teeth and no perceptible body hair being paid to pretend to like things. I think if one of them had popped up 10 years ago we (Patroclus and Slaminsky and Billy and LC and RoMo and Spinny and many more) would have stomped them to death with the sheer force of our self-righteousness. And, y’know, I think we would have been right.

PS: A lesson in how to deal with influencers.

PPS: By Kathy Macleod:

PPPS: More influencer stuff.