Objets trouvés

Having neglected my copies of The New York Times Book Review for a few weeks, I had forgotten how much I appreciate the "found art" typically to be found on its pages. This morning, I found these:

The Internet calls people out of their loneliness to create electronic selves perhaps more naked or strident than the fuzzy, compromised "I" that moves ghostlike through its everyday routines and disagreements. –Stephen Burn, in his contribution, "Beyond the Critic as Cultural Arbiter," to "Why Criticism Matters," in the January 2 edition

I agree that bloggers "create electronic selves," no less than any writer creates a persona, or provides clues in the form of tone, style, vocabulary, and content from which readers construct a concept of the writer. I'm not sure that my blogger persona is more naked than the "real me" whom my wife and neighbors and friends and colleagues encounter in person, but it's surely sometimes more strident; I'm free to express my opinions without having to deal with the upset they might occasion in a person in the same room with me.

"When people get close together, they get more and more savage, impatient with each other," McLuhan said. "The global village is a place of very arduous interfaces and very abrasive situations." Placing that in a more contemporary milieu, what happens now that everyone is a broadcaster? Ubiquitious, cheap technology (digital cameras) and a friction-free route to an audience (YouTube) means that people might broadcast images of their closeted gay roommate having sex, and that the unwitting star of their little network might subsequently, tragically jump off a bridge. –David Carr, in his review, "Media Savant," of Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of My Work!, by Douglas Coupland, in the January 9 edition

The savage impatience of people close together came home to me just a week ago, right here in the residential neighborhood where we live. Someone three doors down reported on the community's social network an intrusion of a cat into his house, and he asked if anyone knew whose cat it was. He mentioned that he saw the animal retreating in the direction of my house, so I had a good idea where the cat lived. I made the mistake of saying so on the network.
    For what ensued was first a discussion of the cat then a generalization to the problems of domestic cats in general who are allowed to roam free (and express their nature as stealthy predators—of birds, for example). By the time the cat's owner learned of these discussions, enough had been said to provoke a defensive counterattack of abusive sarcasm, which prompted members of the defensive team to run onto the field and pile on before the whistle blew.
    Even this local village's abrasive potential was magnified by the existence of the electronic network, as if the original abrasiveness of people having to live close together weren't enough already to make them wary and suspicious of one another.