Bridled contexts

I am trying out different words for a societal trend that is especially popular among youth. It is defined by "being random."

Now randomness, in and of itself, is nothing new. The use of the non sequitur has had a long enough standing in comedy routines, but something new is occurring that can only be an offshoot of indexicality, of mixing and matching and speaking through and about different media forms, genres, specific texts, and the like. Media, after all, are extensions of our nervous systems.

I suggest that being random is a function of a new grammar that is arriving through the mixed, multiple, and simultaneous use of media. Along with this experience qua landscape, an individual is having spontaneous reactions while engaging in phatic conversations with one or more contacts via one of the perhaps many readily available interactive information technologies. What crops up in these contexts are, as I have mentioned, real-time reactions, or cogitations upon media events while narrating those events to another person who is, perhaps, just as distracted by a thousand other windows. Thus, a being random moment is something akin to trying to reveal in narrative form with another what one has experienced. It's a haphazard and messy affair, but the attention spans required for such 'being there' are rather gnat like in their life span.

But this emphasis on being random perhaps has its detractors as well as its practitioners. "That's so random" can be an admiring assessment as well as a harsh criticism. My niece made an attempt at being random by calling her father, sister, mother, and self by other names as she giggled mischievously. This was a funny moment at the playful abandon of being in non-identity using an arbitrary set of terms from a readily accessible discursive background that make up the random information events in one's day.

But is being random something so dependent upon the atomized participation-saturated media landscape or does it merely afford its navigators an attendant sensibility to its expansive yet flat potential? Perhaps it's a little of each. I have little to back my hypothesis. I merely like to attach things that I dislike to the scapegoat of a media form that I don't much appreciate. But that's merely me.

Now, let's discuss what bridling contexts means.

To bridle is to put a saddle on a horse but in this case it's contexts. I would not dismiss the importance of the latter word's plurality too hastily. I think that's a key component of the whole ensemble. But one isn't saddling contexts to ride them. One saddles to place oneself squarely upon more than one context in order to facilitate code shifting and mixing for purely random effect.

But I like the non sequitur as well, and I have been known to use it effectively for laughs. Perhaps I am just being the martinet that I am for criticizing 'being random' while it's merely a rose by any other name. I am sure the spirit of the non sequitur would not mind letting its doppleganger masquerade in the minds of another generation as some rhetorical vision, a genuine hallmark of having had been there and done that.

But before I leave this post in its hasty prose I want to emphasize a very important consideration. People participate in their realities to a greater extent than ever. We can owe some of this to the media in use, their affordances for usage, and the habits of those that get involved. What I trascribed above is an interior vision brought forth for the sake of its logic breaking, yet logically native potential. And all this was something that required the participation of many times, places, and windows of information to bring that forth. Along with this comes the search strategies, likes, and social networks that also help to perform what makes up one's world. 'Where do you want to go today?' has increasingly become where you went yesterday. Why? I think this answer is simple. People can get addicted to interaction if it presents itself as an appetite to be satisfied. If we sent mail, we wait to see if someone responded. As we wait, we pore over our writing and look for potential gaffes. We look over previous messages to spot trends in the mail relationship one may feel one had created with the recipient of this current mail. The list of potential situations spawned by interactive information technology enumerate along lines such as these. And just as sturdy of a foundation of empirical data I presume to have collected to satisfy my vision another may come along and negate my efforts. After all, the interactive technology user I characterized actually cares about his or her messages. Not everyone does, nor does everyone fret over the tiniest detail in one's veritable Library of Congress holding of interaction histories readily accessible and a keyword away from remembering strictly along those lines.

I get rather giddy about these kinds of things, but I blame the coffee. I am in a coffee house trying to showcase my publicness and feign ignoring the public around me. I fancy being surrounded while it is my imagination that surrounds me, and that is the thing from which I cannot escape.