I think

The web is full of these, long harangues that perhaps took anywhere from 15 minutes to 4 hours to make. And a lot of them begin with those fateful words: I think.

To the journeyman web user the world wide web is a place to assert one's epistemology.

Flesh filtered out.

When I was a student, the scholarly work on computer mediated communication (CMC) compared it to a face-to-face (FtF) standard for situating the act of communication between bodies, in space, and over time.

Words as avatars.

The deficit model emerging from this comparison frames early CMC as something 'structurally different,' both metaphorically and in practice, from human-to-human communication, i.e., FtF. One descriptor reveals the nature of this frame: "queues filtered out." Why are queues filtered out? Because early CMC relied upon the many permutations of text to substantiate human interacting. Without face and place words were interlocutors' means for mediating a relationship.

Ribcage telemetry.

We, these skeletons, stripped to not so much an essence as a mineral pre-fact of our existence. We, as skeletons, using our counted rib cages as our currency in speaking to one another. But this isn't our essence. Face and place are essential props for communication.

Speaking as skeletons, we are a problem to ourselves and to others. Skeletal communication isn't embodied interaction molded by the exigencies of context. It's a selection of words, constructed on their own merit for the sake of assuming a superlative position in a concurrent online discussion.

And it gets constructed upon this heaping pile of bones those two words, I think, which preface all personal credos and form the brick and mortar of a citadel of wordplay and free association.

Locust 1-2-3

To characterize our time spent communicating online effectively we need to shift from mammalian analogs to the insect world. Our language has a swarm response much like that of a locust. Swarms emerge from close and continued contact among individual insects, which stimulates a behavioral and physical response in the locusts, making them change color, grow, and become more aggressive as a group. Computer mediated communication is our precipitating locust event.