Florida

I read an article about the destruction of orchid habitat brought about by the housing boom in Florida. I had to stop and consider what would motivate a person in search of natural beauty and warm Gulf breezes to destroy that very premise in the making of a community "fit" for living.

The best I could do to summarize the experience was a cowardly resort to ad hominem.

Florida is full of scared, aging white men with guns who pay no mind to the world around them but rather to the World that charges admission to see a denatured houseguest version of nature do tricks for entertainment.

Word usage and self-discipline

A few weeks into my doctoral program at the University of Colorado I was attending my qualitative methods course, which was taught by a professor who had co-written a book on the subject and who, by most regards, was a giant in this methodology. Some of his earliest work were diamond exemplars of how to conduct qualitative methods and produce publishable work from it. He had since moved on to write award-winning qualitative research and cultural studies pieces about aspects of the nuclear defense industry, namely its memorials.

This experience was a vivid one, and perhaps it's a collapsed composite of several warm fall evenings in that lecture room with the sounds of the undergraduates playing music and socializing in the Dalton Trumbo Fountain Court outside our window. I remember him commenting, in an aside to the lecture topic, on the drums wafting in through the room's open window. "New tribalism," he said, and I couldn't help but think that this man was out of touch. But I was just out of touch with him and his ways. And in the process of learning those ways he taught me a lesson about word usage.

At one point during our discussion that evening I engaged the teacher and the class as I had learned through twenty years spent in the classroom by asking a now-seemingly overused question: "Is this a good or a bad thing?" Instead of responding to my question, he responded to my choice of words. He told me to substitute for 'good' or 'bad' 'more useful' or 'less useful.' To me, that seemed like the essence of pragmatism, a distinctly American school of philosophical thought. Not only was he trying to teach me to be less vague but to focus on the use-value of my focal concern. So, for example, if I were to 'go native,' so to speak, in conducting qualitative research, would that be more or less useful given a certain set of circumstances under which I, as a researcher, were to conduct and eventually produce my research? I was, at that time, 25 and at the zenith of my youthful, dogmatic idealism. Elders, such as this man, were equipping me to steer off that lemming's course leading to the asymptote of a dream figure: perfection, superlatives, up, up, away, death--scholarly or otherwise.

As I said, this experience was a vivid one, and adjunct to this classroom moment was one, before class, at my chest-of-drawers, in my home, across town, in Boulder. There, I had taken the last pill from a bottle of Vicoprofin prescribed to me by an oral surgeon who had extracted four 'wisdom' teeth a few months earlier. During a moment of doctor-patient small talk as he stereo x-rayed my head to plan his attack on these four aspects of my wisdom he asked me what I did. At the time, I was a starry eyed intellectual whose future lay before him. I told him that I planned to study organizational communication to which he offered that pat response: "What's that?" I gave him a seemingly sufficient response concerning communication, representation, and workplace identity as they relate to the meaning of the work itself to which he responded: "Well, don't go around organizing hospital nurses because then they'll demand better working conditions and pay." Here was an oral surgeon, of the old school, wearing a somewhat colorful surgical scrub, counting me among his many thousands of extractions, providing a rather gruff and decidedly Midwestern professional's response to what threat he thought I posed to the order of any organization, especially his. I suspected that he mistook "organizational" for "organizer," which isn't far afield of what many can and want to do in my field but who get subverted by the pay coming from the executives who request them as 'consultants.' I wonder where that surgeon is now? He could just have easily retired in Edwardsville as in Florida, I'm sure, handsomely either way. Me? Well, I just took out the trash this morning, and I am sometimes indistinguishable from the detritus of my life. Translation: I am of my shit, unlike Joe Oral Surgeon, who followed a recipe for success and who, through hard work, intelligence, race- and sex-based institutional privilege, and imposing, athletic build bullied his way through school and into his respective field of work. I, the meek and distracted person I was, ended up taking out the trash at 5 a.m., with leftover soup heating on the stove, coffee brewing, cat mewing, and decided that today was not a good day to visit the Ironworker's hall, the access to which was handed to my by my father. Why? Well, I decided that instead of framing my choice in terms of 'good' or 'bad' I decided to frame it terms of use-value, and my god, what I am doing now is so much more useful than speaking to that high school clique known as the unemployed labor pool, sitting at a cafeteria table, "shooting the shit," awaiting a job call.

mental, illness

Mental, illness is a state of mind accomplished through the coordination of an emotional affect and a sense of self, which attempts to adopt that affect into a 'real condition' of its existence. Mental, illness occurs at the point that one's self identity (self)abusively re-enacts this emotional affect after the underlying chemical or neurological state that precipitated it has waned.

Mental, illness is a state of mind that, through time, becomes a component of self-identity. Over time and through the aid of legitimating institutional discourses this albeit 'administered' self becomes a reality through bureaucratic workings and health care diagnoses. And what was once a private experience with a state of mind becomes a performance, a public stigma, a sick role, carried potentially for life.

The abusement park

The abusement park is a place where you go see marine life trained to do tricks for a paying public.

In the abusement park intelligent marine mammals are separated from a life-long pod, put into small holding ponds under unnatural conditions, and re-trained through a steady diet of fish to do clever tricks for a viewing public.

This viewing public, that fiction of suburban advertising and petroleum fueled fantasy, wants that world to be before it as if everything conformed to a television fiction. Shows like "Flipper," which emerged, perhaps, from World War II and Cold War training of marine cetaceans to conduct military operation, would become a model for the entertainment industry situated in marine theme parks like Sea World. Sea World, situated near another World, created by Walt Disney follows Walt's template for always-consistent, always-fun, always-white-washed entertainment involving people and animals and people-as-animals. It's a combination of circus, acrobatics, and that eye-popping spectacle of marine cetaceans measured by the ton.

Killer whales, orcas, those wonders of the ocean, those pack animals with large brains and sophisticated sonar, those creatures who live in pods comprising multiple generations have their cetacean sociologies cross-sectioned when they're forcibly removed from their environment and environs to be placed in a man-made pool in places like Florida where a paying public watches them jump out of the water, slide out into the open air in stylized poses, and launch their white trainers into the air to the astonishment of the audience.

This abusement park, a place where fictions are spun at the expense of the creatures caught in its narrative. This abusement park, a place where science is distorted to support a narrative that explains away the obvious signs of containment shown by the whales: the collapsed dorsal, the rake marks of aggression spawned from mixing whales of different sexes and different pods into the same small enclosure. This abusement park, an aquarium, a curio containing some of the world's largest, most intelligent, and socially sophisticated marine mammals in spaces much, much smaller than the many miles of open sea that the creature would normally inhabit, safely, and without mental distress. This abusement park, a place that inspires countless generations of white kids from suburbia to join its ranks only to realize the cruel underside to the whole enterprise. The abusement park, a marine themed zoo with a profit motive, pimping animals in its captivity for the sake of a paying public.

The abusement park is the theater of the spectacle where animals (human and otherwise) were harmed in its making.

The Polytechnic Heritage

I've been getting angry lately, and this has been the focus of my anger. Beginning on page 134 of his work, "The Myth of the Machine: The Pentagon of Power, Lewis Mumford writes:

Because the era before the eighteenth century is mistakenly supposed to have been technically backward, one of its best characteristics has been overlooked: namely that it was still a mixed technology, a veritable polytechnics, for the characteristic tools, machine-tools, machines, utensils, and utilities it used did not derive solely from its own period and culture, but had been accumulating in great variety for tens of thousands of years. 

Consider this immense heritage. If the watermill went back to pre-Christian Greece and the windmill to eighth-century Persia, the plow, the loom, and the potter's wheel went back two or three thousand years further; while its grains, fruits, and vegetables derived from a much earlier period of paleolithic food-gathering and neolithic domestication. The bow that won the battle of Crécy for the English was a paleolithic invention, once used in hunting Magdalenian bison. As for the paintings, and sculptures in public buildings, these issued from an even more ancient paleolithic past: the Aurignacian caves. The introduction of new inventions like the clock did not necessitate on principle the discarding of any of these older achievements.

Not the least significant fact about this 'backward' technology is that the areas in which technical skill and engineering audacity were highest, namely, in the massive Romanesque and the towering Gothic cathedrals,

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drew on the oldest parts of our technical heritage, and were associated directly, not with any utilitarian purpose, but solely with attempts to add significance and beauty to the necessitous round of daily life. It was not the need for food or shelter, or the desire to exploit natural forces, or the effort to overcome physical obstacles that raised this constructive technics to the highest pitch of effort. To express their deepest subjective feelings, the builders of these monuments posed for themselves the most difficult technical problems, often beyond their mathematical insight or craft experience, but calling forth a daring experimental imagination, so daring that it sometimes fatally outran their capacities--as more than one toppled tower revealed.

To build these monumental structures, groups of workers of diverse capabilities and talents were assembled, to perform a wide variety of tasks, from the monotonous shaping of stones into square blocks, small enough for a single man to handle, to the acrobatic feats needed to place the carved stones on the topmost pinnacle. not merely muscular strength, mechanical skill, and physical courage went into the fabrication of these buildings: emotions, feelings, fantasies, remembered legends--in fact, the community's total response to life--took form in these supreme technological achievements. Technology itself was a means to a greater goal: for the cathedral was as near to Heaven as any earthbound structure could get.

Such mastery of the complex processes of architectural creation was not for the purpose of either "making work," as in ancient times, or of doing away with work, as under today's automation: neither was it just to increase the personal prestige of the Master Mason or the incomes of the workers, still less to 'expand the economy.' The ultimate end of such a magnificent technical effort was not the building alone but the vision it promoted: a sense of the meanings and values of life. This achievement has proved so valuable that successive generations of men, with far different religious beliefs and aspirations, have nevertheless felt a fresh infusion of spiritual vitality on beholding these buildings, even as William Morris did, as an eight-year-old boy, when he first confronted, breathlessly, the marvel of Canterbury Cathedral.

Not every aspect of handicraft, it goes without saying, offered such happy working conditions or such ultimate rewards. There was back-breaking drudgery, hardship, crippling organic maladaption, and chronic disease in occupations such as mining, smelting, dyeing, and glass-blowing: yet today, despite our superior medical diagnosis and treatment, many of these disabilities still exist, and have even been magnified in technically 'advanced' industries where the workers are exposed to radioactivity, to lead poisoning, to silicate and asbestos dust, or to malign pesticides like malathion and dieldrin.

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The other human weakness of some handicraft industries, like weaving, their fixation in routine motions and unrelieved monotony, paved the way for mechanization: but the effect of the latter, until automation took over, was to intensify the boredom, while the speeding up of the processes took away the soothing effect of repetition that makes such crafts so useful to the psychiatrist in the concluding phases of psychotherapy, as William Morris discovered by personal experience during a troubled period in his own marital life.

In certain departments of handicraft, the rewards and the penalties were, admittedly, almost inextricable. In some of the highest reaches, as in the Persian rug-making of the sixteenth century, the perfection of both the design and the process of work, demanding as many as four hundred knots to the square inch, might call for a lifetime enslavement of the worker, to reach such a pitch of artifice. There is no need to conceal these ugly blemishes: but also no excuse for hiding one of the great compensations--the work itself was prized and preserved. One of the beautiful rugs that now covers a wall in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London demanded the whole lifetime of the temple slave who made it. But this slave was an artist, and in his art enjoyed freedom to create. At the end of his task, he proudly signed his name to the masterpiece. he had not lost his identity or his self-respect: he had something to show for his working life. Compare the death of this slave with Arthur Miller's 'Death of a Salesman.'

To understand the older polytechnics, partly mechanized by the sixteenth century, but not wholly committed to mechanization, one must remember that its dominant arts were solidly based on ancient neolithic foundations: mixed farming--grains, vegetables, orchard crops, domestic animals--and buildings of every sort, from houses and barns to canals and cathedrals. All these occupations required an assemblage of craft knowledge and skills; and the work, in the very process of growth and construction, changed form hour to hour and from day to day. the process itself did not demand staying in the same position, performing a single uniform task, accepting monotony and uniformity, without at least the relief of a change of weather or seasons, or a change of pace. 

Consider the performance of the old-fashioned Japanese craftsman cited by Raphael Pumpelly in his 'Reminiscences.' Pumpelly wanted a door that could be locked, so he called in a metal-worker to make screwed-in hinges; but unfortunately this craftsman had never seen a screw. When Pumpelly presented him with an iron screw, the worker went away and the next day brought a dozen brass screws, beautifully made and polished, after being ingeniously molded. "He also asked permission to copy my Colt's revolver. Before long he brought an exact duplicate working well

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 in all its parts, and it was more highly finished." One would look far to find such confidence and resourcefulness in a modern machine shop: it was long ago exiled from the assembly line.

In the workshop and the household there were plenty of tedious tasks, no doubt: but they were done in the company of one's fellows, at a pace that allowed for chatting and singing: there was none of the loneliness of the modern housewife presiding over a gang of machines, accompanied only by the insistent rumble and clatter and hum of her assistants. Except in servile industries like mining, playful relaxation, sexual delight, domestic tenderness, esthetic stimulation were not spatially or mentally separated completely from the work in hand.

Though hand labor brought many skills to the highest point of perfection--no machine can weave cotton as fine as Dacca muslin with number 400 thread--and even more important characteristic was its wide diffusion, which is another way of referering to the tool-user's essential autonomy and self-reliance. Nothing proves this better than the annals of overseas exploration, with their repeated record of building seaworthy ships to take the place of a wrecked vessel. "The ship's carpenter who marched in Cortes' army, directed the building and launching on Lake Texcoco of a whole fleet of brigantines big enough to carry cannon."  Such a mode of work was equal to any emergency: neither the skill nor the overall knowledge of design was restricted to a few specialists. That our present gains in horsepower have been diminished by a loss of effective manpower, and above all cooperating mindpower, widely distributed, has still to be sufficiently appreciated.

Karl Buecher gave an account of this inter-relation between handicraft work and esthetic expression in his classic study, 'Arbeit und Rhymus,' unfortunately never translated into English; and I have emphasized, in 'Art and Technics' and elsewhere, the fact that mechanical invention and esthetic expression were inseparable aspects of the older polytechnics, and that, down to the Renascence, art itself remained the principle field of invention. The purpose of art has never been labor-saving but labor-loving, a deliberate elaboration of function, form, and symbolic ornament to enhance the interest of life itself.

This ancient reciprocity between folk work and folk art reached its apogee in music between the seventeenth and the nineteenth centuries: witness Samuel Pepys choosing a serving-maid partly for her qualifications in holding her part in song around the family dinner table--or Franz Schubert, who, according to legend, translated the work song of the pile drivers on the river into the melody and rhythm of his Nocturne in E-flat Major. If orchestral music reached its climax in the symphonic works of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert, it was perhaps because it still

p. 138

obviously drew upon the wealth of folk songs and dances that were tied to the rural crafts: a heritage that Verdi, in an industrially 'backward' country like Italy, could still draw on. 

Had this craft economy, prior to mechanization, actually been ground down by poverty, its workers might have spent the time given over to communal celebrations and church-building on multiplying the yards of textiles woven or the pairs of shoes cobbled. Certainly an economy that enjoyed a long series of holidays, free from work, only fifty-two of which were Sundays, cannot be called impoverished. The worst one can say about it is that in its concentration on its spiritual interests and social satisfactions, it might fail to guard its members sufficiently against a poor winter diet and occasional bouts of starvation. But such an economy had something that we now have almost forgotten the meaning of, leisure: not freedom from work, which is how our present culture interprets leisure, but freedom within work; and along with that, time to converse, to ruminate, to contemplate the meaning of life.

Aside from the agriculture and building, the most radical weakness of the older handicrafts was their excessive craft-specialization, which prevented the free circulation of knowledge and skill, and deprived the individual crafts outside the building trades of the great corporate assemblage of knowledge that had made the engineering feats of the cathedral builders such marvellous vehicles of cultural expression. At the end of the Middle Ages, this excessive specialization began to break down through an invasion from above. Note that Rabelais made the study of arts and crafts part of Gargantua's education: on cold and rainy days he devoted himself to carving and painting and went with his tutor to observe "the drawing of metals or the casting of cannon, or paid visits of jewellers, goldsmiths, and cutters of precious stones; or to alchemists and coiners, or to tapestry makers, printers, musical instrument makers, dyers, and other craftsmen of that sort; and everywhere ... they learned and considered the processes and inventions of each trade."

In this description, Rabelais was recording, in effect, the great innovation effected in person by the Renascence artist: the audacious all-around amateur who, though he might still have to attach himself to the Goldsmith's Guild, was actually breaking through a cramping and obsolescent craft isolationism; for this new figure was equally ready to paint a picture, cast a bronze, plan a fortification, design a pageant, or construct a building. Whatever he could think he could draw: whatever he could draw he could do. Through defying the constrictions of craft specialization, the artist restored the full exercise of the mind. 

This facility was not the product of a special genius: was Vasari a genius? It was due, rather, to a disruption of older municipal, guild and ecclesiastic institutions by princely despots and patrons. This gave an 

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opportunity for detached, non specialized minds to move freely from one craft to another, utilizing their hoarded skills, but not having to invent them alone, de novo, as the machine designers after James Watt were largely forced to do. But note: the most successful of these artists, Brunelleschi, Michelangelo, and Christopher Wren, derived their strength mainly from the ancient, if highly organized, building crafts--as a later industrial giant, Joseph Paxton, did from horticulture. 

The past, as imagined by Mumford, is assessed through a rosy prism. I cannot help but think that he reveals his agenda in passages like this. This passage does show a clear break that we see now between traditional society and post-traditional society, and we feel it in our generic institutionalization through school and the mantras of self-exploration and self-expression with very little if any training in the practical skills of a trade. Instead, children are trained to sit passively in rows before a single point of information, and train their attention on a lecture delivered orally, in print, and through multimedia presentation.


The post-traditional society, as the name suggests, is one where the individual has radical freedom to pursue the profession of one's choosing and will not be forced, before the age of consent, into the family industry. The post-traditional society provides a notion of freedom from this very thing. It comes at a specific cost to both mastery and to identity management. By the age of 18 the person living under the mandates of traditional society had logged the ten thousand-hour floor set to measure mastery in a profession. By that token, the professional in a traditional society knew what to do. Contrast this with the young adult in a post-traditional society. By 18 he has mastered passive television watching, product consumption, and the disposable identity formed by taking part in social groups through the adoption of fashion trends. The post-traditional society hasn't deviated much from the social forms that existed prior. Now, the choices one has are presented to the individual and his personal growth work helps him to secure some sense of a self amid the din of advertised choices and the diversity of lifestyles that grow from them. But the choices and resources available are managed by a profit-seeking institution instead of a family member motivated by the survival of a peculiar social concept: reputation.

Reputation is a check to a social organization that relies on a degree of specialization. The reputation of the artisan would motivate this person to both cultivate a craft skill and the good graces of a public that would need his services.

A culture of amendement entitlement

In the sage view of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel society progresses towards greater and greater freedom. And with that freedom comes greater and greater responsibility to uphold the norms, institutions, and laws, which support this free society.

We can contrast this early 19th century picture of history and society with the contemporary United States and its version of consumer democracy under the natural law of capital. And we need look no further than a movie theater in Florida where a retired cop shot a man dead for using his cellular phone during a movie.

To appropriate an internet meme: "I'm sorry. I cannot hear your First Amendment rights over the sound of my Second Amendment rights."

But perhaps there's a truth to this turd of wisdom. Gun fire is louder than the human voice, speaking freely.

Three aspects to the story stick out in my mind, which make it a representative anecdote for contemporary American culture, especially in the jingoistic Republican state of Florida, that dangling dick of America, the same one that corrupted 2000 presidential election results leading to the Constitutional crime of delivering the presidency to George Bush by Court-ordered fiat.

First, a man was using his cellular phone to send or answer a text. Why? Because he could, not because he knows he shouldn't have. He simply had the capability to use his phone as easy as his capability to speak and he did something that he does countless times throughout the day and in so so doing he violated the public social norms regulating movie theater behavior.

Second, a man retaliated against this affront to his right to an unperturbed theater experience through the use of his concealed weapon. This man, elderly, retired from the police force at 51, perhaps having spent too much free time before a Fox news broadcast, himself, a product of his own media consumption habits. Trial testimony reveals that he was texting as well. Go figure.

Third, another theatergoer to the event noted that "it sounded like a gunshot, but [I] wasn't sure if it was real or from the previews because they had just shown a preview for 'Robocop,' which had a lot of gunshots in it."

This little time capsule sums up the contemporary American experience. One man exercises his first amendment right simply because he can, emboldened by the always-present, always-on communication technology: the cellular phone. Another man exercises his second amendment right to bear arms, simply because he can conceal this small firearm, unimpeded, on his person, emboldened by a culture flanked by images of John Wayne and Wayne LaPierre that turn gun possession into a (w)holy American right. Third, a witness is unsure if the gunshot was real or part of a movie trailer showing at the time given the ubiquitous presence of the gun and its continuous discharge in our forms of entertainment.

Only the third man gets a pass. The first two are led like a horse to water by the technologies at hand: the phone and the gun. The function of each and their presence on the person offer logics of practice that circumvent alternatives. A recent article concerning the rude gestures of parents and loved ones who stop, mid conversation or mid presence to answer texts is but one way in which people get enslaved to the cellular phone's constant interpellation of the user. When the phone hails you, you stop what you're doing to look at the screen and respond. Likewise, the man who has gone so far as to see his life in enough danger to pack heat has conceded to the logic of use.  Under normal circumstances he may de-escalate conflict or walk away but in this case he has the answer to conflict. Bang. Bang.

Florida is rife with instances of conflict precipitated by the gun where a man who normally wouldn't confront another does so through his surreptitious self-deputization via the gun. He engages in risky conversations with people he normally would not, and so emboldened by his hidden power, he challenges the other to produce an answer to why he's walking in this neighborhood or to turn down loud music only to have the manner and nature of the query be an affront to the person confronted. The demand escalates into a conflict that ends with the concealer producing his "right" and using it with the effect of ending the conversation in a pool of blood.

Guns aren't simply a manifestation of a philosophy of liberty. They aren't simply a bulwark against encroachments on those liberties. They are discursive resources deployed in interactions with others. And like any mode of power in discourse, they distort that discourse. The gun, a monologic weapon, means "I'm going to tell you what to do because I can." Furthermore it has the tendency to impose the gun wielder's meaning upon the situation. As others have said about using violent force: "It sends a clear message." The irony here is that a dead person has a better 'understanding' of your message.


I'm reminded of that cellular phone commercial: "Can you hear me now?"

The phone annihilates space like the gun. It allows the voice to travel a greater distance than it can normally can, unaided. The gun allows the teeth to travel a greater distance than they normally can, unaided. The phone a weapon in its own right, allows strangers and even stranger behavior to persist in the presence of others by a user blinded by numerous robotic uses of this device to often not recognize the social violation its use causes.

And that poor guy in the theater can't differentiate what's real from what's in the movie. This theater, that analogy for the practical limits to free speech. You can't scream fire in there. This theater, a theater for the drama of the gun. You can't open fire in there.

But you pay to watch the actors do just this all the time. And you carry that phone or that gun all the time, each providing you a reality shaped by the very technologies at hand. When you pretend to entertain others through a clever text, maybe you're channeling a movie star's persona. When you wield your weapon in the defense of a phantom concept against a phantom menace, maybe you're channeling a movie star's persona.

"Go ahead, make my day."
@loudtribesmen

#secondamendment

Repetition, robotics, tweet, tweet

 
Where to begin? Let's start at the top. Right click the image to open it in a new tab or window so that you can zoom in and read along.

Jessi Klein is a comic and a comedy writer who has a twitter account that others follow. The Twitter interface encourages the reader not to 'miss any updates from Jessi Klein' by joining and 'following' what interests 'me.'

Following: Like so many geese imprinted to a passerby.

Jessi Klein, owing to her comedy writing skills, appropriates an oft stated axiom of empowered women that is, itself an empowerment message, that being, "real women have curves." First, it's an assertion of epistemic authority by including a trope of representation, i.e., the adjective 'real.' And I agree that images of women and femininity starting with childhood toys tend toward the skinny, white, and long-legged at the expense of a normal distribution of body types and skin shades. In a media-saturated society the assertion of what is 'real' is a policy-level pinch to wake us up to what is and is not representative of the world at large. We already watch a nightly newscast that creates a representative world of murder, robbery, car crashes, and four-alarm fires. News is about the outliers of everyday occurrence, not about norms, which are themselves repetitive occurrences.

In her tweet Klein has adjusted her empowerment message to read "Real manatees have curves." Why? Because, well, manatees are the rubber chicken of the sea. They're funny, cute, and beautifully elegant floating exemplars of corpulence.

Comedic potential noted, line delivered, laughs had. Well done.

So where do we go from here? A seemingly context-less post initiated by what is unknown, but the post itself invites imitators and respondents.

The first comes as a modulation of the sentence to read "real women ARE curves." And from a gestalt model of human sensory reconstruction I'd agree. Shapes are everything. Illustrators know this and advertisers know this because everyday people tacitly respond to shapes. What is in a butt, a body profile, or cleavage but simply the curvature of lines anyway? Well noted, first respondent. With its emphasis on a 'be' verb, the first response is an appeal to an ontology, that is, an appeal to 'what is.'

Our next respondent defers to another media trope: the artistic exemplar "Positively Rubenesque." This respondent repeats an idiom concerning round people by referring to an early artistic champion of this type of human body, the baroque painter Peter Paul Rubens. To say that something is Rubenesque is to both comment upon the shapeliness or buxomness of a body, specifically female, and to give representative authority to Peter Paul Rubens' style of presenting this body on canvas.

Do you see where we're going here?

Twitter user Christina Barrett has a more pedestrian view but once again calls this a 'fact' the source of which has yet to be confirmed outside of the representative image of our non-consenting manatee floating before a diver's camera. Roland Barthes' commentary on the image presages this moment when he recognizes the ascendancy of the image over the word. So the picture becomes a self-evident fact of seeing as believing. The sentence that 'real manatees' are such is simply a symbolization of that which already is. Her concluding remark is that "It's all @ what you can eat," suggesting that personally and culturally imposed dietary restrictions are the real battleground with the absent signifier here, the 'real woman' and her body type. The use of the word 'all' is an attempt to sum it up, to totalize the experience of one's body and the pressures to look a certain way. It's a representative end-game move to frame the experience of being a woman as that of being under the pressure to look 'like' a woman, which is practiced at the dinner plate. The @ sign is simply a lazy appropriation not meant to trigger a computer algorithm but to substitute for its prepositional referent "at."

The next tweet fits into the genre of the troll, a gently rolling knoll of a troll that simply deconstructs the word manatee itself for its sexist potential. Twitter user Klaus Squirrelhammer runs through the clever portmanteaus relating to the use of different gender-specific nouns, finally resting with "personatee" instead of "manatee" or "womanatee" and ends with the hashtagged word "dignity." As a troll this tweet not only makes a clever word-association joke but also makes the tongue-in-cheek reference to dignity as if the user is attempting to raise awareness to a sexist use of gender-representative language to encapsulate the whole of a species. In this instance, saying "manatee" is akin to saying "mankind." As they say in the parlance of 'on-line,' "well-played," as if all internet discourse were a contemporary version of the gentlemanly banter among English blue-bloods playing croquet on an Asian tea plantation circa 1882. Time is so easily laundered in tweet streams like this to suggest that when the viewer arrives at a feed of this length these clever ideas, as presented, just occurred in the minds of the users without any undo hesitation and testing prior to the tweet that gets posted.

The next three tweets simply repeat the message, making it a mantra, and each completes it with a link to a twitter picture, a redirection to other twitter accounts and their feeds through the use of the "@" tag and in the final case a hashtag reference to a French word for a sexual encounter involving three individuals.

This is an online conversation masquerading as entertainment. It comes from a relatively well-known individual and garners comments from others of varying online renown. This kind of occurrence happens all the time, every day, the sum effect of all these is to demonstrate how often internally meaningful little worlds of significance emerge out of word play that have little meaning outside of the small cabal of twitter users engaged in each feed. If we contrast this use of twitter with the use of it during the Arab Spring in Tarhrir Square we see a bunch of relatively safe and free-feeling whites in the West tapping miniature golf balls with the muzzle end of the 'people's gun' of the revolution. That's a testament to the relative adaptability of communications technology as well as to the culture of distracted auto-entertainment asphyxiation cultivated by U.S. internet users.

But "there's an app for that," and with it comes a more important future substantiation of information technology: the web-enabled robot. Enter a discussion occurring contemporaneous to this tweet from Google chairman, Eric Schmidt. The future he sees for Google is in providing the products of automation that will replace "a lot of the repetitive behavior in our lives." He continues with the vague panegyric for his company's proposed application of robots: "Robots will become omnipresent in our lives in a good way." If the twitter feed is representative of what we already do with technologies like Google's, then the next generation of products that Google develops will be to address some of the unintended consequences of its first generation of products. Connect, search, copy, paste are an OCD cultivated by the information technologies in our hands, in our homes, and on our faces as they get tethered more closely to the ad-savvy search technologies that his company provides.

With the contemporary internet we already stand before something larger than human thinking and human culture. And the powerful search interfaces that we have at our disposal to 'navigate' this leviathan of human communication distort our interests around being before a very big thing and carving out personal spaces within it through search queries. This jungle of discourse that we hack through and rebuild webs of significance is powered by the search machete. But to square this metaphor with our actual habits online its as if we are simply a pair of disembodied eyes using this machete to both carve us up for submission and to cut from that which has been submitted for consumption.

Strange I know, but it's strange "in a good way."