Aesthetics
I find that although I enjoy looking at the technical, social,
psychological, and political implications of internet
communities, what keeps me coming back is a
form of aesthetics.
The last and greatest art is to limit and isolate oneself.
What I worry about is our coming up with a concept,
an analytic tool if you will, applying it to past occurrences, and being
so damn pleased with the aesthetics and usefulness of the concept that we
attribute to it a concrete antecedent existence among the facts we are looking
at. Thus, ideas like rationality, denial, anxiety, group consciousness, self,
soul, morality and virtue leap from being tools we use to analyze the past
(as well as possibilities for the future), to being causal forces that live
among us, unseen, but like ghosts and other spirits, instigating all sort
of misfortune. I like a ghost story as well as anyone, but I don't want to
get silly about it.
Shannah, the lurking social scientists and psychologists need
something to study so I'm all for poetic and intuitive and feeling-full back
and forth explorations...open ended...clothed in the silks of
intimacy, with love sneaking in and out.
Often I glean a sense of safety from the aesthetics--the symbols,
vocabulary and syntax--that flows through the group and eventually establishes
as standard.
I attempt to remain receptive to the aesthetic element in
experience, because it permits me consumatory respite amid what is often
goal directed behavior, and those respites are why I engage in the goal directed
behavior in the first place. Goals are just means to other goals. If I don't
have time to savor the value of the doing, then I am managing my time badly
and become disoriented.
Kafka is definitely my thing. But the point is to recognize
and avoid the absurd; not to wallow around in it
Bandwidth is the capacity of a communication channel
to carry multiple bits of information at the same time. For example, on the
net, a text chat requires way less bandwidth than full-motion video. The
latter contains far more information per second. Some of the beauty and elegance
of the communication arts is creativity of expression within a constrained
bandwidth. I often prefer black-and-white charcoal drawings to full-color
paintings. Poetry is another example: If you have something important to
say, why limit yourself to iambic pentameter? Because the beauty is that
you did. Novels depict nuances of human relationships, but it takes many
pages and hours to read. A good movie does it repeatedly in 90 minutes, but
that doesn't make it "better art".
the net is a *fictive* environment. and in that, we
are continually creating ourselves and others. it is important to consider
this... fictiveness. to allow ourselves to master the medium.
Apparently I don't appreciate the artistry of "creative" email
as much as you do, preferring instead the non-fiction essay equivalent
i think carpetting is tragic. thinking carpetting tragic
may also be tragic
Very practical, very utilitarian, very dull.
Poetry Roy?? I didn't think you had it in you - I'm
impressed!:¬ )
But I have learnt that when form slavishly follows function,
we certainly are left with a useful item, but at what cost? The human psyche
seems to have an aesthetic device installed,
----Quote Dewey, The Quest for Certainty,
1929---
The word "taste" has perhaps got too completely associated
with arbitrary liking to express the nature of judgments of value. But if
the word be used in the sense of an appreciation at once cultivated and active,
one may say that the formation of taste is the chief matter wherever values
enter in, whether intellectual esthetic or moral. Relatively immediate
judgments, which we call tact or to which we give the name of intuition,
do not precede reflective inquiry, but are the funded products of much thoughtful
experience. Expertness of taste is at once the result and the reward of constant
exercise of thinking. Instead of there being no disputing about tastes, they
are the one thing worth disputing about, if by "dispute" is signified discussion
involving reflective inquiry.
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