warning: meta junk.

Brother ghost has written us another post, and a reply we shall conjure.

He writes:

Stories have become primary methodology of education. It’s not that really different now. We have enormous variation in terms of media, but stories perform many of the same purposes: to educate the listener/reader/viewer in language and culture, and to be entertaining while doing so.

As I interpret and extrapolate, ghost establishes a methodology of learning via stories. Here, media acts as a vehicle for stories, which themselves are vehicles for values and norms (i.e. I learn through the bible that raeping women is r..wrong).

I add that stories have a meta-value here. The original methodology that we speak of – that is, the simple transmitting of values – can form the foundation of what some theorists might call critical consciousness, or, in other words, awareness, reflexivity, etc. Reflexivity occurs when people are critical of methodology: “no, ur doing it wrong!” “____ is cancer!” “only weeaboo like teh Narutos.” etc.

Because we’re intrinsically speaking of people here (people are basically the operative factor in talking about “transmitting values”), we have to frame all of this in terms of populations. For the sake of anime relevance, and we’ve probably spoke about this already somewhere down the road, fans are those who partake in methodology but are not critical of other fans. Once, however, a fan becomes critical (or remotely aware of other fans and their methodological behaviors) of another fan, they enter the fandom.

Yet here is the central problem: can fandom exist merely by the nonverbalized consciousness of individuals? – or does fandom require discourse? This is kind of a Foucauldian take on Marxism: critical discourse makes up the material base upon which the superstructural “fandom” is situated. Because this is the internet, discourse is necessarily “material”. It’s significant to consider, however, that in this perspective, fandom is not a material entity but an ideology whose territory engulfs its own constituents. So to speak, the process of becoming conscious (entering fandom) then expands the “mass” of the ideology of fandom.

But anyway, I would say that fandom requires discourse to exist.

An interesting turn on this is what you might call the “counter-meta methodological faction”. Of course, we’ve seen the sections of fandom that scoff at critical discourse, instead emphasizing focus on methodology, without all the wwwwwww stuff. It’s a good point, but it’s interesting because it’s a discourse that runs counter to itself in order to end itself.

There’s some more to this, but I forgot, so that’ll be part 2, maybe.

←[85] (part 1, 2, 3) (collective train of thought: RyanA 1, 2 – Intro 1, 2)

RyanA: What would be really awesome, you may already be thinking this, is to have an aggregator of various reader/blogger’s lensing/noting (Shared Items in Google Reader). Unfortunately, this is more work for authors and asking readers to do such a thing is sort of fishy. If there were a sub-group of producers, not authors, that did this and that is all they did, it could be highly effective…. I wonder if any team-blogs have thought of designating that position to members.

Wow, that’s a really nifty idea. I hadn’t been thinking of that specifically, but I had been conjuring up some group google documents thing. The problem is that I think using platforms besides blogs enters into the “private sphere”, effectively damming communication. Twitter is for bloggers by bloggers just as these posts kind of are, but that’s a totally content related matter as opposed to form-oriented.

You could approach the following paragraph in two or three ways, I think:

(1) Get non-blogging readers to diversify along the “z-axis” – x is blog genre, y is specific content, z is the platforms for accessing both x and y related material. I think that if the barrier of mediums was breached, that would be a totally revolutionizing thing. It’s interesting and important to think about the significance of accounts. What is their relation to identity? To individuality? We know that in forums you need an account, but in blogs you don’t. This sort of contradicts the public/private binary too! – basically, the account-centric nature of forums refutes the very notion that accounts provide individuality, insofar as forums are not good locations to foster individuality, as the conversation has indicated thus far.

(2) You mention an interesting new breed, a “sub-group of producers, not authors [whose role was "limited"to precisely this task]“. I mean, talk about division of labor! Now, in relation to Author, this brings up a huge topic I haven’t talked about yet. If you type in “Pete Zaitcev” you get a boatload of other internet accounts, other nexistences (to quote Kaiserpingvin’s coinage). Is this the same Author? I don’t think so, not necessarily. Perhaps internet identity can be limited to their specific spheres. Anime blogging/notepadding Author isn’t the same on in a political blogging sphere or whatever else. This applies to me, I post in some music forums, and my nexistence may be linked (only to me), but they are totally unrelated. For all intensive purposes, I’m a completely different nexistence vis-a-vis respective content-oriented spheres. This is because, related to the ubiquitous Marx quote, it is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. I don’t want to get into a philosophical debate on the nature of “consciousness” since I haven’t really read any of that kind of text. But, here, I’m effectively saying that the real life individual has the potential to be comprised of a plethora of distinctive internet identities or, possibly, individualities because it is precisely the distinct social nature of each sphere which determines that very “consciousness” or identity. As I stated, the problem is that I’m indexing “identity” for “consciousness”, which isn’t really what Marx was getting at, but that’s beside the point; hopefully you get my gist!

In fact, Douglass Rushkoff said this:

What’s the continuing shape and shift of the bias of the media that we use; and the bias of the internet is shifting away from contact between people and more towards contact through content between people and particular content that is less and less local.

This idea of, as we have been discussing, a content-oriented digital society is extremely important because Rushkoff uses it to describe contact and social organization, I don’t necessarily think it’s redundant up to this point. Essentially, tying together Marx, Rushkoff and Kaiserpingvin, separate nexistences are the product of social spheres which are created by content-oriented individuals. “Division of labor” is too harsh a term, the aniblogosphere has no monetary system nor economy. I think what I’m getting at (it’s nearly over the top of my head) is that in order to breach the damming effects of the medium and de facto private spheres and channels, new forms of digital identity have to be thought of. These new notions of identity and nexistence might have the potential to challenge or at least engage with these incredibly stable discursive regimes and continuous practices of “private” and “public” spheres – there’s nothing really “private” about google documents at all besides the hype and representation it has received from the digital public, the aniblogosphere. Exclusivity in general is a good example.

(3) To totally forget about the previous two points, you say that team blogs can designate members to perform these tasks. The notepadder then becomes not a distinct nexistence but a role, as the individual can “defy quantum physics” by being two things simultaneously.1 By “things”, I perhaps mean representations, or perceptions that society superimposes upon the individual. Similarly, with fansubbing, you can have a typesetter who is also the translator. This method seems relatively unproblematic. It goes back to the structural hegemony vs. personal agency: can distinct nexistences spontaneously pop up out of nowhere, unbeknownst to the structure? – or do the social mechanisms of the structure necessarily have to (a) provide for a ripe social environment into which (b) new forms of nexistence arise? In this case, I think the structure wins. It is essential to have continuously progressive forms of software and blogging interface (Moore’s law?, but the aniblogosphere isn’t necessarily teleologic) to establish the “luxury” or “necessity” of new nexistences and social roles onto which people consciously subscribe upon their entrance into their preferred spheres. Basically, the structure of digital societies create slots for employment, and the people come running: if you build it, they will come! As we’ve discussed, however, the problem is that we need to avoid building bridges to nowhere. In order for a collective notepadding society to exist, those roles and their constituent technologies must have a function and use.2

1 However, I think it’s very hard and extremely rare for someone to be a notepadder and not, first and foremost, an aniblogger. How can they skip those successive phases of nexistence construction? It seems like one must first become steeped in aniblogosphere culture before they can progress to become a meta-blogger. Perhaps Author does contradict that.
2 I remember reading that functionalism in sociology is obsolete, so I don’t know why it sounds so enticing here, though.