Intention, pain and webs

Rumor next, and Chance, And Tumult, and Confusion,
all embroiled. --Milton.

In view of today's curious furor, I feel I'd be remiss if I didn't say something regarding my role in two blogs that are currently receiving intense interest.

I was invited to participate in Meankids back in Feb. by Chris Locke. I saw Jeneane and Frank were involved, both people I have come to know, admire, and like.

I trusted these people, and still do, regardless of what is being insinuated. One of my strongest memories of Frank is his compassion when I blogged about my dog having to undergo surgery for a potentially cancerous growth. He, Jeneane and Chris have soul, and souls.

Others participating I did not know at all, or knew only from their blogs.

The formative idea, if there was any, seemed to me to be an effort by genuinely imaginative people to do something other than the dreary lockstep efforts to be remarkable that characterize a good deal of bloggarhia, especially the marketing and political sectors thereof.

I recall a post about Twitter provoked the most comments and a bit of conversation. It was playful.

I didn't know who Kathy Sierra was until someone linked to her.

There is hysteria, a good deal of facile judgment-before-discovery, and a whole lot of interpretive labor being set aside in what's now being said with regard to Ms. Sierra's allegations.

It might be hard to see this now, but the people, the postings, and the concerns of Meankids and its short-lived successor were diverse, undirected by any single agenda, and more about the claims made by and for blogging per se than about any single individual.

And there were posts that I found ugly, objectionable, scurrilous. Disturbing, because they seemed utterly gratuitous. I don't know why they were deemed relevant, but that's the problem. The web is a thing that creates complex motions of reference and relevance, new momentums and disruptive energies that displace intention and authority.

Real pain -- coming from anywhere, incomprehensible -- is altogether regrettable. Today it seems to be widening into something reductive, something swarming and sticky with its own bigness, that is not interested in facts, but simply spins in the same tedious lockstep unthinking modality that was being mulled and satirized by many of the posts on these blogs. The relevance of everything is now skewed, spun, taken up to a level of abstraction and refraction that's all predicted, if one listens, in the reverb of the old latinate rumor.

The complicated conditions, the open, webbed spaces of experiments in writing are being overlooked, dispelled. Jihad seems to ride on the fashionable air.

For what it's worth, my contributions included Nietzsche, certain politicians, and Twitter among other people and things. Kathy Sierra and other bloggers were not on my radar. I continue to trust the people I trusted. But now I'm less confident that one can so lightly enter into open, creating spaces with others whom one does not know. Jeneane put it well.