.

Zero Comments

Today, I drift hopelessly away from everything

remotely reminiscent of a buy-nothing-day

slacktivism. This particular portmanteau

refers to any do-good desire not predicated

upon the actual act of getting out of one's

armchair. One could easily categorize those

poets who have not yet visited regions directly

affected by BP's oil spill but who nonetheless

write about it, as slacktivistic scribes.

Slacktivistically speaking, ribbon magnets on

moving vehicles and the gratuitous posting of

YouTube protest videos also fits this definition.

Somewhat analogously, the current digi-clime

of harvesting hundreds of virtual 'friends' by

tapping a few keys in the name of anti-content

seems wrought from the same anesthetized

state of mind. As notions of locality crash

headlong into (this kind of) voyeuristic virtuality,

one doesn't need to ask how writing has changed.

Cyberism has more to do with social ranking

than it does with language. And although blogs

may have eroded traditional broadcast media,

the jury is still out on those blogs that receive

no user feedback. If not for that grandiose

practice of social presence, what are writers

writing for, or rather, for whom? Being on the

lowest rung of internet hierarchy widens the

frontier for free expression. Afterall, no one is

watching. So, while the meat-eating majority

get all distracted by an in-crowd dynamic,

twitterizing their blog rolls for the sake of

social currency, some writers are repurposing

the blog tool for an entirely different effect.

That sweet stranger syndrome. But whatever

their intent, it is not yet the mainstream

stuff of contemporary media research.

Cynical slacktivism indeed.

"Then from those profound slumbers,

we awake in a dawn, not knowing who

we are, being nobody newly born, ready

for anything, the brain emptied of that

past which was life until then ... Then,

from the black storm through which we

seem to have passed (but we do not even

say we), we emerge prostrate, without

a thought. a we that is void of content."

(Proust II, 1014)