Friday, December 29, 2006

DUMBING DOWN E-WAYS

Every now and then blogs and comments pages on the net go though periods of heated discussion whereby all manner of chat and reporting is set free. It seems that the last few weeks have been just such a time. The hot spot right now is the Frank Fisher site ( see my links ) where the chat is moving between damned good comment and damned good anger set free. These sites are communication sites within communities that differ in their individual make-up as one would expect from a vital human community. As the good Hermann Hesse would write back in the 1930s : oh how different we all are together and oh how much that is beautiful in humanity.

But many feel and have said in no uncertain terms ( a tell tale sign there in itself) that these blogs and sites are dumbed down. Decent standards are lost and content is lost to a playfulness. Of course one big debate here is that of the larger scene of Modernity and postmodernity but Zola would be better to allow this debate to open up below if folk so wish. The point is that this blog site is not an academic discourse. Indeed most academic discourses have been a miserable failure for most folk. Perhaps blogs and comments pages can reach those places that over-academic "papers" fail to reach.

Yet a few questions remain. Just what are these "appropriate standards" anyway. Who decides and who the guardian of the gates and why?
How do most folk really learn?
Well if Zola carries on this way for too long there will be zero comments and the world will drift into a new dumbness called boredom and doze. zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Perhaps a reasonable comment from Zola is this : Principles are best made as the happenings actually happen with and through folk. principles are terrible when passed down from above as if on tablets of stone. Perhaps these blog sites are busy right now in finding out in togetherness those principles that make good sense.

24 comments:

Anonymous said...

How do most folk really learn?

For starters I would have thought, in this context, by constructively questioning others and - equally importantly - by constructively questioning oneself.

If one does too much of one and not the other I would guess that you end up in a vicious circle of reinforcing existing prejudices, assumptions, dogma and so on.

zola a social thing said...

Trousers : You certainly are in a wise mood today. Must be careful I must.
I think I agree with you and could only beg for more adventure in this whole process.
Widening horizons AND crossing borders.
Will you go where angels fear to tread?
Will I?

Anonymous said...

I would perhaps be wise if I practised what I preached, Zola. Until then, I will try and get the balance right.

zola a social thing said...

Bet we both get told off again soon though ( with a giggle ).

Anonymous said...

Indeed, Zola :-)

anticant said...

You can't push the river. Let the happenings happen.

zola a social thing said...

Don't stop the carnival.

Anonymous said...

I've said it before and I'll say it again. I've done a fair amount of reading, listening, and talking about history during my 4 decades on this planeet. I haven't noticed, during that time, and in my understanding of how humanity "works", if, indeed, it does, that highmindedness and serious have actually helped improve anything.

All these conceptual paradigms (to be unfashionably Kuhnian about it),philosophies, -isms, -ities and what have you. All desperately trying to be serious and not amounting to a very small hill of beans. Seems to me they all, without exception so far, lead to a general increase in human misery.

What doesn't lead to an increase in human misery is playfulness. Let's have more of it.

anticant said...

Only four decades, szwagier? I'm in my 80th year, and I agree with you that too much earnestness is deadly. Playfulness is vital. Nietzsche knew that, though the solemn noodles who perverted and misapplied his [deliberately paradoxical] teachings didn't.

I'm grateful to Zola for raising these issues. I'll be offering my own reflections on six months' blogging over at the burrow for the New Year.

zola a social thing said...

No silliness in THE place of Zola now.
Anyway playfulness is childlike and good for that.
Childlike is never childish or immature.
Me ed aches now.

Anonymous said...

I got the impression from my, brief, reading of Nietzsche that he had rather more of a sense of fun than was good for him.

Probably what did for him in the end. The Serious Ones don't like wit, humour and playfulness - these things sow chaos in their tidy, ordered, pigeon-holed cubicles of a life.

Anonymous said...

Spot on Szwag and Anticant.

Didn't Nietzsche have syphilis though? I'm sure I read as such in an introduction to "Thus Spake Zarathustra". Not that this contradicts your point about his sense of fun, where he to have found himself in a position where he contracted syph.

anticant said...

Yes, the poor guy did. Probably caught in a brothel. That's why he ended up losing his mind, kissing a cab horse in Turin, and being taken into custody for the rest of his life by his vampirish sister who then proceeded to garble and plagiarise his manuscripts into a proto-Nazi text. She loved being photographed with Hitler.

As the son of a devout Protestant pastor, he had difficulty all his life in coming to terms with sex. He did at least have an idyllic interlude [probably platonic] with Lou Salome at Lake Orta.

Best book about his life and works is by Walter Kaufmann.

zola a social thing said...

In the context of "kissing horses" it should be said that horses have needed to kissed rather than beaten and flogged as was a solid European and Alpine tradition a la Freddy and his rescue job. Nietshoedancer kisses were in this context of brutality to being(s).
But I will not flog dead horses I do promise to be good today.

anticant said...

Anyone old-fashioned anough to put "Black Beauty" into their kids' Xmas stockings? Or, for that matter, George MacDonald's "At the Back of the North Wind"?

Could do far worse!

zola a social thing said...

My point anticant was this : Freddie N hated brutality to horses and that was the context and that was his eventual sensitivity and his re-valuing of all value.
Just to keep the thread and the context !!!!!

zola a social thing said...

I know Zola is a right old sod when keeping to threads.
buzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

You see language itself is but a mark of power and status. Cross borders and one or another feels threatened. Sometimes this results in moral panics from the staus quo orders and ordering of things.

Makes little or difference if fuck or shit is used rather than buzz or oh dear me.

Sometimes I revel in the deconstruction ( not possible to destruct as Derrida said) of words as deeds.

Stp it? I will not and cannot.

anticant said...

"In the beginning, was the Word."

It may not matter to you, but it does in my burrow. It's a matter of taste. Glad you appreciate Ol' Fred N as well as Papa Marx. Nietzsche was a professor of philology, as Szwagier is doubtless aware.

zola a social thing said...

Actually Anticant I have some readings behind me and more than Papa Marx ( why "Papa"? surely that would suit hemingway more than Marx!!!). I even have fiddled around with that strange Schopenhauer guy who really moved the Nietzsche head.

The point is, for me, not name dropping or popping. I prefer points be that silly, naughty, solid and informative or be they .......

I enjoy much of this blog scene because people can ( even if they are professors or scientists or street cleaners or nurses ) yap together and find a way through the mazes of misty islands.

I hope my meanings are becoming a little bit more clear as i struggle here to make that Biblical phrase you used above more factual. It was also the word as deed and the deeded word that was the issue. The phrase "first came the word" is way out of context and just a lazy quote.

zola a social thing said...

Better said from me Anticant is :
You quoted "in the beginning was the word" or "came the word" ( I deleted "came" as it had sexual bits involved).
Oh dear me when will i ever get this right?
Dunno.

anticant said...

I think you know perfectly well what I mean, Zola. Words precede deeds, and by their deeds you shall know them.

And if you don't mind, scurrying as I am around the burrow and also keeping up with your and other Awkward Squadders' blogs, 'lazy' is the last word I consider applies to me.

Maybe a little holiday is called for.

zola a social thing said...

Yes Anticant : I hoped I knew. But now you have changed your tune and the first quote now slowly gets into context for meaning.

I am becoming today a boring old fart but I have tried to keep a promise.

Content, content,content.

anticant said...

Yes, Zola, please do be content. I will endeavour to be that as well, and the 'Ayes' will have it.

zola a social thing said...

Aye

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