Usually when we choose the title of an article, or a network, or a domain name, we want something that will express the essence, the spirit, the suchness or tathatā of the thing we are naming. Or we are being humorous. There’s a new instance on the Fediverse called the “godpod”, whose owner has chosen a god-avatar for himself and makes bold declarations, such as that it was a mistake of his not to include mastodons in the ark. Well, “godpod” has a certain ring to it. Whereas Mike McGirvin – the author of several social networks and social networking protocols and of attempts to bridge between them and others, was expressing the suchness of his despair when naming his instance “unfediverse”.
When I chose the name for my own domain it was also with a certain irony. Vikshepa is usually a negative trait in Brahmanism and Buddhism. It implies mental confusion and the tendency of the mind to run towards distraction. We sit down for meditation and instantly the mind rebels and runs all over the place: anywhere but where we are attempting to focus it.
It seemed to me when choosing that name that it is much the same with the internet. We sit down at our keyboard intending to write something, or read one thing, and instantly we are swept on the current of some new developing news story. It’s especially true when we look at microblogs. It’s like willful distraction. Or, if we personally get involved in the discussion, it can be much worse. It’s not for nothing that people call Twitter the “hellsite” – though it’s psychologically interesting that we keep going back to it for more.
So, when thinking for a name for a subdomain for a new personal social networking instance, I am thinking along the lines of “antisocial.vikshepa.com”. I know that usually people are choosing something benign like “social.mastodon.org”. But maybe another ironic name to match the vikshepa is better suited? I wouldn’t be the first to use such a title. Maciej Ceglowski called his Pinboard.in site a place for “antisocial bookmarking”, when his main competitors like Delicious, were calling their sites “social bookmarking sites” – with the idea that people would share their bookmarks for a certain subject.
But why a name like “antisocial” for a personal fediverse instance? Because there is something vaguely antisocial about doing one’s own personal microblog server, rather than choosing a mass-user instance with a few hundred thousand soles. The instance’s public timeline, for one thing would be decidedly dull.
Unless one is a celebrity or an authority with something interesting to say on a certain subject, there is also something vaguely antisocial about blogging itself, or at least thrusting one’s blog before the eyeballs of others. Even bestselling authors of novels, for example, can be tedious writers of superfluous essays. I was recently listening to a podcast of an interview with Kim Stanley Robinson, who spoke about this. He said that although sometimes novelists bring out an anthology of their essays, he was not planning to do so, because he didn’t believe that essay writing was his forte. Indeed, I remember being disappointed by the weekly Guardian column of the Italian novelist Elena Ferente. It continued for a year or so, before she or the Guardian had had enough. It was, I think, a wise decision to stop, because however good a novelist she proved herself to be a poor columnist. At least, that was my impression.
In any case, as I was saying, there is something impertinent about offering to occupy a reader’s time with matters that are often quite inconsequential – to them. To me it might be important to write, even at length. But there’s no guarantee that others will find it the same. So it’s at least as impertinent as trolling someone on Twitter or its alternatives, or not trolling – just being a bore, an asshole, a time waster.
For me, writing is an exercise in trying to see the world in a new way. It comes across, maybe, in some of the posts, but certainly not in all of them. And even when the exercise works for me, it may not for others.
Changes in perception occur sometimes in a split second. The best composers of tweets are occasionally able to summon up such a change deftly, in one witty line. Twitter, with its original 128 characters was really an art form, like Haiku. Not everyone could tweet well. But some were great at it. There should be a book titled “Tweets that shook the world”.
Mastodon, and Twitter itself, have become such a mess due to their wider range of word limits and long and short utterances, but especially those interminable threads. How many jokes can we hear about Elon Musk, or ironic statements about his shocking behaviour, before they cease to be entertaining? We got the message long ago. It’s turning a medium intended for short, pithy expressions of thought, into the opposite. Reading through the thread is as bad as reading a book of memorable quotes from cover to cover. We were hoping to remember a few of them – but eventually they merge together into a kind of wise-ass drone and we remember nothing. I used to have a book of Hallmark Haiku. It was better to read two or three poems, and then put the book down.
Books, and essays, don’t always achieve their effect within a few syllables. Sometimes a novel requires its thousand pages, and sometimes an essay requires its thousand lines. A friend, on reading Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance said that it was good but that the writer could have achieved the same effect with a much shorter book. Maybe. But for me that book is ingrained in my memory due to its length, and the gradual unfolding of its events. Mistry has written shorter books, and short stories, but nothing quite compares to Balance in its effect, which is cumulative, building from chapter to chapter.
There are master-essayists like the 19th century writer Ruskin, who were wonderful thanks to the richness and colour of their prose. It isn’t so much what he says, but the way that he says it, that gives value to the essay, and becomes the reason we continue to read those essays today.
Anyway, time to go back to bed. I’ve wasted some time. Hopefully only my own time.