Emotional hydraulics of the Internet

It is ridiculous to claim that the Internet is only as constraining to the expression of emotion as is the printed page. Poetry, of course has dedicated itself to the proposition that script in lines with margins, and often neither a surprising lexicon nor syntax can express all that can be felt. The fact, however is that poetry implies a reader-of-poems, a peculiar creature which not only agrees with the initial supposition but even defends it with their readership and their deeply said reports of that effect. This reader is not, of course, born of the page, but the page requires a codes and the codex a shelf and so on, until there is a total social environment which demands, confirms, and displays the page. Without this space there would be no reader-of-poems. It is the lingering among other readers which trains readership. And the Internet, in too many cases, only trains readership through the reports withing the texts themselves. If the emotional spectrum which binds Twitter, for instance, open, can be learned at all, it cannot certainly, be said to resemble that other one. What then are emotions here? Why can one never weep through a tweet? Certainly, no new service (the solution to all internet dillemmas) would be adequate. There is no weepbot.


"If you want to destroy the error, destroy the book." -Pico

noisy room

The Cut 1:1

I had friends and students write down questions on bits of paper, and I put them into a hat, hoping that if not random, it could at least have the traditional markings of the random, the other options being dice, straws, or plinko. The first question is... almost totally illegible, which seems proper, but if I can see through the rather nasty smudge it seems to say "not talking... want to." Fair enough.
The first order of business, then, is an introduction to communicative barriers. Traditionally, we would probably start with transmitter, channel, and receiver problems, and perhaps noise (interference) problems somewhere in the middle. The problem of course, is that we can hear our own voice for seconds on either side of the speaking quite distinctly, the echoes only fading off slowly on either side and being confused into other voices, and that this same echo concentration characterizes the receiver (as well, arguably, as the channel). That is to say, there is nothing to transmit that is not already coming back along the same channel just as it is being sent.
The other day I was getting on the bus, and behind me was a preoccupied Black gentleman digging for change for the bus ticket as an apparently drunk woman fidgeted and stomped about behind him. After a few seconds, of course, she began shouting obscenities at him, and he turned around and asked "Are you talking to me?"
"Yes, I'm talking to ME! I am talking to meee," she spat back at him, paid, and threw herself down in a seat, still muttering. "Me, me, I'm talking to me," frothing a little, more from what seemed to have been beer than from the talking.
So, is there a barrier here on the bus? Clearly not. For once, in stating the constitution of a barrier, she spoke in clean parallel to the several that were probably her most frequent configurations thereof. For once, the transmission model makes perfect sense.
And on that note, I will return.