Ping

[randy_byers]

LJ posts are a kind of ping. "Anybody out there paying attention?" But whereas ping is trying to determine whether a host/server is out there and reachable -- whether the Other exists and can be accessed -- LJ posts often seem to be a way to determine whether the Self exists. If somebody responds to me, I must be here. This gets to be addictive. If I haven't posted for a while, I begin to feel invisible and immaterial. Likewise if a post gets no response. However, that's only true if I'm regularly on the internet. If I'm away from the internet, well, out of net, out of mind.

I used to have a close friend who I ultimately decided liked to piss people off because it proved that he existed and had an impact on the world. It seemed an unconscious reflex on his part. It wasn't enough to get somebody's attention, he had to provoke an emotional outburst. He was completely impervious to the anger, too. It contained no personal information for him. A bit autistic that way, perhaps. To him what he was doing was just an elaborate form of pinging, although clearly it was a bit of an unconscious power trip too.

Looking at the Wikipedia article on "ping", I'm now wondering what the existential/psychological equivalent of "ping flood" is. Nagging, perhaps.

Comments

[hal-obrien.livejournal.com]

"Like most Wikipedia articles on technical topics, this one quickly descends into morasses of complete incomprehensibility to the uninitiated."

I hear that happens with the 11th edition Britannica, too. My, how educational standards have fallen.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

No. It does not happen with the 11th edition Britannica, whose technical articles may be complex but are models of clarity.

[hal-obrien.livejournal.com]

I suspect your sample of "uninitiated" may be... less than optimal.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I think not. There is nothing, no matter how clear, that won't confuse somebody, so we can leave those people out of the discussion.

But for my part, I regularly find articles in Wikipedia outside my expertise to be bafflingly written, and even those within my expertise are often poorly expressed (so sometimes I fix them). This is not a problem with print encyclopedias, even the 11th Britannica, from which I've learned much on the technical matters it covers.

And others to whom I've observed this have agreed. Of course, we could all be poorly educated moderns, and the original Britannica readers of 1911 would have understood Wikipedia's article on "ping" (a topic on which they certainly would have been among the uninitiated) perfectly.

[hal-obrien.livejournal.com]

"I think not."

You never do.

"There is nothing, no matter how clear, that won't confuse somebody, so we can leave those people out of the discussion."

Absolutely. Let's declare 90% of the population, about whom the comment was made, to be out of the discussion. How annoyingly tedious it would be otherwise -- the discussion might stick to the point, or something.

Let's stop talking about those boring other people, and return to the most important topic in the universe: You.

"But for my part, I regularly find articles in Wikipedia outside my expertise to be bafflingly written, and even those within my expertise are often poorly expressed (so sometimes I fix them)."

Et cetera, et sequelae.