Solitude Networking

Anybody there?

'I am lonely, will anyone speak to me' pleaded the message on the website. Within minutes someone did - and soon thousands of total strangers were sharing their emotions. Oliver Burkeman on an online phenomenon


Nobody, give or take the occasional blues musician, likes to admit to being lonely. People who study loneliness, like Harvard psychiatrist Jacqueline Olds, typically have to rely on anonymous surveys to gauge the size of the problem; when you ask people to identify themselves by name, they tend to use words like "independent" and "self-sufficient" instead. On the internet, though, anonymity is the default position, which explains the extraordinary story of what happened on the website Moviecodec.com.

It wouldn't be unfair to call Moviecodec a website for geeks: codecs are pieces of software that transform audio or video files from one form to another, and discussion on the site is usually technical to the point of being incomprehensible. But in July last year, at 9.49 one Wednesday morning, someone posted a message with an incongruous subject line, no less heartfelt for its lack of punctuation. "I am lonely will anyone speak to me," it read. Half an hour later, the first reply arrived, bearing another hallmark of online anonymity: mindless abuse. "OK so how are you," the respondent wrote. "Are you a piece of pig's bollok?"

But then something remarkable began to happen. Within a week - for reasons having to do with the way Moviecodec's tech-literate owner had made it easily accessible to search engines - the loneliness discussion had become the number-one result if you searched Google with the phrase "I am lonely". And judging from the messages on the board, a lot of people were doing so.

"Dude, I typed 'I am lonely' in Google and your post was the very first response," wrote someone using the name Wetfeet2000. "Does that make you the most popular loneliest person on the planet?"

The messages grew from a trickle to a torrent, as visitors who had stumbled on the site posted their own thoughts. "I'm surrounded by so many people every day but I feel strangely disconnected from them," one wrote. "I used to have a big family and now am down to a few aunts and uncles," explained somebody else. "The friends I have had moved on and got married. I must have done something to deserve this." "It's 3am here," read another contribution. "Just woke up next to my boyfriend and felt so incredibly lonely and sad."

What was revelatory was not so much the well of unwanted solitude, as the way that participants were discovering it. We have become accustomed to relying on Google as a gateway to information of any variety. But countless people seemed to be using it for something more profound - as a source of oracular wisdom, and for answers that the internet was surely unable to provide.

Or was it? Only days into the life of the Moviecodec discussion, which is still going on today, the benefits of finding people in the same boat began to make themselves apparent. "I feel so much better that I am not the only one that typed in 'I am lonely' on Google," one person wrote. And: "Can't believe I typed in this message and found so many people feeling the same way."

Of course, many people might argue that spending too much time on the internet was one of the causes of all this loneliness. Some of them argued that on the website itself, even though they must have come there in a similar manner themselves. Others just seemed disgusted that the topic had been raised, and a taboo broken: "My suggestion to your problem is two things," wrote SAGoon. "First, buy a gun. Second, shoot yourself in the head. Fuck you and don't post faggot shit like this again."

As summer turned into autumn, though, the discussion began to adopt a pragmatic tone. "Maybe some volunteer work is the right way to go," wrote someone under the pseudonym LonelyMan. "At least then I'll be doing something to help others, instead of feeling sorry for myself." Another participant said he felt suicidal, and a fellow site visitor tried to talk him back to calmness. Bjarne Lundgren, who runs Moviecodec from Denmark, added his own thoughts. "I'm the webmaster/owner of Moviecodec.com and I'm also quite lonely," he wrote.

For as long as people were still accessing the site by typing "I am lonely" into Google, the discussion had the air of a shared secret. Most visitors, by definition, had already overcome the hurdle of verbalising their feelings and typing them into the search engine's little white box. Then, the week before last - after the discussion had grown to 107 pages, and thousands of messages - a brief article about it appeared in the New Yorker magazine.

The website suddenly had a whole new audience, many of them presumably curious, rather than lonely - and the site's regular visitors responded with all the hauteur that might be expected from the followers of an underground phenomenon that had suddenly entered the mainstream. (The New Yorker article, at the time of writing, has even replaced Moviecodec as the first Google result for "I am lonely".)

"I'm outta here!" wrote FrenchToast. "This used to be a pretty cool site. People discovered it through serendipity and wound up sharing some very personal stuff. But since that %@&* New Yorker story there have been a flood of idiots."

If that judgment was overblown, the tenor of the discussion was certainly beginning to show signs of intellectualisation. One contributor last week took a moment to note the distinctions between the words athazagoraphobia (fear of being forgotten) and eremophobia (fear of loneliness).

A hierarchy of loneliness began to emerge with the old guard at the top - something new contributors felt obliged to acknowledge. "I read about this site in the New Yorker . . . guess I'm not an authentic 'I'm so lonelier'. In fact, I can't say I've ever thought of typing in emotions on Google." Before long, the number of participants who had discovered the site through the New Yorker appeared easily to outnumber those searching with the phrase "I am lonely".

For more than a year, Moviecodec had provided an unlikely connection in a world in which there aren't enough of them. But by last week, the discussion was beginning to feel disjointed, oversubscribed, as if it had outlasted its usefulness. The site's original participants seemed to be discovering that, while it is definitely distressing to feel as if one has too few friends, it can also be possible to have too many.

Some of the messages so far ...

In NYC, millions of people, but here I am: quite overweight, single, nearing a big, ugly birthday. Time to stop the pity party, I know, but terribly lonesome in the meantime - NYERREADER

I was reading one of the posts at this site a few hours ago. It said a good thing to do was just go out walking. So I did and ended up on the main strip in the city, all bright lights and hundreds of people having fun. Nothing worse. But then I bumped into a friend of a friend and his friend. We talked about nothing for a while. I suddenly felt a lot less lonely. So, yeah, point is getting out of the house worked for me - I googled too

This is quite the little postmodern community, lonely people who find each other at the touch of a button ... Do I feel less lonely now? I knew there were lots of lonely people out there before. Now I am in conversation with some of them, but maybe I am just saying my little piece, congratulating myself . . . Maybe no one will read my post and understand it. Maybe I haven't said it right. Maybe someone out there will read it and understand, and maybe she will write back - oddkod

I'll be everyone's friend!!! - Kristen

why do so few lonely people get along with other lonely people? - jingo

some of u talk to damn much! no wonder u lonely - Jac the King

this thread is so beautiful...it feels like humanity crying out in one voice... I'm lonely tonight too. Anyone in montreal? I wish we could go for a walk together ... - alonetonight


Tuesday August 30, 2005
The Guardian

Piotr Jaworowski

Some nice digital images.

http://he1z.deviantart.com/store/

Las Vegas casinos using oxygenated air

Proper air circulation is vital in all types of buildings. The topic of indoor air quality has made headlines and legislation over the last few years. Attaining that ideal combination of temperature, circulation, and filtration requiresa balancing act of budget, regulations, and the needs of theoccupants. Getting it right makes a big difference. The most recent example of this came to me from a friend who wanted to find out the truth about the kind of air casinos supposedly use to keep people gambling long into the night. She discovered that, while casinos do not pump in oxygenated air (a potential fire hazard), many do use a combination of fresh air circulation and refrigeration to keep visitors feeling alert. No doubt the knowledge that this formula works came from a lab and not a business meeting. Casino design also seems to have taken cues from experiments with mice in mazes. They take a stadium-sized room, build irregular aisles and dead ends with rows of
slot machines, and violá – wide awake people, certain there is a piece of cheese around every corner. The first article in this issue talks about supplying air for both people and mice, and takes an engineer’s look at some new technology.

www.animallab.com

McRorie - The One Man Band

http://mcrorie.net/
All the instruments are controlled via electronic pads attached all over his body.

Davis Shrigley Photography

Interesting scottish photographer who uses the everyday vernacular to
create surreal and humorous photographs.

http://www.davidshrigley.com/list_photographs.html

You're a Woman, I'm a Machine

by Death From Above 1979.

Great rocking out music with fat bass riffs and good rhythm section, which is basically all it is. Wire meets Sabbath.


The band, who had to change their name to avoid confusion (not to mention potential legal hassles) with the New York production team DFA, have managed to record an album that offers much more depth from such a simple arrangement than one would expect. The primary reason the album works so well is due in large part to bassist Jesse Keeler; sounding like a coke-fueled Geezer Butler channeling Fugazi, his basslines are especially nimble, his fast-picked notes coming from all over the fretboard, from extremely low, heavily distorted tones, to more mellifluous, upper-register licks, to all-out dissonant screeches. The key factor is that his performance is so versatile, you forget he's playing bass, his performance boasting the dexterity of an 80s metal virtuoso (Billy Sheehan, eat your heart out), but without all the pretension. Singer/drummer Sebastien Grainger is equally strong, providing muscular punctuation to Keeler's basslines, but at the same time, adding some variety to the proceedings with deft rhythmic changes, veering from straight-ahead punk, to disco-fused hi-hat workouts, to fabulous conga breakdowns, to the ever-reliable, much-loved cowbell.

On the Edge of Eternity

Philip K.Dick died on March 2,1982, the result of a combination of recurrent strokes accompanied by heart failure. In a 1981 entry in his Exegesis (an extensive journal he kept to explore the ramifications of 2-3-74) Dick wrote as focused a self-assessment of his aims and talents as a writer as can be found in any of his journals, letters, essays, and interviews:

"I am a fictionalizing philosopher, not a novelist; my novel story-writing ability is employed as a means to formulate my perception. The core of my writing is not art but truth. Thus what I tell is the truth, yet I can do nothing to alleviate it, either by deed or explanation. Yet this seems somehow to help a certain kind of sensitive troubled person, for whom I speak. I think I understand the common ingredient in those whom my writing helps: they cannot or will not blunt their own intimations about the irrational, mysterious nature of reality, for them, my corpus is one long ratiocination regarding this inexplicable reality, an integration & presentation, analysis & response & personal history."

One can readily imagine this passage having been written by Franz Kafka in his diary. And it is among the great fictionalizing philosophers of the twentieth century - Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, Samuel Beckett, Rene Daumal, Flann O'Brien - that Dick's place in literary history lies. His uniqueness in this lineage is all the greater for his ability to have created great works in the broadly popular SF form. Dick remains compulsively, convulsingly readable. He is the master of the psychological pratfall, the metaphysical freefall, the political conspiracy within a conspiracy within a conspiracy. He is - as much as any contemporary writer we have - an astute guide to the shifting realities of the twenty-first century.

www.philipkdick.com

Taxonomy

- The science, laws, or principles of classification; systematics.

The taxonomic organization of species is hierarchical. Each species belongs to a genus, each genus belongs to a family, and so on through order, class, phylum, and kingdom. Associations within the hierarchy reflect evolutionary relationships, which are deduced typically from morphological and physiological similarities between species. So, for example, species in the same genus are more closely related and more alike than species that are in different genera within the same family.

Carolus Linnaeus, an 18th-century Swedish botanist, devised the system of binomial nomenclature used for naming species. In this system, each species is given a two-part Latin name, formed by appending a specific epithet to the genus name. By convention, the genus name is capitalized, and both the genus name and specific epithet are italicized, for Canis familiaris or simply C. familiaris.

Modern taxonomy recognizes five kingdoms, into which the estimated five million species of the world are divided. This table presents a familiar organism from each kingdom and the names of the taxonomic groups to which it belongs.

Man's constant struggle to muzzle, pin-down understand the world.

Jim Lambie

Born, 1964, City TK, Scotland
Lives and works in Glasgow, Scotland

Jim Lambie's objects and installations playfully find high-modernist forms in junk from the 1960s and '70s, the very era when "modern" became a truly mass-culture aesthetic. In his floor installation Zobop, black duct tape forms a monochrome abstraction on the floor, its pattern determined by the specific peculiarities of the gallery's architecture. Within this field, Lambie includes a series of sculptures, each of which cleverly transforms found objects into elegant abstractions. Made of chair backs, old handbags, and pieces of mirror, The Jesus and Mary Chain recalls both a plaza and the bedazzled inhabitants who might stroll there. Hanging high above, Sunbed (Tan Tropez) glows like an artificial sun; and leaning against the far wall, the Psychedelic Soul Stick playfully lauds the symbolic power of found abstraction. This unobtrusive work made from a branch wrapped with hundreds of layers of shredded record albums, photos, colored ribbons, and thread is part of a larger series in which bits collected from favorite recordings, significant photos, or beloved sweaters are transformed into a shamanistic object that possesses the combined symbolic powers of all the objects from which it is made.

http://www.themoorespace.org/JimLambie/JimLambie.html

Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment

"What was taking place in him was totally unfamiliar, new, sudden, never before experienced. Not that he understood it, but he sensed clearly, with all the power of sensation, that it was no longer possible for him to address these people in the police station, not only with heartfelt effusions, as he had just done, but in any way at all, and had they been his own brothers and sisters, and not police lieutenants, there would still have been no point in this addressing them, in whatever circumstances of life."

Meaning:- This quote, from Part II, Chapter I, illustrates Raskolnikov’s sudden realization that by murdering Alyona and Lizaveta, he has completely isolated himself from society. His separation, which began before the murders, is now complete, as he has truly crossed over the bounds that formerly kept him tied to the rest of humanity. Indeed, one can argue that only because of his increasing alienation and lack of empathy for other people is Raskolnikov able to actually commit the murders. Additionally, the act of having physically accomplished the crime makes it necessary for Raskolnikov to cement his understanding of himself as a “superman” so that he can evade the bothersome, banal consequences of his actions. Much of the novel is concerned with Raskolnikov’s gradual breakdown and deconstruction of this identity in the face of his alienation from others. Only when he confesses his guilt to Sonya, someone whom he sees as a fellow transgressor of morality, does he start on the path of rejoining society.

"A Dog Cannot Be A Hypocrite, But Neither Can He Be Sincere"

An interesting little idiom I saw on www.rollersparkers.com

Television

The early 21st century drug of choice. A shared illusion, making its addicts think they have friends, a life, access to good information, and the critical thinking skills to form valid opinions. Fatal in large doses.

Instance: Paul spent the day eating Cheetos and watching Television, then had a light heart attack in the evening.

The cathode ray tube is the retina of the mind's eye.

Long live the new flesh!

A device that causes attention deficit...um whatever...yeah, so like i was watching friends the other night and....

Why were we not so surprised on 9/11? Because we watch too much television!

Another way of making money.

What, TV used to educate, inform and inspire? Let's broadcast the Bold and the Beautiful instead, gets more ratings.

Definitions from www.urbandictionary.com

The Mirror - Andrei Tarkovsky

"In all my films it seemed to me important to try to establish the links which connect people (other than those of the flesh), those links which connect me with humanity, and all of us with everything that surrounds us. I need to have a sense that I myself am in this world as a successor, that there is nothing accidental about my being there." (Tarkovsky in Sculpting in Time, 1984)

Art - to grope blindly for connection with others in the dark. Been recommended the mirror to watch. Have already had a sneak peak at "The Mirror".

After watching. - A cerebral and deeply subconscious work. It's struggle to grasp any narrative probably because there is none. there's more of a mood and a collection of themes in this film. Summer - rebirth - posterity - memory - perception of childhood - family. Full images of an ephemereal and obscure nature I'll definitely need to watch this one again with a few notes or at some explanation to through some light on the ideas.

Self Destruct

Just read an interesting article on Courtney Love, who is recently being charged for some assault/drug possesion something-or-other. While reading I thought to myself what has happened to Courtney Love. Over th years she has gone through a couple of suicide attempts, the suicide of her husband, embarrasing events on public television (such as flashing and doing a hideous rendition of Danny Boy on Letterman), assault charges,  one allegedly with a bottle of spirit and a torch her at ex-manager/boyfriend with a woman, her demise as gone into freefall. It is amazing the rampant self-destruction she has committed to herself. Misguided self direction, insecurity and self desctruction are hidden flaws in all of us which i think Love so explosively reminds you. The sadness of her situation will get you down but the enthusiasm and fervour at which lives at if uplifting and a triumph. Her history proves a fascinating and turbulant read and lends some explanation for her behaviour.

Born Courtney Michelle Harrison, she spent her ealry years with her father, Hank, a Grateful Daed acolyte who reportedly forcefed his four-year-old LSD and dragged her all over the world, from a sheep station in New Zealand to hippie commune in San Francisco.

At 12, love was sent to live with her mother in Portland, oregan, but by the time she was 16 she had disowned her parents and taken to the road.

After working  as a stripper in Japan, Love turned up in liverpool in the early eighties, where she had a brief relationship with the teardrop Explodes singer Julian Cope. In 1986 she moved to LA where she met director Alex Cox and lobbied for the part of Spungen in his Sid Vicious biopic Sid and Nancy. She ended up playing Nancy's best friend, Gretchen, though her fascination with the Sid-Nancy relationaship continued apparently forming the template for her marriage to Kurt Cobain. While not one of rock's greatest talents. Love will certainly be remembered as one of its most notorious screw-ups. she is shortlisted to star in some new vampire movies recently.

How long can someone stay on the road of destruction and anarchy that she has. It's a tremendous display of spirit and will power.

Fahrenheit 9/11

The only film I've anticipated for a while and it turned out to dissappoint a little. I approached with caution as I'm aware of Moore's techniques. I just wish he didn't have to resort to the same sensationalism that the neo-cons and there cronies use to manipulate people. He's only fighting fire with fire, I suppose... and he has now become a popular symbol and strong leader for the left, badly needed at the moment.

The Guardian is right when they say '... it is incendiary, excitable, often mawkishly emotional but simply gripping: a cheerfully partisan assault on the Bush administration.'

The sunny skies and warm sand of Cable Beach, Broome, WA

Bataille on Discontuity, Eroticism and Death

Been reading a book, Eroticism by George Bataille, on and off recently. More off then on due to the convoluted language and philisophical ways of expression... but I found it really enjoyable and fulfilling. Its as though I've found someone more intellegent to articulate thoughts I've internalized but never taken the time to sit down and think about. I particularly identified with the below sections. Being an atheist I found it refreshing to get a different view on life outside the christian explanation.

"In asexual reproduction, the organism, a single cell, divides at a certain point in it's growth. Two nuclei are formed and from one single being two new beings are derived. But we cannot say that one being has given birth to a second being. The two new beings are equally products of the first. The first being has disappeared. It is to all intents and purposes dead, in that it doeas not survive in either of the two beings it has produced. It does not decompose in the way that sexual animals do when they die, but it ceases to exist. It ceases to exist in so far as it was discontinous. But at one stage of the reproductive process there was continuity. There is a point at which the original one becomes two. As soon as there are two, there is again discontiuty for each of the beings. But the process entails one instant of continuity between the two of them. The first one dies, but as it dies there is this moment of continuity between the two new beings.
The same continuity cannot occur in the death of sexual creatures, where reproduction is in theory independent of death and disappearance. But sexual reproduction, basically a matter of cellular division just like asexual reproduction, brings in a new kind of transition from discontinuity to continuity. Sperm and ovum are to begin with discontinuous entities, but they unite, and consequently a contuity comes into existence between them to form a new entity from the death and disappearance of the seperate beings. The new entity is itself discontinuous, but it bears within itself the transition to continiuty, the fusion, fatal to both, of two separate beings...

...On the most fundamental level there are transitions from continuous to to discontinuous or from discontinuous to continuous. We are discontinous beings, individuals who perish in isolation in the midst of an incomprehensible adventure, but we yearn for our lost continuity. We find the state of affairs that binds us to our random and ephemeral indiviuality hard to bear. Along with our tormenting desire that evanescent thing should last, there stands our obsession with a primal continuity linking us with everything that is. This nostalgia has nothing to do with knowledge of the basic facts I have mentioned. A man can suffer at the thought of not existing in the world like a wave lost among many other waves, even if he knows nothing about the division and fusion of simple cells. But this nostalgia is responsible for the three forms of eroticism in man."

He goes on to explain the differnt forms of eroticism. From what I can understand the three are; Sexual, Friendship/Paternal/Maternal (similiar to eros and agape) and finally Religious eroticism which is the most interesting.

And thats it... all pretty spot on I think... except for that bit about the lost waves, I don't know what he was going on about there. I've often thought to myself sex and death are definitely related and the ultimate truths in understanding ourselves, both of heavily supressed in christian society... but why? for me Bataille has scratched away a layer from this complex question.

The 'Roey' as its known to the locals. An oasis in a tropical town.

Music For Airports

Have just checked into a hostel (the Roebuck Bay Backpackers) and there's a chatty English lad in my room. He has a pretty extensive mpeg collection. With the exact taste in music that I have. It's fun seeing the enthusiasm on his face from chatting to a like mind. We found our way onto the subject of music after he heard me playing GYBE on my CD player.

Listening to his 'Music For Aiports', Brian Eno now... wow! soundscape brilliance a little bizarre really as I'm not coseyly Sprwaled out on my bed (like I'd usually be) but in a bustling LAN gaming internet cafe complete with roaring kids zapping the bejaysus out of each other. Great name for the album too. It has all that transient anxiety kinda feel that I always feel in airports.

Welcome Me!

So I've finally figured out how to make a blog without having to manage all the techno babble by my owns.

Will hope to ad more and more now... must start by getting that digital camera active and do something with it. Maybe take some photos of lovely Broome, Western Australia. I've never had a diary before so this should be interesting? It's gonna be odd talking to no-one but yet still having (potentially) everyone reading.