methrowrock | the dislike button (Reply)

You would think that after pulverizing my brain and guts for the past few days, I would develop an aversion to writing. But no, surplize!! There is nothing that could stop me from ruminating and germinating half-baked beans of ideas. You wish. It is such a relief to finally escape the oppressive potentiality of opprobrium: the constant second-guessing of the self, the deliberation and hesitation of the mind, the apprehension of the bell curve. It was torturous, and I might have morphed into a noxious and bitter hag on too many occasions. Speaking from the vantage point of hindsight, there was a perverse delight to be derived from those sleepless nights though: sitting before the laptop for hours on end, checking facebook and tumblr ever-so-often for people to save me from the madness and dying a bit on the inside every time, perusing through pages and pages of notes, opening up countless tabs and having the sentences meld together in a giddying Gaussian blur of knowledge!you!should!pay!attention!to! And the most delectable thing is that I get to replicate the experience for another five more times before the semester is over!!! :) Haha. But no shit, it was strangely enjoyable. Guess I just got to manage my time better.

So 2210 essay pretty much sums up the week. Monday 3rd October: met Jia-duck for lunch at Holland Village. It was always nice catching up with her. And I promise that if she ever had a crush on one of my friends, I will introduce them to her. HAHA. Lazed and talked till I was late for 2101 lecture heh, then friendly with Winchester, before rushing home to rush tutorials for Hell Tuesday. It wasn't that bad after all, although 2210 and 2212 tutorials conveniently threw my brain into a blender for the most part. 3101 lecture with the pingeon and smartaleck, and a future Korean bbq buffet date was set! 1201 tutorial was tune-out time, which was a relief, because my thought-strings had snapped by then. Hitched a ride home from Mitch, intending to start my essay but ended up slacking the night away. Same case for Wednesday: 2212 lecture, lunch with Choobug the high-decibeled, slaaack. Thursday: slaaack, visit by the owner of Nathan Kim the macbook (HAHHAHA), epic photo-boothing and room redecoration time, training in the evening, rushing home to...? slaaack. Friday: 2210 lecture, 1201 lecture, hitching a ride from Mitch that dear, and finally!!! Began the painful process of building a card-house of arguments. Saturday: hiphop in which my sister and I caught nothing, family dinner. Sunday: family lunch, carving words out of flesh from 4pm to 11.59pm, countdown to the Thanksgiving celebration!!! Hahaha the pingeon makes a heck of a scary teacher, but it was good motivation. When there is money, there is no honey! Either way, I am hella relieved that that is one term assignment over and done with. Next stop: 3101 response paper by Wed. Wowza.

After expiating a couple of thousand words on the emerging discourses represented by Facebook, one can't help but feel queasy about using it. It is not simply about the usual brouhaha about privacy issues, exhibitionism, and voyeurism; instead, it is how the technological interfaces have structured our daily lives and the ways in which we perceive the world. I really liked Zadie Smith's essay "Generation Why?", which was an incisive discussion about the interactions between software and heartware (people). (Heartware haha, how PAssion-like) Why, on our Facebook profiles, are we encouraged to classify our favourite books, films, TV and ecetera? In a way, our identities are being relegated to what we choose to like or dislike, what ideas and attitudes we choose to associate ourselves with. A "levelling down in itself", if you may, because of the emphasis on our consumptive choices. How do I make myself congent... There is a pigeon-holing of sorts when one fills up the blanks in your biodata and Info page, and I'm not saying that these characterizations are wholly untrue, but that they reduce and short-change the conceptions of individual identity into a list of algorithmic categories. This should segue into philosophizing about identity and the self, but I have neither the knowledge nor the intellect required to continue, so I will just say that the way Facebook structures our lives and thoughts about ourselves and other people should be examined a little more closely. Because, how can you glean insights of people's personalities from what they watch or listen to? Because, why should you? It seems to me that Facebook is trying to annex reality via people's internalization of its preferred reality. And that reality appears to be a safe, bubble-like parallel universe, in which negativity has been banished along with intimacy, and where quotidian lives are bracketed into coiffured blanks to be filled up by permutations of binary bits. And the repression of negativity is all the more glaring when 'likes' are preferred, when people are encouraged to share their stream of thoughts and pictorial evidence of thoughts-turned-into-action, when you can be Facebook friends with somebody but stealthily classify and restrict them from your life under "Lists". It is intriguing, really. How Facebook is an arena for passive aggression: the formation of "an anodyne colony in which nobody has enemies" (Tyree, 2011, Film Quarterly), “a situation of non-desire, non-meaning,” a collective “fantasy of a society without antagonism” (Dean, 2010, Blog Theory)? Hmm I'm not sure, but you can sure that things won't be messy on facebook. cue smileyface :) <3 Haha.