Tuesday, January 24, 2006

Dissecting the Dialectic of the Postmodern Threadjack

A very interesting social phenomena is taking place as we speak. Conversations are occurring throughout the world in the form of new media, and specifically within blogs. There are many reasons why this will fundamentally change the nature of human history, but the most prevalent is the simple fact that everything is recorded. There is no re-assessment of what transpired, no creative recall at a later date. We have access to our own conversations, and the conversations of millions of others. I predict this will fundamentally separate human society. But let us look at a small tidbit of the new dialog.

In this post at my favorite group blog, redstate, a opinion is stated regarding the nature of those participating in some of the threads. Principally, we observe participants with opposing philosophical viewpoints interjecting their presence in a less than constructive manner. The mature and reliable moderators cleanse the profane, and the creative conservative sharks feed upon that which does not get banned. However, the nature and intention of commentators is only discernible from their words, past and present. Sometimes this leads to comments of the humor noir as in the thread of the above post. If this abject sarcasm is self referential in its implication, yet the reference is duplicitous to start with, I hear-by state this should be called a 'postmodern threadjack'.

The principal would be surrounded by key phrases which steer the conversation off topic simply to emphasize the nature of the phrases themselves. The new topic becomes the comments initiating the threadjack. This is close to the highest form of postmodern dialog. For the neophyte, here is a primer on interjecting some postmodernism into your own dialectic. So, to reiterate, a postmodern threadjack transits the epistemic certainty of a thread to create a pseudofucus upon the facade of the jacking comments themselves. Foucault would be proud...

1 comment:

absentee said...

Karl, you are guilty of BRAINjacking. I was about to make the same joke.