Clickthrough

I'm trying to figure out why it is I've never mass-forwarded an email containing a joke, a list, a profound thought, a list of profound thoughts, cat pictures, dog pictures, political demagoguery or things attributed to George Carlin that George Carlin never said.

It's not that I'm entirely anti-social. I send things via email. I have a facebook account that sometimes gets an update. I think I even did a serious one about what I was actually doing once. Twitter I tried and failed at, but it wasn't a total waste: I was able at least to find out what the absolute basement of my attention span was. And Pinterest... OK, look, I've only got so many hours in a day. It's not that I insist on unscrutinized, unmediated cultural and personal experiences, it's just that I think I've finally run out of username/password combinations I can reasonably be expected to remember. Ever since this Jeremy Lin thing took off, my standard CoupleInchesOfPain is taken almost everywhere I try to go.

And I'm not going to pretend I've always been the savvy digital eminence grise you sort-of see before you. No, I'm not lurking here in the internet backwater in a format largely abandoned some time before MySpace really took off because I lack the drive or ability to adapt. It's that I've determined it's the best way to exert a subtle influence to mold the interwebs into an image of my choosing. Although I will admit recently I've been feeling I may have hit the "subtle" part of the plan a bit too hard.

No, I was an early adopter. Back to the days before AOL, when the internet was Prodigy and some local bulletin-board-style sites. I know what the scream of a 14.4 baud-rate modem sounds like. And in the course of that long education, I opted into a lot of shit I ought not to have. My virus rate in the early days was practically Sheen-ian. And yet for some reason, the email chain never really tempted me.

Part of it might just be my base-level skepticism when it comes to the idea of magic. A lot of "FOREWARD THIS TO 9 PEOPEL AND MAKE A DIFRENCE!!!!" broadsides are less Jeffersonian paeans to public culture and a little bit more along the clap-to-save-Tinkerbell-from-the-poison lines. The logic of how an email list might positively affect a little girl with cancer, for example, was never really spelled out. It's not that I discount my own occult influence, I'm just worried there's a limit to it and I'm saving it to seal the deal when I finally get my chance to sleep with one of the Bangles. Some dreams die hard.

My main objection to email forwarding is practical: it leaves a paper trail. All this work to save the trees and develop the digital workspace and still, paper trail. The trees aren't happy enough with us killing way less of them, no. It's not about being left alone anymore, it's about revenge. They've followed us from their world into the digital realm, like Hugo Weaving in the second Matrix movie. Unless that was the third Matrix movie, then I mean that. Anyway, the paper trail follows us wherever we go, leaving a bright line of legally-admissible footprints behind us. How many "private jokes amongst friends" does it take before everyone knows you're a pro-bestiality racist? Turns out it can be just one.

Nope, not me. It's part luck and part common sense, but I've been clean thus far. Whatever I feel about bestiality and racism is going to die with me and my black dog.