Der Sound und der Fuhry

As connected as we all are by the still relatively new ubiquity of the internet,* a lot of actual exchange is lost in a pat formula that has developed very quickly over that same, brief, intense, big-bang span of expansion from nonexistence.

The first, most obvious hurdle--and I'm just including it here to get it out of the way, as much as I hate to bring it up at all--is the dick pic. This is not a sex-shaming judgment piece or an advocacy piece about the unexamined entitlement of the men who foist their genital photography on women at the drop of a hat. The second one especially just leads to auto-response arguments asking terrible victim-shaming questions about women and their dedication to securely gripping their hats lest they be dropped and then WHAT DO YOU EXPECT? Or worse arguments about which women out there could do with a good foisting. I'm not bringing up dick pics because I feel like I have an answer, I'm just saying I hope we can someday arrive at a place where a man and a woman or a man and another man or a man and an artificial intelligence or a man and a live web feed of a panda enclosure at the National Zoo can have an open discussion about any topic that will not result in said man, at some point, deciding that a picture of his junk transmitted digitally would be welcome at all, let alone relevant or helpful to the discussion at hand. Even if the discussion is "what does your dick look like?" Even if that's the case, still, just don't assume. Some people like a nice verbal description. Active consent, dudes, that's what you're looking for. Start practicing. It's the future.

The second major barrier to fruitful internet communication is the concept of the mic drop. You know it when you see it. Sometimes it's referred to explicitly, usually surrounded by asterisks to connote physical action, like *drops mic* after offering an argument or counter-argument that one has unilaterally decided has precluded further debate to such an emphatic degree that it justifies the potential damage to sound-amplifying equipment that one probably does not own oneself. An equivalent is anything with the clickbate headline that includes the verbs "eviscerate" or "obliterate" or "shut(s) down," like "Hillary OBLITERATES Planned Parenthood critics with a three-word tweet" or "Janice Dickinson EVISCERATES Bill Cosby Defenders In Sacramento Local Radio Morning Show Interview" or whatever. These aren't pieces that are designed to convey any kind of information for consideration. They start with agreement or disagreement. The editorial characterization is right there in the shop window. Someone's already decided if the argument quoted is evisceratey or obliterationable. The point is not to get you to look under the first layer of link aggregation and go "I wonder...", it's to make you either nod or shake your head, depending on your existing predilections, and say the words "FUCKIN' A!" in one of the many shades of meaning** that bit of pithy elegance is capable of conveying.

My own suspicion for most headline writing is pre-internet. I read once, somewhere at sometime,*** that any headline in the form of a question meant that the piece once commissioned ended up going nowhere, but was run to fill space anyway. The short version of that is: if the headline is a question, invariably the answer to that question is "no." With the internet and the metric of clickthroughs to generate advertising counts, basically the rule is to discount everything that isn't a link to a lecture by Neil deGrasse Tyson about stellar nurseries or something.

Every once in a while, you do get an article that hasn't made up it's mind, and that's refreshing. Like Slate's recent "Is Donald Trump a Fascist?" Now, on the face of it, question-headlines are normally answered with a "no," which we've established. But this one is actually an interview with the author of a book on fascism, who seriously considers the question, which is a nice change of pace. But of course the question itself is somewhat loaded^ and the subsequent questions are a bit leading or, er, dispositionally inclined, shall we say.

But it's nice every once in a while to really have a question taken seriously and glean some kind of information (like a better idea of what fascism actually is or means) not necessarily related to the one stated in the headline (the answer was always going to be "well, it depends..."), even if the premise of it shades near fatally in the direction of Godwin's Law.

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*And by the way I have never and will never buy the "we've never been so connected and yet so isolated!" line of facile sophistry. No one seemed to be quite this worried about technologically mediated connection when the technology was television and analog corded phones... or no, wait, they were, weren't they? Mostly I'm stalling because I'm trying to think of a better example of immediate internet connectedness than a session with a webcam sex worker and failing. Examples that include a hint of human trafficking can be a tough sell. Unlike actual humans, I guess.

**By that I mean either shade: absolute, emphatic agreement or despairing, rabid, comprehensive rejection.

***I never claimed THIS was a source for any solid information.

^WITH OBVIOUS TRUTH AMIRITE?!?!