Slashdot Mirror

Twitter is little more than a digital version of some a-hole writing something on the wall of a public restroom. Mostly a collection of advertisements and banal BS. It's not like we have someone writing profound tresses on the human condition there.

Some things never change.

I grew up in a similar timeframe. I have the philosophically opposite viewpoint. That doesn't mean I think you should splash every embarrassing photo of your kids on social media to torment them in perpetuity; but that I don't think we should be trying to hide our dirty laundry under a false veneer of cleanliness.

Have you ever read books or stories written from around the 1950s or earlier? They're remarkably sterile in that it's incredibly rare for anyone to swear. The one big exception is stories told from front-line soldiers' point of view during WWII. Suddenly every other word coming out of everyone's mouth is cursing. Why the disparity? This goes back even to ancient literature, where the recorded word is usually suitable to read to your children, but a sampling of what people were actually saying is enough to turn your ears red.

For some reason, society has developed a notion of "proper" behavior which deviates substantially from how people actually behave. You put on your Sunday best when going to church. An attorney dresses up the defendant in a suit and tie even though the guy never wore them before in his life. You clean up your house when you have guests coming over.

Whatever the reason, I think this disconnection between expected behavior and actual behavior is harmful. You're basically teaching people that it's OK, and even beneficial to lie. You put on a dog and pony show for a potential customer, where you demonstrate your software (only the parts which work well - gotta hide the parts that don't work well) to try to convince him to buy. Its detrimental effect is especially pronounced in politics. We've come to expect our elected officials to all have spotless records (no skeletons in the closet) and behave properly all the time. Well I'm sorry, but the only people who can meet that standard are ones whose behavior is so deviant from the norm that they're not really fit to represent the people they're supposed to be representing, or pathological liars. That's why politics is chock full of the latter - we ourselves have filtered out the more honest candidates because they're honest enough to tell us about their past screwups. The net result being the liars who successfully deny and cover up their screwups are elected.

This is all coming to a head now that the Internet and social media is becoming such a big part of our lives. A faux pas which in the past would've been forgotten (except maybe as an embarrassing anecdote told by a best man at his friend's wedding), is instead documented with pictures, video, and everyone's immediate reactions, digitally preserved for all eternity. You believe the solution is to return to our past ways and try to hide these misdeeds from a wayward past. To put on a false facade for our daily interactions with friends, co-workers, and people who may hear about you; while revealing our true selves only to our closest and most trusted family and friends.

I say we've passed the point of no return and can't go back to that past. Society needs to come to grips with the new reality that's been created by the permanence of digital information storage. We need to accept that everyone makes mistakes. That we weren't born with a copy of the criminal code emblazoned in our cortex, and the only way to learn the social rules of proper behavior is to transgress them yourself and become subject to the scorn of people who follow such rules (nearly everyone), or watch someone else go through that process. A Presidential candidate used to smoke crack. So what? We were all young and stupid at some point. How s/he learned from that experience and used it to make better decisions in the future is much more important in determining their fitness to be President I think.

Getting to that point requires a widespread acceptance of what people are really like - swearing, drinking, yielding to peer pressure,

People today are ignorant and uneducated. But what's new is, they are proud of it.

No, people today are, as always, proud of what they think they are. For instance, you seem to think of yourself an intellectual, and are jumping at the chance to denigrate those you see as different.

Ours is a world in which football players, reality TV stars and talentless singer bimbos earn hundreds of times more than Nobel prize-winning scientists, and represent what young people aspire to become when they grow up.

How, exactly, is that different from the the last century? Come to think of it, when exactly did scientists make more than non-scientist celebrities? There are a lot of professions out there, and very few of them fall into any kind of "science" classification. For most of human history, those pure-science careers have always been academic, having no practical application that would affect most peoples' lives. When your job is to move a load of cargo to a different continent to support a colony, you don't care about the amount of redshift in the starlight by which you're navigating. On the other hand, having a widespread reputation that your city is the best at some particular popular sport provides a conversation for a salesman, opening new opportunities for business.

As I see it, after the atomic bomb brought immediate public attention to scientists, pure science has been getting more celebrated. Today we have more college graduates than ever before, and that number is still rising. We have more STEM careers and more STEM jobs than ever before, and we're even starting to see an increasing number of scientist celebrities like Neil deGrasse Tyson (Whose Twitter account, I'll note, appears second in a Google search for "Neil", below only Wikipedia.)

In a world of self-satisfied, militant, openly avowed crassness...

...which is so much different from a world where we publicly post such intellectual statements as "Phileros is a eunuch", "Epaphra, you are bald!", or "Lesbianus, you defecate and you write, ‘Hello, everyone!’".

...writing equations onboard a plane instead of watching the latest episode of Game of Throne on one's tablet is seen as suspicious. That's more than a little sad.

What's sad is the pervasive suspicion that caused it. This time, it was math equations. Next time, it could be a poet writing in Arabic. Recognizing it as Arabic would be less "ignorant and uneducated", but it'd be just as bad, and would probably result in even more delay. It's the paranoia that's the problem, not stupidity.

I don't trust anything written by a whore. If you can't grow a penis, then get the fuck out of my thread.

I.2.20 (Bar/Brothel of Innulus and Papilio); 3932: Weep, you girls. My penis has given you up. Now it penetrates men’s behinds. Goodbye, wondrous femininity!

They actually did, except they named themselves 'The drunks of Menkaure'. On a slightly unrelated note, this graffiti from Pompeii wouldn't look out of place in a modern city.

>>>Most of the Roman graffiti preserved at Pompei has dubious artistic value - http://www.pompeiana.org/Resources/Ancient/Graffiti%20from%20Pompeii.htm

I feel like I'm reading Twitter. While a historian might like to see SOME of Twitter saved, I doubt they think it necessary to preserve all of it.

But most art is lost. And for good reason: because it's not worth saving.

...and who decides this? You? By what metric is 'value' determined? And why is your aesthetic the only one that counts?

Most of the Roman graffiti preserved at Pompei has dubious artistic value, but has great value to historians (to give insight as to how the 'little people' lived and thought back then).

Just because something's a throwaway for you doesn't mean it won't be of value to someone else, at some future time.

I.4.5 (House of the Citharist; below a drawing of a man with a large nose); 2375: Amplicatus, I know that Icarus is buggering you. Salvius wrote this.