Warning: This is really incoherent, but there might be some neat thoughts in there somewhere.
I was reading an academic piece earlier today, and it was your typical theory-heavy post-structuralist sort of thing, all eyebrow-beetling and theory-over-practice and ivory-tower-as-all-hell (and quite a good essay for all of that), when I flicked back to the top of the essay to check the title and noticed that the piece's epigraph was a lyric from a pop song. This was amusing to me for two reasons.
First, I really, really think that epigraphs should be used to reinforce the point of the piece by using a quote or thought that doesn't really work in context, but stands alone quite well. The epigraph is the one place where you should "quote-drop." This particular epigraph was not that. Instead, it was a very general, nonpartisan statement about the topic of the paper that the author was about to spend twenty pages examining and pontificating on in great detail.
Second, as I was thinking about the incongruity of this, I came to realize that the epigraph of an essay has become the place that us weird, closeted, uncool, anti-social academics have co-opted for desperately proclaiming "Hey! I like rock music!" or "Hey! I watch movies in addition to reading huge tomes of mid-1900s theory!" It doesn't matter if the epigraph fits the paper topic, it seems, as the real point of the epigraph is to prove that we have "real lives" outside of academia, that we do things with our lives other than write essays and push our glasses back up on our noses. This is kind of silly. I say that even though (and maybe because) I've done it too: I almost included a Wilco lyric from "Hell is Chrome" at the beginning of my dissertation, and I've included music lyrics at the top of a few of my essays. Again, not because it's useful in the context of the essay, but because it feels cool to make that shallow link between pop culture and heavy theory...you know, instead of actually building that bridge into your paper and risking getting poo-poo'd because you're talking about Jeff Tweedy instead of Georg Simmel.
Anyway, the end point of my thoughtxcursion was me deciding that I was super-clever and that I obviously had to paste some snarky shit about this epigraph on Facebook. I got about halfway through typing it up before I stopped, realizing, as I said above, that a) I'm also guilty of this particular epigraph-sin and b) that my motive in posting my realization publicly was entirely just to show off by picking on someone else. Sure, I'd do it in a semi-humble way by mentioning that I've done the same thing in the past, but the implication underlying this admission would still be "...but I learned my lesson, and now look at this moron!"
I would never call someone out on something this stupid in "real life," but the one-way anonymity of Facebook made it easy: everyone who saw my post would know who I was and would know how cleverly snarky I was, and they wouldn't know the person that I was picking on, so that made the picking-on okay. A funny observation rather than a direct attack. Right?
No. Not right. Because the spirit of the post would have still be confrontational, and even if it never got back to the person I was writing about (which it absolutely, certainly would not have), I was still doing myself harm in using someone else's (excellent) work as a starting point for a goofy, mocking post made just to make internet people think I was clever. This is a very big thing in other cultures, other belief systems, that we don't really seem to have in our culture: the idea that holding yourself above someone else, defeating someone else, attacking someone else, not only hurts them, but also hurts you. In our culture, it seems, the winner is right (or "Might Makes Right", a dictum we criticized, tore down, and then for some reason replaced with capitalism).
The insidious thing about Facebook (for me, at least), is that it creates a playing field wherein I'm always the winner. Everything I post is, by necessity, my own interpretation of an event, piece of work, etc., and I can post my interpretation in a forum wherein everyone I want to see what I have to say can, and everyone I want to exclude can be excluded. We're already (generally speaking) a pretty intensely ego-centered culture, and Facebook makes it easier, more rewarding, to be that way and never have to face negative consequences (at least not immediately). This is pretty obvious to All Humans in the "Everyone on Facebook is selfish because they think I care about Castle Crashers or their new baby pictures or whatever the fuck!" but I feel like today I discovered a new layer of the site's ability to quietly encourage users to construct a world where they're the center.
From now on, before I post something online, I want to try to make sure that I'm only doing it because it's worth sharing, that it's something that helps build community and strengthen links between people (virtually and maybe even physically). If it's something that criticizes someone, somewhere, or an idea, or a religion, or what-have-you, I want to try to make sure that critique is still in the name of strengthening community bonds and not just in the service of giving me the quick happy-boost one gets from having their opinion validated by lots of clicks on a "Like" button. I will still, for instance, happily post articles about gay-bashing churches being a bunch of assholes because there's certainly a particular kind of community I want to be a part of, and I'm naturally going to want to encourage that other people help build that kind of community (online or off) instead of another kind. I'm only human, after all. And of course I'll fuck up occasionally, again because I'm only human.
But I think that as we continue to rely on services like Facebook for our day-to-day communication, it's important for everyone to think a bit about what you put online and why you do it. Even if you can (and do) "win" an argument or successfully shout over your opposition by posting something online with the intent to win rather than the intent to share, aren't you, in the most Buddhistic way, doing harm to yourself as well as others in the process? When I rarely stop and think about it, like I did today, it sure feels that way.
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