Person as Mystery

A Blogger in a Red Blouse, After Pierre Bonnard
Mike Licht

작년 뉴요커지에 실린 Malcolm Gladwell의
소셜 네트워크에 대한 에세이도 분명 인상적이었지만
어찌해서 오늘에서야 읽어보게된
Zadie Smith의 글 또한 내가 하고 싶(었을 수도 있는)/은 말을 아주 훌륭하게 해주고 있었다.
그래서 나는 그만큼 더 입이 꾹 다물어졌다.
이것마저 "only poor education" 탓이라고 하기에는
나의 게으름이 너무 도드라진다:


Connection is the goal. The quality of that connection, the quality of the information that passes through it, the quality of the relationship that connection permits -- none of this is important.

You want to be optimistic about your generation. You want to keep pace with them and not to fear what you don't understand. To put it another way, if you feel discomfort at the world they're making, you want to have a good reason for it.

Information systems need to have information in order to run, but information underrepresents reality. [...] In Facebook, [...] life is turned into a database, and this is a degradation, [...] which is based on a philosophical mistake ... the belief that computers can presently represent human thought or human relationships. These are things computers cannot currently do.

If the aim is to be liked by more and more people, whatever is unusual about a person gets flattened out.

To the advertisers, we are our capacity to buy, attached to a few personal, irrelevant photos.

What is your relationship status? (Choose one. There can be only one answer. People need to know.) Do you have a "life"? (Prove it. Post pictures.) Do you like the right sort of things? (Make a list. Things to like will include: movies, music, books and television, but not architecture, ideas or plants.)

We were going to live online. It was going to be extraordinary. Yet what kind of living is this? Step back from your Facebook Wall for a moment: Doesn't it, suddenly, look a little ridiculous? Your life in this format?

The Social Network is not a cruel portrait of any particular real-world person called "Mark Zuckerberg." It's a cruel portrait of us; 500 million sentient people entrapped in the recent careless thoughts of a Harvard sophomore.


따라가는 사람도 없고 따라오는 사람도 없는
블로그는 좀 다를수도 있다고 생각하나,
왜 그런지는 지금 너무 졸리니까 다음에.