A “Random” Chat between Lars and Evgeny

My friend Lars posted today about something a guy named Evgeny wrote about strolling — in other words: browsing — the web… and in particular, Lars said to Evgeny:

I disagree, profoundly.

Personally, I do not believe in “random walks” — I mean: I do feel as though I go on such walks, but I also believe that there are more or less reasonable explanations that motivate most of my actions. Yet people who do not even feel that they are able to move freely are just as incompetent on any city street or department store as they are with most web browsers — many if not most are not even aware how they can set the browsers homepage, let alone that a browser is today just as much a publishing tool as it is a consumer application. As soon as people fire up a browser window and the browser loads the homepage address from the web, the user is sending a message to the web which says “I’m here and I want to see the website which I consider my homepage” (and quite ironically, I have a hunch that very few people will consider one of their own webpages to be their “home” page).

Strolling in town is always a question of leaving home and interacting socially (probably moreso in Europe than in the United States, because aside from a few exceptions, the United States is simply not “configured” for social interaction).

Indeed, many — if not most — of the people who live in the United States of America are almost completely oblivious to the most basic tool for social interaction: language. Americans all (more or less) speak the same language, so they seem to be as unaware of the significance of language as most are unaware of the air they breathe in and out.

To stroll or to “flaneur” means to use language: When someone says I am doing such-and-such — in a way that others are able to get an impression of what is meant — then others are able to use such expressions to organize ideas about the world… and in the extreme case we might say that it is only by communicating in this way that we form a community.

This is the case whether our interaction is online or offline — but online communications follow more standardized codes (bits, text, and especially ASCII characters) than offline communications (body language, nuanced gestures, vocalization, facial expressions, scents, and so on).

I also disagree… with both Evgeny and Lars. I disagree with Lars because I do not feel he has depicted the free will we have to point our browser wherever we choose to point it… — he has not shown this sufficiently. And yet I disagree with Evgeny even more, because he is such a charlatan that he pretends to criticize the reduction of our actions to limited commercial activities when in fact we are not doing that at all, but Evgeny himself is — because he is actually doing nothing more spewing words in exchange for the cash for his own advertisements, and he is partnering with a company who is also in the advertising business.

Anyone who wants to avoid the parochial commercialism Evgeny laments, can do no better than to stop reading Evgeny’s remarks — except perhaps to stop reading any of the bogus marketing material spewed out daily by such intellectual whores to industrial interests.

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