Listen / Read
Today’s reading was depressingly ridiculous. By which I mean that Siddiqui’s inability to distinguish her pot from the kettle she’s calling black is amusingly ironic, but so devastatingly unwitting that you’re left feeling that there’s just simply no hope.
Inside their world of supernatural imaginings – the absolute, unquestioned certainty of humanity’s definitive fantasy – the religious are trapped, unable even for a moment to step outside their glass houses and look back in at that tiny space they confine their minds to. Instead they stay inside, throw their stones and call each falling shard that cuts them on its way down a test of their faith in the indestructibility of their broken house.
Anyway, that’s enough metaphors run ragged, but if you want a marvellous demonstration of just how glassy the house and black the pot then read Steve’s brilliant edit of Siddiqui’s reading on the comments of today’s Platitute for the Day. It really is spot-thefuck-on.
I do find it quite interesting that Second Life and the like seem to be luring such large numbers of people away from their first life. But I think there’s also a tendency for people to instantly see new technology as some sort of threat. For the most part, it just seems like another form of escapism. Mona moaned that these people are wasting their time on earth. Well, if that’s her problem with it, what about all the boys and fully grown men spending their lives playing Championship Manager? What about people who spend every free moment they have with their head buried in a book? Is Harry Potter a social evil too? I actually think he is. But that’s just me.
What makes something a waste of time then, Moaning Myrtle? Anything that’s not reading the Qu’ran? If so I look forward to Siddiqui’s next reading when she tells lonely, dysfunctional bookworms everywhere to stop wasting the time Allah has allotted them. I mean, they spend all their time reading, sometimes late into the night, eventually passing out due to over-exposure to imaginary worlds. They can’t put them down, you even see them thumbing them on the bus when they could be talking to the person sat next to them (if they weren’t also reading a book). They even read them in the bath! Naked! What a disgusting way for a person to waste their time.
And I think that’s the problem Siddiqui really has here, the sense that Second Life is packed full of adulterers cruising a pixelated landscape for online ‘interaction’. And, who knows, they might get lucky and score some flesh action too. But doesn’t that actually make it less escapist? Bookworms immersed in a literary world really are escaping into fantasy, there’s nothing real over the next page, no actual wardrobe into a tangible Narnia. But on Second Life it’s real people sat, just like you, at the electronic end of their customised avatar, tapping away on a keyboard just like I am now. Perhaps with one less hand than I am now.
It seems, with people getting to know each other via profiles and exchanged messages, flirting via their online persona, meeting in real life and on occasion even getting married, that Second Life seems to have become something of an internet dating service, for some users at least. Will Siddiqui go on national radio to cast her judgement on people who meet people that way too? A colleague of mine met her boyfriend via internet dating over a year ago, and they’re still very happy. They’re not married yet though.
Is that a problem, Dr Siddiqui? Because I get the feeling this is about what so much judgemental, repressed, religious discourse is really about. Fucking. What a fucking waste of time. Every single one of us fucking fuckers is a fucking time wasting fuck. So says Mo’.
But I think Siddiqui has missed the point of why Second Life is so popular. She’s right in that people are escaping real life. But what they’re escaping to isn’t the important part, it’s what they’re escaping from that we need to be worried about. A society full of vain cretins and religious idiots wherein you either have to dispose of your intelligence or your reason (or both) to be accepted. The real world is an ugly place filled with pretty people and prayers to the unreal in heaven. When everyone has lost the plot, it’s no wonder some people devise their own.