a diet of sorts. but with whose body? and to whose health? (4)

After 72 hours off, I just reactivated Facebook. And I have to say, my response as I went to the Facebook page, auto-filled the login and password fields, and press the "connexion" button was visceral. I felt it in my stomach. Revulsion. A slight urge to barf.

I'm not kidding. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that I was just running up in the stadium, and my body was sort of there already. But even looking over all the familiar icons, shapes, colors, and boxed-in faces and statements, it looked slightly foreign. A place where I may belong in some sense, but whose constraints on relationships and utterances and appearances and manners of being seemed lined up in cells, standing out in clear relief. We put ourselves in those little boxes, fit ourselves and our forms into its blue-and-white reverse-chronological ad-lined incessantly-connectifying matrix. Encased. Kind of like Han Solo in deep freeze.

I'm sure *I* am the same way on this blog, on Twitter, and wherever else I am, where you are, where we are. Simultaneously enabled and incredibly constrained, shaped and formed by the medium.

I suppose that's the precondition for all of our utterances, in this body and that--to be constrained and enabled by the same mechanisms of being and articulation.

Yet never have I felt so strongly that one reason Facebook is so comfortable on the inside, and is (at the present moment anyway!) seeming so gross from the outside, is that being there is like all sharing the same body--our body, where we live discursive and cyber-embodied lives something akin to parasites (feeding on ourselves, each other?), creative at the local level and utterly dependent on the greater system for the life, the flesh, the blood, the circulation it affords us.

Yes, I know I'm being overly dramatic. But that sinking feeling is still sitting heavy in my gut. Maybe the "diet" metaphor's not too far off the mark after all. Bleeccchh.

yup, this is #4 in the series...I'm hoping to get back to two other half-baked posts from the last few days.