I learnt a new expression the other day: polite fiction which is where “all participants are aware of a truth, but to avoid conflict or embarrassment, all pretend to believe in some alternate version of events”.
And now I’ve been using Jaiku (in the least optimal way I’m the first to admit it, as I just have a computer and no a dataset-enabled phone to play with it) for a week or so and I kept wondering what an alternate expression could be… what happens when all participants are aware of a lie but all ignore it. Does the lie then become invalid and pointless?
Because to be frank, I’ve been lying on Jaiku, I’ve also been lying on Talponia.net and everyone knows it’s a lie, but just one person has asked me about it, concerned.
Why am i lying? Well because i want to blur the lines of presence and eavesdropping.
I started to think about this idea of presence, and in a way voyeurism. Is it really that interesting to know that we are all the same, we all share the same dull things at different times of the day depending on our timezone, such as eating, traveling, shopping, working too much, sleeping too little. Is that something worth eavesdropping on or does it only matters when those lives come into collision with your own?
Are we interested in the entire spectrum of the asteroides or just in the collisions… and more importantly, is it worth capturing everything when all you want to know is if a collision can happen and be engineered?
Late night thoughts on a Saturday night on a rainy night in Kabul…well, not really ; )
Interesting thoughts… I find the ‘physicial’ presence updates matter more if it’s someone I care about. It’s much more fun to tell fictitious stories to the rest of the world. And we really couldn’t function socially without bending the truth (or rather, playing with stories) even with the people we know well. Funny how lies are ‘bad’ but at the same time seem so necessary.