Friday, January 4, 2013

The internet shoal of fishies

We at the K-Landnews love all things living. We also love the Dead, but only the Grateful ones.

That passion for using words describing living things in all sorts of contexts is shared by many humans.

It has brought us catchphrases like "top dog", "alpha male", "predator", "big fish", "400 pound gorilla" (or 800 pounds for the really scary ones), as well as "top of the food chain", "dog eat dog world" and others.

We like these easy concepts and the imagery they provide. It is but a small ironic step from the top dog to dry humping a leg.

What we do not like is what we perceive to be a certain inevitability, an implication of natural order impossible to change without the intervention of Mr. Darwin or your god of choice.

One of our images at the K-Landnews is the internet shoal of fish, which makes for easy statements about safety in numbers and those predators going after us.

We have even suggested to Facebook that they look into algorithms based on the concept of crowd control to get their messy mess under control.
Crowd control in this context means the good kind, the one described a little in our earlier post "Becoming gay for a day", not the nose busting, skull smashing kind preferred by riot police and fear mongers.

The internet shoal of fish image also provides a simple but not reassuring idea about becoming a victim on the net. Unless you stray too far from the shoal or behave badly to the neighbors, you are not being singled out, it is simply your turn to get swooped up.

Bycatch of history, if you will.

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