Blogsquatching: Interface and Malfunction
Posted by: Loren Coleman on June 4th, 2008
Carl Diehl’s Metaphortean Space nicely adds a shiny chrome, intellectually-friendly frame around his insights into “blogsquatching”:
An interface is typically designed to make the new domain easier for a “user” to comprehend. When this remediation works, the user is fairly oblivious to the crossing-over that is going on. On the contrary, malfunction typically calls attention to the collision of worlds, maintaining itself as burden on presumed purposes.
This sort of dissonance might seem to complicate the credibility of such a thing as “the interface of malfunction.” If there is hesitation…so be it. An experiential and interpretative encounter with this mechanism will give one a better impression of its Fortean flavor! The interface of malfunction exists in that duration of uncertainty that follows an anomalous rift in the linear progression of the everyday. An unexpected occurrence that can be accommodated with provisional explanations or embraced as passageway to new lands. The interface of malfunction is a paranormal mechanism to encourage a dip into the unknown. The unknown may remain aloof, leading the curious onward, or it may be extinguished into a legitimate thing, technique, or new animal… but the process is initially un-known.
The interface of malfunction relies on a rupture in physiological vision and what Norman Bryson refers to as “socialized vision” (in Vision and Visuality) i.e. the mesh of signs that filter/focus one’s point-of-view socioculturally.
Pre-existing knowledge or suspicion of other dimensional worlds, creatures, phenomena factor in to the interfaces of malfunction. These thought-forms operate within vernacular networks of information, the blogosphere notwithstanding. The Sasquatch encounter these days, for example, opens up an interface of malfunction that must contend with the questions of blobsquatchery and answers of blogsquatching. “Blogsquatching,” a term coined by preeminent cryptozoologist Loren Coleman, refers to “the use of web logs to spread information on unknown hairy hominoids such as Sasquatch, Yeti, and Yowie across the internet” (Cryptomundo.com, “The Short History of Blobsquatch,” November 25, 2006).
This age-old collision of experiential and interpretative Sasquatch encounter is amplified through the internet, it remains as always perceptual and conceptual, pulling on individual sensory information and collective forms of speculative interpretation.
Carl Diehl, Metaphortean Space, “Interface and Malfunction,” June 3, 2008
About Loren Coleman
Loren Coleman is one of the world’s leading cryptozoologists, some say “the” leading living cryptozoologist. Certainly, he is acknowledged as the current living American researcher and writer who has most popularized cryptozoology in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
Starting his fieldwork and investigations in 1960, after traveling and trekking extensively in pursuit of cryptozoological mysteries, Coleman began writing to share his experiences in 1969. An honorary member of Ivan T. Sanderson’s Society for the Investigation of the Unexplained in the 1970s, Coleman has been bestowed with similar honorary memberships of the North Idaho College Cryptozoology Club in 1983, and in subsequent years, that of the British Columbia Scientific Cryptozoology Club, CryptoSafari International, and other international organizations. He was also a Life Member and Benefactor of the International Society of Cryptozoology (now-defunct).
Loren Coleman’s daily blog, as a member of the Cryptomundo Team, served as an ongoing avenue of communication for the ever-growing body of cryptozoo news from 2005 through 2013. He returned as an infrequent contributor beginning Halloween week of 2015.
Coleman is the founder in 2003, and current director of the International Cryptozoology Museum in Portland, Maine.
I’m consulting my thesaurus and will get back to you when I’m done.
Whew. Take a walk in the woods, buddy! lol
Pedantic to the point of obfuscation. I mean, I get what he’s saying, but I’m still shaking my head. What’s with the meandering, pretentious language? One practically needs a machete to hack through such a jungle of needless verbiage. In short, it’s pretentious and that pretense occludes any true meaning the author may have wished to convey. Instead, readers are left with several paragraphs of linguistic acrobatics instead of a concise, coherent article on the topic at hand. It might appear “scholarly” but unless one’s goal is to be a showboating PhD candidate or to be one of only 12 people ever published in some obscure journal… I digress.
Waaaa? I need another cup of coffee, then I’ll read it again.
I saw the word “is” in the piece, and “sasquatch” was in there too.
Bill Clinton left me utterly befuddled as to what “is” means, and I’m still working on understanding the term “sasquatch” in all its ramifications. As for the rest of the article….
Oh, and I think I understood Loren had his tongue firmly implanted in his cheek when he described the piece as being “intellectually-friendly.”
However…
Heh…”blogsquatchery”…
Pedantic, to be sure, but fascinating, if only for the new words one can learn.
“Interface of malfunction”…
I like the sound of it, whatever the heck it means.
Sounds like Cryptozoology gone Techie.
What?
jerrywayne: Look, man, it’s simple.
He means that the sasquatchian interfacial has disrupted the sequential novitiate paradigm of malfunctionality….
Oh I give up. This is so whatever-it-is that I can’t even imitate it.
And what should scare you all most is that for all you know, what I was starting to say might be RIGHT.
That’s it. I’m making a t-shirt that says “I heart Blogsquatchery”.
Seriously, you know you all want one.
The last two paragraphs are the only two that made sense… And only just O.o
Pseudo-intellectual bafflegab. Sounds like educationese, where teachers pretend to be highly educated and scientific, butchering the language in the processes.
“Bafflegab” is an awesome word, and it’s a perfect descriptor.
“Word of the Day” has nothing on Cryptomundo.
This complicated passage might be oversimplified into single sentence:
Seeing something like a sasquatch really freaks you out. It challenges one’s understanding of reality so severely that one struggles to find an available hook in the closet that is your world view to hang it on. In the desperate attempt to understand the unfathomable, one turns to unlikely sources like the internet to gain affirmation of the fact that you’re not crazy, but looking on the internet makes you crazy. And you never get the whole answer you are looking for, so there is a breakdown in what he calls interfaces, which is the bridge between you and your sources of information and even your understanding of what is reality.
Sound right? I’ve seen this phenomenon at work when interviewing sasquatch witnesses. The NEED to talk to a researcher person in hopes of resolving their confusion for having seen something that isn’t supposed to exist.
The article was kinda cute. I think the guy is was a philosophy major who was struggling to apply all those logic classes in some kind or real world way.
Hope this helps, T. Powell
thom_powell:
Well, it wasn’t one sentence. 😉
But durned if, after reading yours, I read the blog again, and actually GOT some of it.
See, Carl? Calm down and you can come across. lol
And as to witnesses needing to find someone to believe them, I can empathize. I wouldn’t need that (although it sure would be frustrating not to be able to tell somebody the way I do about other critters I’ve seen). The evidence has sort of prepared me for the reality. But I know why they need the support – they KNOW IT DOESN’T EXIST – AND THEY JUST SAW ONE, as real as anything else they’ve experienced.
Right, Carl? 😉