Archive for March, 2006
My bags are almost packed, years worth of stuff has been donated and dumped, and the time has come to make the short trip east. Like so many brave young souls who went before us, we’re moving to Our Nation’s Capital, Dublin.
I’ve spent the last couple of weeks dealing with all of the aforementioned stuff - sorting my shit out, I think it’s called - before I have to pointlessly haul it to across the country to gather dust until the next move.
I gave away my desktop computer, probably the last desktop I’ll ever own - I’ve had one of those things in my various bedrooms since I was about eight. I’m selling my long-silent bass amp, surely a sign that my latent dreams of a career as a famous musician are now somewhat in danger of not being realised. Books and CDs, I’m hanging on to for now.
Anyway.
New city, new people, new job - it should be fun. Time to switch off, pack the car with my now-streamlined collection of stuff, and go.
A new style of writing that the collective mind of the internet has unknowingly developed: creating emphasis on a word or phrase by making it a link to another page.
Some people’s blog posts, for example, are densely linked collections of references, hinting at a wealth of further material beyond the surface of the text. The paragraphs of text on their own make sense, but they are ridddled with links to external references (squint at things magazine or Rodcorp to see what I mean).
By adding a link to an otherwise unassuming word within a sentence, you create an optional branch to the flow of communication, an aside. In a literary sense, the link says: there’s something more to be seen here, there’s something else I’m thinking but not saying directly, but you can pick up on it if you’re willing to follow through. The link implies an embedded additional meaning.
This is what intonation does in speech; by stressing or accenting a particular word or phrase when I talk, I’m communicating something extra. In fact, when reading online I find myself mentally applying verbal emphasis to linked words within a sentence (literally stressing the word in my mind). In the same way as italics or a question mark are a guide to tone, so is a link.
Are the limitations old media being exposed by it’s linear restrictions? I don’t know of an equivalent style in literature (David Foster Wallace’s hyperactive use of footnotes (See? I did it just there!) is the nearest parallel I can think of). What about speech for that matter, with it’s inadequecy to express what we are really thinking or feeling (the very thing poets and many writers spend their careers striving to overcome)?
What if we could embed hyperlinked commentary, mental symbols or narrative branching within our speech?
Does anyone know of a “burn on demand” service - that is, something that allows you to order small runs of CDs to be professionally burned (not as CDRs) and packaged as needed?
Neassa told me about the difficulty of getting a relatively small print run of her EP done. Services like Lulu allow authors to self-publish single copies of their book as they are needed. Why not CDs? I asked a friend who works for a label, who asked his boss, and both came back negative - they’d never heard of it.
I’ve wondered if there would be any point to something like this. Not the mechanics of it - asking a musician to manually create the CDs themself would be the equivalent of asking an author to photocopy their book for distribution - but the obsolescence of the format itself. What with the new model for music distribution - iTunes, MySpace, the Arctic Monkeys and all that - where does the humble CD stand?
As an aside, one of my favourite projects from Transmediale was Burnstation, a mobile copying station loaded with Copyleft licenced music. You browse for music you dig, then burn it all to a CD to take with you.
Anyway, burn on demand, does it exist? Should it?
… or, the Dublin Riots and the citizen journalist’s revolution.
So there was mad rioting in Dublin at the weekend - street paving torn up and flung at police, cars burned out, shops looted. RTÉ didn’t even break from their regular Saturday sports programming to cover what was going on (although Charlie Bird took a few lumps for the side), simply because they weren’t prepared to deliver the ground-level reportage required. There were plenty of bloggers about though (highlights that I’ve seen here, here), who covered what was happening on the ground as the day went on better than TV and radio managed to, and better than the Sunday papers.
I’m not convinced that “citizen journalism” is the only way forward by any means, but in instances like this it’s strengths are apparent. In the same way that bloggers simply don’t have the resources or time to devote to investigative journalism, the traditional news media can’t achieve the blanket coverage that distributed guerrilla reporters can. So, we got political analysis and high-level interviews from TV and radio, and we got on-the-spot coverage from blogs. They compliment each other.
The online coverage called to mind an excellent book of vivid stories from the Easter Rising that took place in the same street ninety years ago, and the fictionalized account of the same events in A Star Called Henry. These books simply following people’s actions throughout the day, while something bigger happens around them.
In school, history bored me so much that I dropped it for the Leaving Cert. When I went to college I took it up again, because by then I had caught on that interesting stuff had happened after all - I’d just heard about it from poor storytellers. History is almost always more interesting when told from a personal perspective, from the participants points of view. That’s why I found the independent online coverage of Saturday’s events particularly captivating. However, news shouldn’t just be entertainment, and the mainstream media still plays a role in providing a wider perspective on current events.