Thanks to Anna for sharing a snippet of her circumlocomotivation west of the Mississippi as part of The Snailr Project. Here’s postcard no. 29.
In September of 2000 there are thousands of weblogs: topic-oriented weblogs, alternative viewpoints, astute examinations of the human condition as reflected by mainstream media, short-form journals, links to the weird, and free-form notebooks of ideas. Traditional weblogs perform a valuable filtering service and provide tools for more critical evaluation of the information available on the web. Free-style blogs are nothing less than an outbreak of self-expression. Each is evidence of a staggering shift from an age of carefully controlled information provided by sanctioned authorities (and artists), to an unprecedented opportunity for individual expression on a worldwide scale. Each kind of weblog empowers individuals on many levels.
Rebecca Blood’s ‘Weblogs: A History and Perspective’ passed its tenth birthday a couple of weeks ago. It gets more valuable with age, as an aide-memoire to those who were around the web at the time, and a testament for those who weren’t. It identifies the connection between early weblogs and newer publishing platforms (Tumblr is old school) and the tensions and divergent motivations that now delineate the online landscape. But its closing thoughts of an adversarial future–
Our strength–that each of us speaks in an individual voice of an individual vision–is, in the high-stakes world of carefully orchestrated messages designed to distract and manipulate, a liability. We are, very simply, outnumbered.
–make me think, ten years on, of an orchestration has been done through envelopment, programmatically, and with a degree of complicity: a co-opting of mass participation that’s templated and textboxed and increasingly tied to a handful of gatekeepers.
Preamble: This is something that I’ve been thinking about on and off for nearly a year, as a kind of synthesis of this piece on social memory and this one on making. Having heard James Bridle‘s fantastic dConstruct talk and read Richard McManus’s piece on “social objects”, it’s time to write something down.
Once upon a time,
Not so long ago,
there was a little girl and her name was Emily.
And she had a shop.
It was a rather unusual shop because it didn’t sell anything.
You see, everything in that shop was a thing that somebody had once lost,
and Emily had found,
and brought home to Bagpuss.
At the heart of Bagpuss is a story of how we relate to things. The arrival of each lost thing brings the characters to life, and the characters in turn invest that thing with its own life, not just making it new but restoring to it a history and purpose. Finding things is only the beginning of a process of finding out about things.
There are two distinct strands to this process: the mice are the engineers, the renovators, the fixers and stitchers. They work with things as they are. It’s the other characters who offer up different narratives of origin — Bagpuss’s fanciful folk tales, Yaffle’s academic scepticism, Gabriel and Madeleine’s songs — that collectively work towards giving those things their rightful story and place.
It’s a model repeated in so many different places online: things that were once mute and self-contained are explicated and have their purpose and context teased out in conversations that bring together mechanical and historical knowledge. These conversations are explicit in places like Ask Metafilter or on dedicated forums, but also implicit in the ties between enthusiasts’ websites. They draw upon formal repositories of knowledge, such as scanned service manuals and catalogues that would otherwise have been lost, but they also create a lasting record of personal experience and expertise that contextualises those archives, and which would have been passed down in previous generations through word of mouth. It serves as a distributed and voluntary apprenticeship, in which technical capability is, by necessity, bound up with historical understanding.
All of this happens without formal mechanisms to transform things into “social objects”: the internet’s endless pathways turn our simple discoveries into expeditions that reveal the worlds in which those things have lived, beckoning us to become archivists and archaeologists of pasts that overlay and intertwine.
::
As an inveterate nostalgist historian, I’ve always got half an eye on the rough threshold between the ‘historical’ and the ‘archaeological’ internet, by which I distinguish between old stuff that’s largely retrievable somewhere, even if it’s riddled with broken outbound links, and the stuff that has to be dug out of archives or reconstructed from the memory of where those broken links once led. It’s a threshold that seems to shift further forward every time I look: some chunks of the online past disappear entirely, while others are gradually muted and objectified so that they require the same kind of explication as the things Emily brings to Bagpuss.
Perhaps a better distinction might be between ‘archival’ and ‘archaeological’, but I’ve gradually come to believe that formal archiving efforts have largely failed. This isn’t to disparage the efforts of Brewster Kahle, Jason Scott and other well-meaning digital preservationists, but these repositories are largely write-only, and it’s fiendishly difficult to pull synchronic snapshots of the web as it was and bind them to our memories and the narratives that derive from them.
This taps into the discussions of the online world’s illusion of atemporality, and the need to establish the basis for a digital historiography that provides more than just a commitment to preservation. It requires curation, and curation implies a narrative. It flourishes in the context of gently competing tales of origins and influence. (Historical arguments about the origins and evolution of the weblog, for instance, are well worth having.) It requires the tools to lay out the online past at a sufficient distance to allow us to make connections that weren’t apparent at the time, and by doing so, to question our own blurred recollections, but it needs room for those recollections to be treated as commentaries and keys and sometimes as sources in their own right.
It requires love.
As mentioned previously, there’s a good rule of thumb for working out how much Apple will squeeze out of its British customers: convert dollars to pounds, add VAT, slap on an extra ten per cent for shits and giggles and round up to the nearest nine. That is, if you don’t have an election, a hung parliament, and ForEx traders dumping sterling.
At £429, the base-level iPad would fit the SAUKS equation almost perfectly at $1.50 to the pound, which is where sterling was hovering on election day. At $1.48, the prediction comes in about a fiver more; at $1.40, it’s just over £460, and at $1.30 just shy of its (pre-tax) dollar price.
For all the jokes, it’s clear that Apple’s sales model, with its consistent price points and relatively long product cycles, can only work outside the US with some degree of hedging against currency declines: assuming a year till the next iPad, a weakening pound may squeeze margins at some point, though Apple will be loath to raise prices.
In that scenario, though, the price of an iPad is going to be the least of people’s worries.
When I was seven, my dad built me a bed, taking inspiration from a drawing in an old woodworking magazine, scavenging the wood, cutting it to fit the lean in the room. It had three drawers and cupboard space beneath for the games and toys and books I steadily acquired, as well as the growing pile of tapes for my ZX Spectrum.
Around the same time, he carved me a miniature cricket bat the length of my middle finger, notching a V, varnishing it, winding cotton for the handle grip. It’s a precious thing to me.
He has built sheds, paved patios, dug out ponds, knocked out walls, fit gas fires, tied flies — and that’s just in his spare time.
My dad is a maker.
In his twenties, my dad bought a tenor banjo. It’s a beautiful thing: ivory buttons, inlaid mother-of-pearl on the head and fretboard, vellum skin, a duster stuffed behind to keep down the volume. Looking online some years ago, I found a site devoted to vintage banjos, which told me a little about its age and history and the journey it had taken over nearly a century of existence. I told this to my dad, and he was thrilled; I printed out the pages and posted them, because computers remain a mystery to him.
Last year he told me that the screws from a couple of the tuners had broken; finding replacements was difficult, because that gauge wasn’t made any more in Britain. I registered at a banjo forum, asked for help, and within days a kind person from New York not only told me the gauge I needed, but sent a bag of screws that I posted on to my dad. They were a perfect fit. When I described how I got them, I might as well have been telling him that aliens landed in the garden and left them behind.
A couple of Christmases back, I called my parents, who were staying with my sister and her family. Could I speak to my dad, I asked? I’ll give him a shout, said my mother, but he’s been playing on the Wii with the kids from the moment they switched it on.
I finally spoke to him, surprised by what I’d heard. “Bloody marvellous, son.”
When I look at the iPad, I see something my dad could use without hand-holding to find the history of that banjo, to seek out those screws, to look at old video of Sonny Terry, to feed his glorious practical creativity, unencumbered by the need to learn the habits and quirks of computing, and not relying upon a transatlantic support department.
There’s a liberation in open things (and opening things) but there’s a far greater one in how things can open up people.