In which I try, after 25 years of blogging, to drop the ironic stance a bit.
If you time it carefully and the whole thing hasn’t been washed into the river by the already torrential rainstorm here in the burbs, you might catch our garden fireworks live on the Shedcam from 1730 – 1900-ish this evening. I’ve upped the timing on the cam and pointed it out the shed window. I guess actually catching a burst on the cam would be a one-in-a-million chance but I don’t suppose you’ve got anything better to do this evening have you?
Azeem has kicked off a provocative to-and-fro from some of the big brains about the BBC’s role in the post-crash Internet.
I’m a busy man – I’m nearly forty and I’ve never lit a firework in my life (can that be true?) and this evening I have to light lots of them. So, here are some disconnected thoughts:
1. Has the market failed? There are lot of fancy words – mostly borrowed from economics – in this debate and two of them – ‘market failure’ – make me uncomfortable. It’s much too early to tell that we’re seeing any kind of systematic failure here. A market crash is not the same as a market failure. We mustn’t allow our frustrated and (admit it) utopian geek-longing for better tools, fatter pipes or social transformation to convince us that we’re at the end of anything. Seriously: we probably need at least another decade before we can be sure that the current, messy mix of provision cannot deliver our nirvana of interconnection, participation and empowerment (that’s not an excuse to wait ten years, btw).
2. Politics. The BBC might be the right vehicle for this laudable goal – or it might not. There’s a critical difference between picking the right agency or mix of agencies and levers to deliver a social policy goal and pragmatically making use of a big, powerful, politically bullet-proof institution like the current BBC to do it. Although the latter might make sense now – especially while this kind of thinking is gaining ground within the Beeb – it might just be storing up problems – both practical and political – for future generations of citizens and market players. I happen to think that we should probably seize the opportunity of a pumped-up, inflation-protected BBC to at least make a start on the infrastructure for participation but I think we must be practical and limit our ambitions – the better to realise them fully in the future. Piggy-backing the BBC makes sense right now but not because the market has failed, rather because the market is in the doldrums and we need to make some progress while the Venture Capitalists are still on strike.
3. Government neglect. Since we may have to wait a long time to see how this all pans out, we need to get started now on embedding the goals of the ‘connectivists’ (or whatever we will call people of this general mindset) in the right places: public policy, media, corporate and BBC strategy. For this reason, I’ll link to my alarm from a couple of months ago at the total exclusion of the net from the scope of the new UK Communications Bill and from the super-regulator OfCom. The Government at least has to be paying attention in this crucial phase. Benign neglect has had its day.
4. Long-range thinking needed. Since I’m on record as arguing for seven or eight years now that the BBC is the best-placed agency to pursue some of the goals of the connectivists, it’s interesting to reverse the telescope for a minute and look at this from the BBC’s perspective. I’m ill-qualified to do so but there must a nagging worry in the minds of the more forward-thinking Beebistas that this period of plenty cannot last and that, when it comes to an end, the outlook for a huge, content-focused state broadcaster may not look at all rosy. The BBC needs some good long-range thinking. This is a good start.
One look at this map (From the Public Internet Project via Werblog) showing Manhattan’s wi-fi nodes should be enough to prove that the biggest digital divide of all is the one that runs roughly North-South down the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. What would a similar map of London, Paris or Berlin look like? Sparse, I’ll bet. The distribution of nodes within Manhattan also speaks volumes of the divide at ground level, though.
If I’ve got this right, the big, empty zone at top right is dominated by social housing likely to be light on Wi-Fi. The graphic recalls Booth’s extraordinary 1889 map of London, visualising Victorian urban poverty for the first time in startling, block-by-block detail. (got this wrong yesterday and credited the maps to Mayhew who wrote about the London poor. Luckily nobody visits this weblog so I think I got away with it).
iTunes playlists are becoming an obsession. Here’s my “sisters and brothers, mothers and fathers” list – every track that features one of those words in its ID3 tags. For some reason, these lists make for a much more provocative listen that just randomising the whole library.
A Mother's Love, The Meters All Your Sisters, Mazzy Star Big Bayou, The Flying Burrito Brothers Broken Little Sister, Death In Vegas Brother Can You Spare A Dime, George Michael Brother John, Cannonball Adderley Christine's Tune, The Flying Burrito Brothers Come To Daddy, Mummy Mix Divine Mother, Jah Wobble Endless Grey Ribbon, The Corn Sisters Every Day Is Christmas, The Webb Brothers Gonna Die With My Hammer In My Hand, Williamson Brothers And Curry Good Mornin', Brother Graveside Song, Stevens Sisters He Ain't Heavy... He's My Brother, Keith Barrow He Meets His Mother, Richard Robbins He's The Greatest Dancer, Sister Sledge I Believe In Father Christmas, Six By Seven I Need Someone, Wallace Brothers Jackie Brown Soundtrack.mp3, Brothers Johnson Jungle Brothers - Because I Got It Like That (Ultimate Mix), Jungle Brothers Just a Little Talk With Jesus, Statler Brothers King Of The Road, Statler Brothers Lacassine Special, Balfa Brothers Last Song for Mother, Nanci Griffith Legacy (Show Me Love) (Mash Up Matt Mix), Space Brothers Little Sister/Get Back, Elvis Presley Little Sister/Get Back, Elvis Presley Look At That Old Grizzly Bear, Mark Mothersbaugh Make It Easy On Yourself, Scott Walker & The Walker Brothers Mother (very rare), Blind Melon Mother And Child Reunion, Paul Simon Mother Nature's Son, The Beatles My Baby's Gone, Wallace Brothers My Dad's Gone Crazy, Eminem My Sister, Tindersticks Nebraska, The Cash Brothers New Genious (Brother), Gorillaz Oh Lori, Alessi brothers Oh, Sister One For Daddy-O, Cannonball Adderley One Too Many Mornings, Chemical Brothers Our Mother The Mountain, Townes Van Zandt Piece of my Heart, Big Brother & the Holding Company Ras Dub, Sister Carol Sal Got A Meatskin, Carlisle Brothers Sister Ray, Joy Division Sisters & Brothers, The Fire This Time Slapshot, Brothers In Raw Star Catching Girl [Soulside Mix], Brother Brown Feat. Frank'ee Transition Theme For Minor Blues (Or Little Malcolm Loves His Dad), Sonny Rollins Tunji's Song - Tunji Oyelana, Brotherhood of Breath Will the Circle Be Unbroken, The Neville Brothers Will The Circle Be Unbroken, Statler Brothers Will the Circle be Unbroken, Mother Maybelle Carter Will the Circle be Unbroken (live), The Allman Brothers Band You Can't Hold On To A Love That's Gone, The Holmes Brothers Your Heart And Mine, Nicholas Brothers Your Winter, Sister Hazel
I persuaded The Guardian to print my blog address so maybe I’ll get some traffic today! I posted the full text of today’s article about Super Audio here a few days ago. If you’d like to comment on that article, click here to load the entry.
Yoz has done the donkey work on legendary software engineer Mitch Kapor’s latest product, a ‘Personal Information Manager’ (PIM) called Chandler. A useful analysis, lots of links and even some retro executables. The man should get a medal. I’ve tried a lot of PIMs, brainstormers, outliners, contact managers – structured and freeform, integrated and standalone. They’re intellectually interesting – I’m always looking for the perfect organiser but I’m quite old now so I’m pretty sure it doesn’t exist – my pathology makes me unreformable, unorganisable. I suspect the whole category is doomed. Only restless, neurotic people and organisations with a pathological need for order will adopt the next hot organiser and the people who could make best use of them are productive without them. Buy a notebook.
Some scratched and mangled black & white photos I took at Dave & Danny’s ‘Village Fete for the Twenty First Century’ back in the Summer showed up in the post months late. Some frames were lost all together – including all the ones of Dave & Danny themselves. The rest, including this one of Matt “Warchalking” Jones plus Yoz, Paul, Adam, paper folders, my kids, Juliet… and Freeman Dyson are spooky. They should offer this as a service.
We’ve pressed the Powerbook and MS Powerpoint into half term service for our four year-old’s revision. In kiosk mode it’s easy to create a constrained sequence of words, letters, numbers that will only advance when he clicks in the right place and that provides an entertaining sound as a reward for getting the task right.
We learn: too much entertainment along the way is a major distraction (no pictures!); sometimes Olly wants to motor through the presentation thumbnails instead of following the sequence; knowledge acquired elsewhere (while browsing the web, for instance) is readily applied – “Why can’t I go backwards?”; sometimes computers are rubbish and spreading everything out on the table for easy scribbling and rearranging is best.
The whole thing makes me wonder if there’s an app out there for this kind of DIY educational computing. Something that would allow us to roll our own exercises easily and react quickly to the child’s demands? Something that would allow us to save the result to the web so others could play or so that we could call up exercises from anywhere?
As I said, it took me a long time to adjust to the new ways of listening implied by clever tools like iTunes. A concrete example: what I used to do was exactly analogous to listening to a CD: flick through the long list of playlists until one catches my eye, double click to play. No change there. Later I downloaded a ‘play random track’ applescript and, together with the ‘shuffle’ button, that became my standard way into the library. But sometimes, random can be a bit too random. So now I use iTunes’ search function, which is simple enough. I just free associate until I get an interesting-looking playlist. Then shuffle through the results.
This is really orthogonal to the experience of ‘putting an album on’ – ‘artist’, ‘album’ and ‘genre’ are secondary to mood or ambience. Meanwhile, the whole MP3 universe is still organised into albums – MP3 players even try to locate album cover art when you play a track – but the new ways of interacting with music must imply at least a loss of emphasis on the album. Once we’re accustomed to ‘dialing up’ a mood or a feeling or an era, will we want to buy albums at all? Or will we buy (or rent) an hour of ‘contemplative’ or ‘aggressive’ or ‘Renaissance’ or whatever? Here’s one of my playlists. iTunes search terms were ‘I’m’ and ‘You’re’.
I'm Still In Love With You, Al Green I'm Fricking Awesome, MC Paul Barman I'm Waiting For The Day, Beach Boys I'm Only Sleeping, The Beatles I'm Amazed, The Pixies I'm So Tired, The Beatles I'm Serious, Beenie Man I'm Waiting For The Man, Velvet Underground You're a Big Girl Now, Bob Dylan You're Pretty Good Looking, White Stripes You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go, Bob Dylan I'm Taking My Audition To Sing Up In The Sky, Cap, Andy, And Flip You're So Vain, Carly Simon You're My Thrill, Chet Baker I'm On My Way, Clifton Chenier I'm Waiting For The Man, David Bowie & Lou Reed You're the Reason God Made Oklahoma, David Frizzell & Dottie West I'm Coming Out, Diana Ross I'm Walking Backwards For Christmas, Goons I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry, Hank Williams I'm In The Mood, John Lee Hooker I'm Prison Bound, John Lee Hooker I'm Beginning to see the Light, Johnny Hodges You're The One That I Want, Less Than Jake You're A Friend Of Mine, The Meters I'm not Worried At All, Moby I'm Your Hoochie Coochie Man, Muddy Waters I'm Ready, Muddy Waters I'm Like a Bird, Nelly Furtado I'm Depending On You, Otis Redding I'm Leaving You, Otis Spann I'm A Man, Pulp I'm Housin', Rage Against The Machine You're in the air, REM You're In My Heart, Rhonda Vincent I'm Someone Who Loves You, The Roches I'm So Glad, Skip James I'm An Old Cowhand, Sonny Rollins I'm An Old Cowhand (alt. take), Sonny Rollins I'm Gonna Make You Love Me, Supremes/Temptations I'm Still Here, Tom Waits I'm So Glad, Skip James I'm Taking My Audition To Sing Up In The Sky, Cap, Andy, And Flip You're My Everything, Zoot Sims
Today we bought fireworks. I mean we really bought fireworks. They’re having a toofer at Tesco’s so we wound up with a shopping trolley-full of fireworks for half price. Driving them home was like The Wages of Fear – I maintained a steady 5 mph as the sweat beaded on my forehead. We’re going to set them all off in the garden next weekend. I hereby prophesy that we’ll manage about three Roman Candles before one or all of the small children present goes bonkers or a parent sets light to the shed and we have to call the whole thing off.
