I’m looking for people to try out a new community project that I’ve been developing at work. It’s a completely new way of organising message-boards and I think potentially it’s quite exciting. If you wish to participate or are interested, then e-mail me at tom%40plasticbag.org – it’s going to be of most interest to people who live in the UK…
This is a difficult post to write. It’s difficult because I’ve avoided writing it for far too long. It’s difficult because it forces me to face some things that I’ve tried to pretend weren’t happening. And it’s difficult because it undermines my faith in humanity and forces me to give up some of the illusions that I’ve desperately operated under for several years now.
About one year, one month and two weeks ago, the World Trade Center in New York was destroyed. All around the world, people looked on with horror at what was occurring. And before all the recriminations started, before the rhetoric became overwhelming, before the civil liberties were eroding, and before dissent became unpatriotic, there was this bizarre moment of pause, of stunned silence. And in that moment, there was a remarkable unity of feeling and purpose around the world. It was only when we all opened our mouths again that everything went to hell.
It was in this moment of shock that webloggers first started broadcasting their tiny, newly-vulnerable voices into blogspace. Some talked of their experiences of being in New York or of the feeling of vulnerability that all Americans suddenly felt – a vulnerability they’d never felt before. Some responded with exclamations of disbelief or anguish. But I think a large number couldn’t say anything at all – how could one say anything valuable in these moments.
Most of the people I know in the UK who ran weblogs didn’t know what to say or do. There was nothing that could be expressed that would be useful – nothing that could be done but sympathise from a distance. Many of us felt utterly powerless and yet desperate to do something. We came up with a project at the time that I think did some good. But then it’s really impossible to tell.
In most of this stuff, most of us tried to be impartial, non-confrontational and politically of a space that wouldn’t offend people who had just lost friends and family. That was the most important thing in the immediate aftermath – the orphaned, the widowed, the bereaved. As it should have been. Not political point-scoring or the use of those deaths as justification for military action. No flag-waving or advocating of interest groups that needed a say.
It would be months later before I would become aware of the phenomenon of the warblogger – months where information had filtered out gradually, where stances had calcified and battle-lines were beginning to be drawn. I started to notice politically radical statements appearing with semi-regularity on some people’s sites – and entirely new sites appearing out of nowhere advocating extreme universalising positions of every kind – evil muslims, the hypocrisy of Europe, the righteous thunder of America…
To my shame, only once did I make any kind of stand. I sent an e-mail to Stephen Den Beste about (what I considered to be) his overblown anti-European rhetoric – and he responded. I got a fair amount of short-term fallout in the form of highly unpleasant e-mails and comments posted on people’s sites. And I think at the time I decided that several things should stop me continuing with any kind of debate on these issues in public. Some of these I think are still valid, some of which I now think I could characterise as cowardice or laziness, nothing more…
The fact is I believed warblogging in its most hawkish, blood-hungry mode to be the short-lived rantings of extremists – and not representative of American online communities or weblogging communities in general. And because of this, I’ve got on with talking about the things that I personally find manageable or stimulating, and have kept far away from discussion of wars in Iraq, or bombings in Afghanistan, or racist violence in Europe and America, or the way all these events have been cynically used for party political ends, or the way in which state-sanctioned warfare is being transformed into a continuous enterprise just as civil liberties in all areas are being slowly limited. I haven’t said a word about the level of irony I felt when it became clear that Hollywood’s grasp on file-sharing technology meant more to most people than the fact that people were being held illegally across the world.
I’ve kept my mouth shut through all of this stuff. And I’ll probably continue to keep it shut, to be honest. But I needed an outburst today because of the stuff that I’ve been forced to come into contact with recently – the verbal attacks against Anil Dash for example – appal me beyond measure. I feel actual physical sickness at sites declaring whole religions to be at fault for the actions of tiny groups of often pooly-educated poor extremists. And this is the tiniest tip of the ice-berg.
I don’t know how to say it in any other way except to say that as an episode in web history, I personally believe that Warblogging has been shameful, horrific and a stain on us all. The escalation of warblogs is a disaster for development of personal publishing, and a crippling blow to the individual integrity and worth of weblogs and weblogging. This whole media – a media which was supposed to be about freedom of expression, allowing everyone to have a voice and a space to talk openly and honestly – has turned increasingly into the worst kind of soapbox punditry, witch-hunting and as a platform for violent warmongers and nationalists. And I’m afraid I feel partly responsible…
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Remember…. You're a FAG…
I probably shouldn’t be posting this, but Davo sent it to me when I was at work, and I nearly spat my drink across three quarters of the office. God only knows the intention of the person who created it. God only knows if it’s supposed to be silly or hurtful… But when sent from poof to poof, it’s like being in on the funniest joke ever…
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On participation in online communities…
So I was reading a post at Meg’s site called You – yes you – at the back: you may not talk in class. Best post title ever. Anyway… That’s not the point. I had a comment to make about it, so I went and started to write it, and then next thing you know it’s about a year and a half long and still incomplete. So like a fairly large seedling, I decided to transplant it to my site, intially for the normal part of the site, but then – you know what – it got even larger, so now it’s stuffed like an embarrassing piece of furniture in the attic of my site:
Who’s afraid of community participation?
The most interesting aspect about discussing “UK weblogging culture” is how uncomfortable people seem to be with the concept of being part of a “community” at all. Perhaps more fascinating still are the assumptions of what participating in a community involves…
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A screen-cap from earlier today…
Taken by young Jamie Cronin, this screen-cap from earlier today will forever preserve the day when the train from London-South Wales was delayed by a large inflatable hamburger on the line…
There’s a fascinating post about the emergence of the UK Weblogging Community at notsosoft.com at the moment. One of the tools that has strengthened relationships between UK-based webloggers (of which there are several – pubs being a significant one of them) has ceased to function – the GBlogs Update Tracker has shut down so that its creator can concern herself with (considerably) more important creative work. But does the removal of a tool signal the end of a community project? And was UK Weblogging’s emergence as an active and vibrant interconnected community ever a project?
The most interesting aspect about some of the debate that has ensued in the responses to Meg’s post is how uncomfortable people seem to be with the concept of being part of a “community” at all. Also fascinating is the assumptions of what participating in a community involves. The assumption seems to be that being a member of a community is something chosen, something that involves heavy participation, and something that requires each of its participants to be friends with one another and socialise.
These aspects of participation are almost held up as spectres – huge achievements that one would have to wish to overcome in order to participate. I can’t tell whether it’s because we’re English or because we’re bedroom-bound webloggers that being part of such a community seems to terrify so many people. It could be just the reification of individuality that has brought us to this place. But I think it’s unfounded. And I think it’s unfounded because this sense of community is artificial and overblown…
Let’s look at a couple of examples – when people talk about the local community of people in a village do they mean that (1) they all go drinking with each other all the time, or (2) that they are familiar with each other’s existence, may know each other (sometimes only by several degrees of separation) and share a vague vested interest in their local environment? I would contend it’s the latter. And when people talk about the ‘gay community’ or the ‘Jewish community’, they’re not referring to individual social groups of friends, but instead to a roughly shared set of goals, aspirations, interests or cultural principles.
In web circles, community has come to mean different things. Mostly we think of specific sites or services designed to create communities, like Habbo Hotel, Metafilter or Barbelith. If we push ourselves we might extend this to Usenet groups or even Instant Messager communities or e-mail. But fundamentally these are tools for helping communities to germinate, develop and extend themselves – not the communities themselves. Just as the communities themselves are not necessarily defined by drinking with one another, or by believing exactly the same things. Do all members of Metafilter go drinking with one another? Do they all participate to the same extent?
In fact what community represents, what community is is something much looser than a definition surrounding the activities that the members undertake with one another or the tools that they use to communicate with one another. These can be sidelines in fact – at best, they strengthen the bonds – maybe they make possible communities between people who would not be able to form them otherwise. But that’s all…
I do consider myself a member of a community of UK webloggers. And I feel that way because we all have something in common – a shared experience maybe, or a desire to learn from one another, an interest in other people who validate our ‘hobbies’ or maybe it’s just because what matters to one of us is more likely to matter to other ones of us. I don’t share my politics or my sexuality with many of these people. Nor my gender, many of my interests, my ethnicity or my obsession with Buffy.
I also consider myself part of an online community of webloggers in general – an ever-growing group of people who share certain things with me, including the fact that they might be at home writing a huge post at eleven o’clock at night, or that they feel a need or a desire to express themselves.
I also consider myself part of a community of gay webloggers, and gay people on the internet in general, and in fact gay people in general. And then there are the communities surrounding the issues of design that I’m interested in. And the communities of people who are interested in Buffy.
Some are communities which manifest themselves through geographical proximity, closely shared values, friendships, sex even. With other communities there will be none of that at all – simply a shared characteristic, or chromosome, or interest.
We’re all members of hundreds – thousands even – of different overlapping communities all the time. Some are tiny, some are huge. Some are more important to us than others, but all are important to an extent. And it’s nothing to be ashamed of!
I’ve been re-reading a little book on Baudrillard because it’s the only thing that fits in the pocket of my brand new coat (excessive money spent – we’ll say no more about this). In it I’ve stumbled upon a section about Baudrillard’s relationship to history and his debt to Nietszche that really appeals to me. It goes like this:
Friedrich Nietzsche, in his Unfashionable Observations of 1874, criticised historical inquiry in his time for making the present look just like another episode, and the creative acts of individuals humble by comparison. It burdened individuals with more knowledge than they could absorb; it encouraged a resigned relativism because change implied that the present was unimportant; and it generated irony and cynicism because it engendered a sense of late arrival…”
When I was doing my doctorate I got really excited by a passage in Forster’s Maurice – it’s a fairly iconic passage used in a lot of scholarship in a fairly throwaway fashion. In it, the character of Dr Cornwallis, teaching young undergraduate men (including our hero) says of a piece of translation that they are about to undertake, “Omit: a reference to the unspeakable vice of the Greeks”. I remember thinking this was extraordinarily radical considering how we now approach history. Current academic practice is one of dislocation – people in the past were nothing like us. They are incomprehensible to us by the standards that we generally operate by, and we have to hygenically and distantly analyse their behaviour with none of the emotional outbursts and resonances that we might use to examine contemporary matters.
This is considered true in basic historicist approaches, but even more true in historicist approaches to literature, where the assumption seems to be that one of the implicit acts of criticism is some kind of model-making of the minds of the audience (or author) of a work. Only by understanding the people do you understand the work. Personally I always thought this was a highly dubious intellectual move – particularly when undertaken in an absolutist fashion. Too many questions emerge from this kind of behaviour: Whose is the mind? Who does it represent? What about divergent readings from the period? Does it idealise a particular kind of reading or intepretation? Is the mind that we use to understand the text simply itself generated by us from the text itself?
Similarly there are problems with a complete lack of historicism, of course. It would be delightful to think that one could try and force a modern mind through a text without any historical information whatsoever, in such a way that they were encouraged to think about the text purely in terms of contemporary society – but it’s simply not possible. The mind constructs a fictional world as it reads – it contextualises, it tries to fit disparate and apparently nonsensical elements together. The practice of reading a work removed from historical context is simply an exercise in the conceptual reconstruction of that period. And this is never more true when you’re thinking about texts in other languages, where even basic comprehension the text requires a reconstructive leap.
So why is the statement in Maurice so challenging? Because it amounts to a statement that texts from outwith your cultural frame of reference aren’t just there to be examined analytically and distantly, nor even merely to undermine your assumptions of ‘normality’ and push you towards total moral relativity. Instead they can have very real and potent social and political effects. They are inevitably political, weapons / devices with no function other than to stimulate, entertain and use in argument and discussion to forward a case, a goal, a political end…
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Doonesbury Day Two…
This is going to get old quite quickly I think. Not the cartoons themselves, but the fact that I’m planning to link to the new one each day for as long as they’re about weblogs and weblogging: Doonesbury Oct 22 2002.
So what does it mean when weblogs get into Doonesbury? Are we still radical (if we ever were)? Are we established now? Must the world bow down and worship those (me) who have been weblogging for a very very long time? Is Oprah next? As Murray Lachlan Young once said about fame – “Who’s my guru? Where’s my hamster?”
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In praise of skies…
You don’t get to see a lot of sky when you live in a city like London. For the vast proportion of the time the sky is an adjunct to your life. It’s outside your frame of reference. It’s barely relevant in fact. It’s the thing above the buildings, but only because there’s got to be something above the buildings. For the vast proportion of the time you’re surrounded by walls.
I feel different when I’m in the country now. There’s more sky there, and it tends to take centre-stage. I’ve come to love the sky since I’ve lived in London – because I miss it, I suppose. Sometimes you catch glimpses of it – the sun sets down Oxford Street when you’re standing near Holborn, and the walls become a frame for the sky for a moment. I feel like I’m straining my neck. In the country, the sky pushes down on the earth. It keeps everything in perspective. How can things seem important when there’s streams of colour in every direction as far as the eye can see? And the clouds hang in strips, or build like islands. And the sun ruptures through it all.
One of the most transformative experiences of my life was to do with skies. I was driving towards Bristol from London and it was raining everywhere. It was just before sunset, but it seemed like the night because the clouds were so thick. The air was more water than air and it was very difficult to see anything. And then for a few moments the sun came below the level of the cloud, and the sun was pink and red, and literally everything turned pink. The clouds lit up pink from below in all directions, the road was wet and reflected pink upwards. Every particle of water in the air caught the light and glinted and flashed. It was probably the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen in my life.
When I went to Los Angeles to see Kerry and Sean, we went to the pier. And we saw Tyne Daly from Cagney and Lacey. And there was a man on the pier with a bubble-blowing machine. And when the sun set over Malibu, I think I nearly cried because it was so beautiful. And I think Sean and Kerry thought I was a bit soft, or a bit insane.
There are times in the city when the buildings seem to high, they seem to block out the sun too much. They get in the way. Then the things that happen around us lose their perspective. They grow out of proportion. They’re huge. Their shadows are huge and cold. And then the relationships that have frayed and fallen apart seem spectre-like, inhuman. And the future seems formless yet empty – like it’s on a reel or tape loop, like it’s the skipping sound of a CD gone wrong. And then you take comfort in your friends, such as they are (or great as they are), and wait for something new to happen.
I saw Gideon and Nick today. We shopped for coats. I talked to Matt Webb over AIM, and met up with Kelly to celebrate her birthday. I met four new people today. Two were women, two were gay. I spoke to Danny on the phone, and tomorrow we’re going to see XXX. And I e-mailed my other Nick to see if he wanted to join us. And then there was the text message conversation with someone I’ve only recently been back in contact with. I’ve got a presentation to prepare and a sitting-room full of cold curry and empty drink cans. And a younger brother who means more to me than anything else in the world.