Archive for the ‘Web 2.0’ Category
Sunday, February 5th, 2012
Instant blogs were first marketed in the USA in November 2002 under the brand name Technorati. The Technorati platform was founded by Dave Sifry, with its headquarters in San Francisco, California. Tantek Çelik was the site’s chief technologist – obviously they should have used someone else. The fact that Technorati is virtually useless can be demonstrated by the fact that it’s link to the feed from my rss worked for a few months and hasn’t uploaded anything now for more than two and a half years. Technorati’s ranking system is equally stupid and promotes tired and conventional views at the expense of innovation and smart thinking. The content of instant blogs has varied over the years, but with the maturation of Web 2.0 now generally consists of the following:
3 parts bullshit (can be cut & pasted from other blogs).
2 parts worthless opinion (can be cut & pasted from other blogs).
1 embedded video.
Seasoned with lots of pictures.
Mix all together.
Serve on WordPress, Blogger or LiveJournal.
Can be fortified with swear words! Fuck, cunt, motherfucker, shit, etc.
Can be thickened by adding gratuitous insults or spam links!
Instant blogs are on the whole self-referential, narcissistic and not quite vicious or crazy enough to keep me entertained. By way of contrast I’m sexy, seductive and smart! I’ve also gone beyond narcissism to become an ego-maniac on a world historical scale; and I’m so self-referential that my tongue has not only disappeared up my own arse, it has emerged once again from my mouth! No one makes an instant blog the way I do – compare and contrast and you’ll find this one is better than anything else on the net! Sarcasm and irony can only take you half-way there – you also need infinite, absolute negativity. And I’ve got that in spades!
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: Blogger, blogging, blogs, bullshit, cunt, cut and paste, Dave Sifry, fuck, instant blogs, irony, LiveJournal, motherfucker, narcissm, negativity, opinion, rss, San Francisco, sarcasm, self-referentiality, shit, spam links, Tantek Çelik, Technorati, video, Web 2.0, WordPress
Posted in humour, Web 2.0 | 15 Comments »
Sunday, January 8th, 2012
One time British Prime Minister Harold Wilson is often credited with coining the phrase ‘a week is a long time in politics’. When it comes to the internet things move even faster…. but the speed of these changes might be likened to ‘dynamic inertia’ (in both politics and blogging). The phrase ‘dynamic inertia’ has been used to promote the shake weight ‘exercise’ fad of recent years – and appears to have been coined for this purpose. Shake weights were marketed with adverts that featured women grasping these light dumbbell-like objects in their hands and jerking them about with their arms. The infomercials featuring this imagery went viral online because many saw in such hand and arm gestures a connection to onanistic sexual activities. There is now also a slightly heavier shake weight for men. The female shake weight has been marketed as trimming women’s arms and making them slimmer – whereas the manufacturers claim the male equivalent enables men to bulk up (although obviously what are essentially the same set of exercises cannot do both these things)!
Despite spurious claims by those marketing the shake weight, there is no scientific evidence to back up their assertions this expensive branded product is at all effective as an exercise aid. What the shake weight represents is a triumph of marketing over common sense – as do many other recent exercise crazes such as the power plate. Obviously any exercise is better than no exercise, but there are far more effective and less expensive ways to workout than using a shake weight or a power plate. What the people selling the shake weight have usefully done is provide us with a term to describe our current cultural condition. The phrase ‘dynamic inertia’ perfectly encapsulates the political and cultural situation we find ourselves in – which is no longer postmodern but has simultaneously failed to move on from the postmodern. This is a world in which capitalism (and thus official history) can only go backwards – and one where the products of alienated labour are still being falsely presented by our exploiters as having transformed themselves into ‘pure image’.
Obviously the only way to go beyond this post-postmodern condition is through the revolutionary transformation of capitalist social relations. This will be an overflowing in which we’ll be able to realise every aspect of ourselves as human beings, and together enjoy the wealth of this world in a truly collective fashion. Although it will number among the more minor benefits of communist revolution, I will at last be able to dispense with my spam filter, something I currently require to block ‘messages’ such as the following: “Discover The Untold Secrets Used By The World’s Top Cat Trainers To Make Their Kittens Listen To Their Every Command” (link removed). It should go without saying that we don’t want a society of ‘order givers’ and ‘order takers’ (or even one divided into ‘hep cats’ and ‘kittens’), we want a society of equals!
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: alienation, blogging, capitalism, communism, dynamic inertia, exercise, Harold Wilson, hep cats, hype, kittens, onanism, post-postmodern, postmodern, power plate, pure image, revolution, scam, sex, shake weight, spam, spam filter
Posted in advertising, mass media, scam, spam, Web 2.0 | 20 Comments »
Wednesday, December 28th, 2011
I just read through all the reviews of my books on the Goodreads website – and a lot of the negative ones are premised on the retarded assumption that realism is the only valid form for ‘fiction’. I’ll begin with some examples of this from Goodreads ‘reviews’ of my anti-novel 69 Things To Do With A Dead Princess:
J.C. Moylan: “stewart home needs to learn how women think if he’s going to make his protaganist (sic) a woman.”
What a plonker – and dig the lower case spelling of my name, although I doubt this is an e. e. cummings fan.
Likewise, C. Vance: “very few men can write from a woman’s point of view. very few men can write from a woman’s point of view this poorly – especially the first-person recollections of sex. after the narration of her ‘meat curtains’ and his ‘fuck stick’ i was done. inane nonsense with regurgitated lit theory to try to make it seem like legitimate fiction instead of another smut book.”
Which leads us on to the same error made from the opposite perspective by Tess (no surname give) on her Goodreads ‘review’ of Dead Princess: “too many references to pulp fiction get in the way of this book actually BEING pulp fiction, which is what I percieve (sic) as the author’s intentions.”
What I’m actually trying to do is render all genre boundaries meaningless – and not just those between pulp and literature, but also fiction and non-fiction - none of which are actually real, but they are nonetheless perceived as ‘real’ by those in thrall to them. It should go without saying that genres evolve over time, and that what is included in any particular genre also shifts historically. Given that I’m going beyond literature, I’ve no interest in the straight production or reproduction of other genres either. Literature is in part created by its division from pulp, these two categories both conjure up and buttress each other – what I want to do is overflow canalisation of this type. While those who berate me for failing to write realist literature tend to be way more obnoxious when giving vent to their ridiculous opinions, anyone who tries to understand my anti-novels as pulp has also failed to grasp what it is I’m doing (and is therefore unable to pass worthwhile judgements on my books).
Returning to Dead Princess but moving onto another common misunderstanding when it comes to my writing (and, indeed, the work of all those who have grasped that literature is dead), we get this from Alberta (no surname given):
“disappointing… the writing seemed too rote… like he was anxious to get everything down but he didn’t care how he said it. ”
Which echoes but is less explicit than a comment I noticed on a Goodreads review of Steve Beard’s Meat Puppet Cabaret:
Becca “… i think that a book which strays so far from conventional narrative, it should have more exciting language.”
The complaint that I suspect is being made here is that the language isn’t literary – unfortunately many ‘reviews’ on Goodreads are so short and/or poorly expressed that it is often difficult to understand very precisely what the poster is trying to say. That said, I have been told numerous times that I can’t write because I don’t use flowery literary language. Those who make this claim simply don’t understand I want my words to flow so I make my sentences as simple as possible to achieve the effect and ‘meaning’ (or in many cases disillusion of ‘meaning’) I’m aiming at. Mostly complexity in my books comes from a piling up of concepts, not from individual sentences. That said my prose is worked at – you don’t get smooth and rhythmic sentences from a first draft – and obviously I am not aiming for literary effect (since that would mitigate against what I set out to achieve – the supersession of literature among other things).
The problem with Goodreads – and Amazon ‘reviews’ too for that matter - is that many of those who presume to pass judgement on my writing lack the skill and knowledge to do so. A ‘good’ proportion of these would-be ‘critics’ have been brainwashed into thinking that all books should be judged by conventional and hackneyed nineteenth-century literary standards. While I don’t doubt that readers of this type dislike what I write, were they able to understand my books I might yet groove them – but even if after gaining a little relevant knowledge they still loathed my prose, it would be better if they were able to express an opinion about my writing without making complete fools of themselves. Those who’ve never encountered tripped out post-fiction in all its (un)originality – and haven’t yet understood the nature of modernism’s break with realist tropes – aren’t so much reversing into the future as plunging headlong into the past!
Of course I wouldn’t stop these ill-informed bozos from adding their reactionary inanities to Goodreads – after all their failed attempts at putting down my books simply add to my credibility. The question is to what extent we should bother to engage with small ‘c’ conservatives who base their criticisms of 21st century post-fiction on the conventions of nineteenth-century realist prose? They might learn something from us but should they fail to do so, then having anything to do with these imbeciles is just a complete waste of time.
Just in case you want to see it here is my author profile at Goodreads – http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/29676.Stewart_Home.
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: 69 Things To Do With A Dead Princess, Amazon, anti-narrative, C. Vance, canalisation, e. e. cummings, genre, Goodreads, J. C. Moylan, literature, Meat Puppet Cabaret, narrative, post-fiction, pulp, realism, smut, Steve Beard, Stewart Home, writing
Posted in books, Web 2.0 | 26 Comments »
Thursday, December 22nd, 2011
Asserting that ‘we are everywhere’ is probably more convincing than the claim that ‘I am everywhere”. Nonetheless it doesn’t take much suspension of disbelief before I’m able to convince myself that indeed “I am everywhere” – after all, I’ve been billing myself as ‘an ego maniac on a world historical scale’ for years! Recently I stumbled upon someone on Goodreads with my name who has been promoting my books rather energetically over there – unfortunately this Stewart Home can’t possibly be me since he joined the site in July 2007 (whereas I joined yesterday) and he’s based in the USA. My author profile at Goodreads is here.
When I read what other people write about me it can often seem like I’ve been even busier than I actually am. Reviewing my recent White Columns show in the New York Times on on 18 November, Roberta Smith wrote: “A brochure written by Mr. Home explains a lot, if not everything. For that, there is his lavishly detailed Wikipedia entry, which also appears to be his handiwork.” To me the entry in question has an inconsistency which makes it obvious it is a collective effort rather than mine. I suspect that some of the imbalances in the article are the result of other people using Wikipedia to promote themselves. For example, while many of my books and exhibitions are passed over without discussion, there is a bizarre passage about the Evening Falls nightclub (including the fallacious claim that I didn’t read there). Likewise, when I last checked, no one had updated my list of exhibitions on this Wikipedia page to include my recent White Columns outing.
Moving on, I’ve also seen some nutjob using web 2.0 comment facilities to allege that I write my own Amazon reviews…. of course they offered no proof, and had obviously missed the fact that I just don’t take the user generated content on that site very seriously. As you’ve probably gathered by now, way too many of my leisure hours are spent reading about myself for me to have the time to write reviews of my own books for Amazon. Likewise, it will come as little surprise to most of my readers that one of the things I love about the web is the way it allows everyone to turn over their own past – and in some cases rediscover material they’d pretty much forgotten. I didn’t have any images of the Anon exhibition I’d been a part of in Luton back in 1989 until John Wynne posted some photographs of it on his Facebook profile. I immediately snaffled those featuring my contributions and added them to my Flickr photostream – where they look absolutely fantastic in an utterly weird eighties appropriated post-pop art kind of way. Likewise, earlier this year I finally got around to putting an image of my ‘original’ Art Strike Bed onto Flickr, done several years before Tracey Emin attempted to recuperate this particular assault of mine on the sensibilities of the London art establishment.
I could use this piece as an opportunity to write about how I’m attempting to replace the planking fad with a craze for photos of people standing on their head – there are currently a dozen pictures of me doing headstands on my Flickr profile (see if you can find them all). However, rather than banging on about my topsy-turvy online presence, I’m now going to get even more self-referential and obsessive. What I’d like readers of this blog to do is tell me in the comments below whether I used the best possible title for this post, or whether I should have reversed it so that it ran: “Reclaiming my future, occupying my past”?
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: 1980s, 80s, Amazon, Anon, appropriation, Art Strike Bed, eighties, Evening Falls, Facebook, Flickr, Goodreads, headstand, John Wynne, Luton, planking, Roberta Smith, Stewart Home, Tracey Emin, Web 2.0, White Columns, Wikipedia
Posted in books, exhibitions, Web 2.0 | 27 Comments »
Thursday, November 3rd, 2011
“How To Make Money Fast” is just one of thousands of spam comments my filter prevented from being posted on this blog. If the spammer in question actually knew a good way of making money fast, it’s unlikely they’d be telling other people about it. My filter is also repeatedly blocking spam comments from someone offering to write cheap blog posts for me and my readers. This seems to rather miss the fact that I prefer to put my own spin on shit – not to mention that with all the spam that comes my way, I’ve more than enough material from which I can write blogs fast, so I don’t need to pay someone else to do it for me. I could probably spend hours taking the piss out of the spammer offering to add Facebook fans to profiles on that platform… Fake fans aren’t about to bring anyone fame or money… and ultimately it’s more satisfying to engage with people than have them look up to you for no good reason. The star/fan relationship ain’t exactly a groove sensation – and using social media to replicate it online seems to completely miss the point of web 2.o, which is that it should give people the opportunity to interact on a more equal footing.
During my spam deletion process, I tend to pay slightly more attention to those comments offering search engine optimisation services (SEO) and free backlinks, than virtual pitches for lawyers. plumbers, escorts, watches, baby clothes, handbags, diets and designer shoes etc. However I wouldn’t click on SEO cowboy links or allow their outrageous claims to appear on my blog – because they’re likely to lead to some virus infested scam site. What all this bot-driven ‘activity’ ultimately reveals is the desperation among those who think social media is the new Klondike and that they’re about to strike gold. As I’ve said before, focusing on content will ultimately result in getting people to engage with a site – building links may raise you very slightly up some search engine rankings, but it doesn’t necessarily lead to anyone looking at what’s on your pages. Content is still king and ninety-nine percent of the time monetisation is a pipe dream – which is one of a number of reasons why there are no ads here!
If you still want to make money fast you’d probably do better ram-raiding a jewellery store.
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: add Facebook fans, baby clothes, backlinks, blog posts, blogging, bot, build links, designer shoes, diets, escorts, free backlinks, handbags, jewelllery, lawyers, links, make money, make money fast, pitching, plumbers, ram-raiding, search engine optimisation, SEO, social media, spam, spammer, virtual pitches, watches
Posted in advertising, scam, spam, Web 2.0 | 22 Comments »
Sunday, October 16th, 2011
1. These days most of those surfing the web prefer reading status updates to blogs – it takes less time.
2. You can’t see the trees because of the astroturf. Likewise, you’ll get way more link spam than comments from people who’ve actually read your content.
3. If you write something over 800 words in length virtually no one will reach the end.
4. To get a point across you have to keep repeating it, which is boring after a while.
5. No one is interested in what you’ve got to say – not even your mom (although she’ll be monitoring your web activity because she suspects you’re taking drugs and wants ‘proof’ before she confronts you about it).
6. People are conditioned for instant gratification and just click through to a new page every few seconds.
7. Technorati really sucks – the rss feeds they take from blogs like this get screwed around at their end and the posts don’t show up on their site.
8. No one trusts the views of bloggers because of the way PR companies have attempted to manipulate this medium.
9. Sometimes it’s really difficult to even think of ten points to create a formula blog, and you waste an hour on a post instead of getting it done in five minutes.
10. Blogs have gone out of fashion because they are like so noughties.
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: astroturf, attention span, blog, bloggers, click, click through, drugs, formula blogs, instant gratification, link spam, noughties, PR, PR companies, rss, rss feeds, spam, status updates, Technorati
Posted in humour, Web 2.0 | 21 Comments »
Wednesday, September 28th, 2011
My impression is that I’m not the only person to have found that Web 2.0 is proving less interesting these days than it was five or six years ago. I don’t think this is simply because for my social (networking) circle the novelty has worn off. It has more to do with the fact that the web is less chaotic than it was and corporations have learnt how to better use and control social networking. Friendster fell out of favour because it kicked out fakesters (those that refused to use their ‘real’ identities) and it was continually crashing due to lack of server capacity. MySpace allowed people to adopt any online identity they felt like taking – so it appealed to the fakesters, among others. One of the things I liked about MySpace was its willingness to jump on any and every online fad going, which made it more of a culture clash than most other parts of the web – and I particularly dug the blogging features. I’ve detailed my use of MySpace in an article on the main part of this website – http://www.stewarthomesociety.org/praxis/myspace.htm.
MySpace had lots of faults but it was fun for a while. The platform being bought out by Murdoch’s News Corp (via the Fox subsidiary) led to MySpace suffering a slow death, since its old media purchasers had no understanding of what they’d acquired. That didn’t stop the fools at News Corp from messing around with their new toy. Facebook took up the slack, after initially appealing to over-privileged college kids and other conservatives who couldn’t stand the anarchic nature of MySpace; and partly because one of the central features (alongside photo sharing when that was introduced) was the status update – which required less effort than writing a blog. Twitter took the status update and transformed it into pretty much the only feature on its site. Facebook quickly became a place to do little more than post links when the company made attempts to claim ownership of any original content distributed directly from its severs. No one in their right mind would want to give FB CEO Mark Zuckerberg anything too interesting to claim as his ‘copyright’. Facebook’s current revamp looks a lot like a tail-ending of the failed MySpace. Facebook is now being promoted as a place for sharing media. Zuckerberg’s site for college squares and their post-degree clones has always been uptight and preppy, but in recent months the boredom factor there has definitely increased.
I know I’m not the only person in my social networking circles to try out other sites in recent years. I’ve found the take up at Identi.Ca too low for it to work very well for me – although I’m still posting: http://identi.ca/stewarthome. VK might have turned out better for me if there hadn’t already been a number of Stewart Home fakester sites on their servers prior to my arriving there: many users assumed that I couldn’t possibly be running my own profile on ‘their’ site (a corporate Facebook clone but with more than a few toes dipped into the darkweb). VK is most popular in Russia and since my books sold very well in Russian translation, I’m well known there. So I’m plodding on with VK too: http://vk.com/id121464913. I’ve been working with Diaspora alpha but initially went to a pod that didn’t suit me. I’ve just switched to another pod that seems much better: https://diasp.org/people/36032. Fingers crossed that Diaspora takes off once it goes fully public, the potential for something really good is definitely there. I’m at many other places – including of course Google+ – but to take just one example, I can’t even remember the last time I logged in to my LastFM account: http://www.last.fm/music/Stewart+Home. I have managed to post new material at YouTube quite recently (a public reading from one of my books which I give standing on my head): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z70hEvWbaWg. I hope to update my Vimeo profile at some point in the future: http://vimeo.com/stewarthome. The same goes for my site on Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/stewarthome/.
Instead of waiting for a social networking platform that I find viable to either appear or reach its potential, I figured I’d return to blogging here – albeit on a more sporadic basis than in the past. This is in part because I’ve found the current Guardian newspaper series on “How to build a profitable blog” by Andrea Wren completely vile. Rather than opening up the possibilities of blogging, Wren’s series is all about closing them down and reducing web 2.0 to a narrow focus. Viz, her desire to turn ‘creativity’ into money. Wren and her mentor Craig McGinty may or may not make a fortune from their blogs, with some added help from the Guardian series that is boosting them – but most of their foolish followers won’t get a pot to piss in from setting up online sites. It is only by moving away from an obsession with monetisation and hits that blogging can become in any way exciting. Search engine optimisation is so last decade, and I’m still of the opinion that content counts, alongside the quality of interaction between a site and its visitors. I’ve never focused on a single subject to the exclusion of all others either here or when I blogged on MySpace. Unvarying subject matter may or may not deliver a target audience to advertisers, but it is also the road to unadulterated tedium.
Finally – and just in case you’re interested – the revolution in plumbing (and many other areas of design and engineering) is allegedly coming to us all very soon via 3D printing rather than web 2.0. And in recent days as I went through a slew of old social networking sites I’d joined, I found that some had wiped my profiles, but many others remained just as I’d left them when I’d last logged in two or more years ago. That said, the entire Twine platform had disappeared and when I typed their url into my browser I was redirected to the Evri site (who I understand have both bought out Twine and wiped my account from the site they’ve merged into their own). Meanwhile, I was excited to discover my Tumbler profile could be be updated from my new Diaspora account. Other places I’ll start updating again – mostly with links to here – include Stumble Upon, Digg and Delicious (the latter two had both ‘lost’ my old profiles but I set up new ones). As for my WordPress site blog, Live Journal, Blog Spot and Bebo profiles (among many others), I’m curious to see how long they’ll stay up if I never log in again, let alone update them…..
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: Andrea Wren, Bebo, Blog Spot, Craig McGinty, Delicious, Diaspora, Digg, Evri, Facebook, Flickr, Friendster, Google, Guardian, Identi.Ca, LastFM, Live Journal, Mark Zuckerberg, monetisation, MySpace, News Corp, Rupert Murdoch, search engine optimisation, SEO, Stewart Home, StumbleUpon, Twine, Twitter, VK, Web 2.0, WordPress, YouTube
Posted in Web 2.0 | 24 Comments »
Thursday, December 31st, 2009
I’ve already written about my experiences of producing the first season of the Mister Trippy blog at MySpace. It is obviously a little early to write about the second season in any depth since this is its closing post. There is also less need to write about Mister Trippy season two because I’ll be leaving the posts up rather than taking them down as I did with not only with the first season of Mister Trippy, but all my MySpace profiles (to protest about the platform’s support for US imperialism), in Spring 2008.
Having produced posts for the first Mister Trippy season daily, I found it far easier to blog every other day in this second season (except for the first month, which was daily). That said, at exactly a year long, this season was also quite a bit shorter than the first. While the comments remained an integral part of the blog, there were considerably fewer than during the first season. I’d view this as a consequence of hosting season two on my own site rather than a social networking platform, and also because I didn’t concentrate on replying to comments as much as I did during the first season. That said, I appear to have more readers here than when Mister Trippy was hosted at MySpace, but far fewer of them commented and those that did made less comments than on the first season of the blog. From a conventional media point of view, upping both the number and percentage of lurkers is probably a good thing, from a full-on committed to Web 2.0 perspective it probably isn’t so good, although it does make life easier! That said, there have still been loads of great comments containing both solid information and some really way-out humour on the season two blog!
A few facts and figures. Mister Trippy season two ran from 1 January 2009 to 31 December 2009, during which time I posted 193 public entries (including this one). As I write this there are 5,007 approved comments split across these posts. Likewise, between myself and the Askimet anti-spam software 10,207 comments were blocked or removed. All the blocked or removed comments were of a commercial nature. Obviously the number of approved and blocked comments will increase as time goes by, although probably not at the same rate as when I was posting on a regular basis.
I’ve found this blog and the main website to which it is attached a good way of alerting people to information I’m seeking. It has enabled me to locate individuals, unearth facts, and in particular extend my knowledge of my mother Julia Callan-Thompson and her bohemian social circle – as well as my first cousin once removed Ray ‘The Cat’ Jones (a legend for audacious Robin Hood-style thefts from the rich and famous, as well as a successful 1958 prison escape with a subsequent two years on the run). That said, while – for example – I now know that Francois Raymond who exhibited photographs of my mother in 1967 is dead and I have contact details for his brother, I’ve drawn a complete blank in my attempts to nail down the fate of Malcolm ‘Grainger’ Drake.
One of the things I’ve always tried to do on this blog, as well as the main site to which it is attached, is put information online that wasn’t previously available via the web. The pieces I’ve posted about my mother’s circle and Ray ‘The Cat’ Jones are good examples of this. When I began researching my mother’s life there wasn’t a single entry about her online. It is because of my efforts that a search engine request now brings in more than 15,000 results for Julia Callan-Thompson, rather than none (which was the result I got from my early web searches for her). There was material about Ray The Cat on the web before I started blogging about him, but by locating a primary source in the form of Ray’s testament about his life and going back to contemporary press coverage of his exploits, I’ve expanded the range of material available online and shown that recent retellings of his escape from Pentonville Prison completely distort the facts (and that the confusion appears to begin with inaccuracies introduced by Mad Frankie Fraser and his ghost-writer James Morton). However, to see this you’d need to read through all my blog entries on Ray The Cat. My research is ongoing and I revise what I have to say on the basis of what I discover. Putting material online is important, there is unfortunately a growing trend (particularly among the young), to look for information on the web and if it can’t be found there then to assume it doesn’t exist.
My research methods appear to confuse some of those I’ve spoken to, since I’ve had the odd email complaining I’ve not written up a story as the person recontacting me originally told it. I always try to find as many sources as possible for what I write. Sometimes these provide me with conflicting information, and some people even provide more than one version of the same story over a period of time. Using archival records where they are available, and all the oral history I am able to collect, I try to reconstruct events as accurately as possible. This can result in a specific person’s recollection of events being discarded; not because I necessarily think the individual in question is lying – memory can play tricks and the person concerned may simply be mistaken about what happened. Someone claiming to have direct knowledge of something does not automatically make them a reliable source for the subject. I work from all the evidence available to me and sometimes this will indicate (or even prove) that a particular individual’s memory of a specific incident is faulty or fraudulent.
Moving on, I trust that the interest of media professionals in blogging is waning, since it has had a deleterious effect on the activity. There are individuals who take up blogging in the belief that it might make them famous. Although this is unlikely, it doesn’t stop people trying and thus producing narrowly focused blogs with very limited subject matter, or else simply going in for egoblogging. One of the elements of this blog that proved particularly popular with a large swathe of readers were my reports of London art world openings. It would not be difficult to construct a blog around nothing but reports of this type, but for me it would become boring and is therefore to be avoided, despite – or rather because of – the fact that it would lead to me being viewed as a greater conventional ‘success’ than is currently the case.
Likewise, most newspapers seem to have given up on investigative journalism, or even research, and at a time when we need much more of it; clearly it is those with particular interests and specialised knowledge who are far better qualified to do this than so called media professionals, and blogging is a cheap and efficient way for the ‘real’ ‘experts’ – in other words, amateurs like you and me - to gather and disseminate information. I’m not seeing as much research based blogging or other web reportage as I’d like, but hopefully there will be more of it in coming months and years – and far fewer blogs being updated via Twitter feeds. I’d also like to see the majority of bloggers trying a little harder with their writing. While splurging something out is a great way of getting it down, you do then need to rewrite and revise. I’ve always tried to compose my blogs the night before I posted them, so that I could give them a final rewrite in the morning. Too many blogs look like their author hasn’t read through what they’ve posted even once! If you’re not prepared to read your own writing, you shouldn’t expect anyone else to do so either!
In conclusion, while I wouldn’t rule out a third season of the Mister Trippy blog, I’m not committed to doing one either. I’ll just see how things go. For now I’d rather concentrate on other pursuits. I will continue to update the main website to which this blog is attached – check the new additions page if you want to see what is being added. Wow, this may also be one of the least humorous blog I’ve written over the past year, so I obviously do need a break from Mister Trippy!
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: 2009, art world, blogging, egoblogging, email, Frankie Fraser, investigative journalism, jail break, James Morton, Julia Callan-Thompson, London, Mad Frankie Fraser, Mister Trippy, MySpace, prison escape, Ray Jones, Ray The Cat Jones, Raymond Jones, research, Robin Hood, social networking, Stewart Home, Twitter, Web 2.0
Posted in Web 2.0 | 30 Comments »
Saturday, December 19th, 2009
San Francisco based novelist Peter Plate came up in conversation the other night. I was at the launch of the Sara De Bondt and Fraser Muggeridge edited tome The Form of the Book at Art Words new Broadway Market shop, where I ran into some people I hadn’t seen for a while and we started rappin’ about mutual friends. None of us had been in contact with Peter Plate for a year or two and he became the focus of our conversation. While we were still in touch with him, he refused to do anything on the internet: he seemed to see it as a vehicle for police surveillance. Although it can be and is used in this way, it also has other functions and possibilities. So what happens when a contemporary writer not only refuses to use social networking platforms like Facebook and doesn’t have their own website, but won’t communicate by email? Does this give them an overview of the world as it is today, or leave them out of touch with their contemporaries? It’s probably impossible for us to judge that objectively right now, so I’ll leave it hanging… Without forgetting, of course, that Plate may not be ‘in love with today’, and might believe that being out touch with the contemporary world makes him a better writer!
What I can say is that a web search for Peter Plate didn’t turn up too much of interest: a page about Plate and his books on the site of his publisher Seven Stories, the odd review and the inevitable web book retail operations selling his stuff (plus a lot of results for other individuals who share his name). So Plate hasn’t quite disappeared, but he looks like he might join the ranks of the reforgotten. That said, I’m sure I could get a message to him via his publishers and I could almost certainly get his current home address and phone number from someone I know in London, but he isn’t easy to locate and right now doesn’t even have a Wikipedia entry. That said, there are other authors with several books to their name who are active on social networking sites and elsewhere on the web, but who aren’t currently represented on Wikipedia (such as Barry Graham whose entry was deleted in September 2009 for being ‘self-promoting’). My own view is that both Plate and Graham merit Wikipedia pages, but then we all know that particular platform works in mysterious and often non-rational ways….
I haven’t read Peter Plate’s more recent books, but I admire him for his hardcore stance against the net. One thing this certainly does is provide him with is more time to concentrate on his fiction. That said, personally, I enjoy engaging with the twenty-first century world and I appreciate the new horizons the web opens up, while simultaneously recognising that in its current form it certainly has some serious downsides. Does anyone know of anyone else currently active in the culture industry who has never used email or the internet?
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: Art Words, Barry Graham, Broadway Market, contemporary writers, disappeared, dropping out, east London, Facebook, Fraser Muggeridge, Hackney, internet, London, Peter Plate, privacy, San Francisco, Sara De Bondt, Seven Stories, surveillance, The Form of the Book, Wikipedia
Posted in books, culture gossip & parties, Web 2.0 | 19 Comments »
Monday, November 23rd, 2009
On Saturday night I read at Volatile Dispersal, a festival of art writing held at the Whitechapel Gallery. The event proved so crowded and popular that it was hard to take very much in. I found this ironic because after I’d used my FaceBook account to remind people about the event (I list all the public events I’m doing initially on my homepage), among the comments I garnered were the following:
“I like the idea of ‘art writing’; its the best phrase I’ve ever come across (Barry Watten?) to describe the efforts of those of us who spend anywhere between 5 to 50 to 75 hours on one text, which is little more than a page, only to have said text become tucked away appropriately in a ‘slim volume’ which no one in their right mind will pay 10 dollars for when all is said and done… go boy!” Volker Nix.
And: “Yeah Volker, writing that nobody will read, not even if you put it online for free…I used to see that as being somehow radical (and I still kind of do)…but now I think the only real reason for engaging in these practices is simply because you enjoy it (is that somehow radical?)” Robert Chrysler.
There were various events going on in different parts of the Whitechapel Gallery, I was programmed to read in a small upstairs space alongside a whole host of other ‘art writers’, and this segment was curated by Francesco Pedraglio. Since I was on last, I was more focused on getting into the mood for my reading than paying attention to what other people were doing. That said, it is decidedly amusing that some of those engaged in ‘art writing’ are clearly unaware of experimental poetry by the likes of Bob Cobbing, so they are able to cover old ground as if it is fresh (and I guess it is for them, if not me).
What I found particularly curious about the event was that a number of people were participating in Volatile Dispersal who I knew but I managed not to meet on the night. I was able to hear Sally O’Reilly read because there was a speaker system relaying the sound from the room in which I also performed into the adjacent bar – but the event was so packed that I was unable to get into this small gallery for the majority of sessions before mine. I looked out for Sally afterwards but it was so busy it was easy to miss people, and I didn’t ‘see’ O’Reilly at all that night. Others advertised as being present who I failed to clock at all included Babak Ghazi (whose downstairs event clashed with mine) and Laura Oldfield Ford. Yet more, such as Mike Sperlinger, I spotted across crowded rooms – but in most cases was unable to attract their attention before they disappeared.
Among those I did manage to speak to were Crow, Bridget Penney, Bridget Lowe, Katrina Palmer, Maitreyi Maheshwari, Gavin Everall, Jane Rollo, Nick Thurston, Anthony Isles, Jonathan Allen, Benedict Seymour, Maria Fusco, James Brook, Chris Horrocks, Jeremy Ackerman and Hilary Koob-Sassen. I also had a reasonably extended conversation with Rob La Frenais about Toshiba ripping off Simon Faithfull in their current ad campaign. Nothing wrong with plagiarism of course, but Toshiba and the ad agency they used initially claimed this blatant steal demonstrated the commitment of both parties to innovation. Ho ho! La Frenais was telling me corporations can’t get away with this kind of rip-off in the world of Web 2.0 because tweets, blogs and comments on sites like YouTube and Facebook have spread the story around the world and forced Toshiba to backtrack – so they’ve apparently paid Simon Faithfull some wedge to say nothing, and are now claiming the ‘innovation’ was not launching a chair into space using weather balloons (as Faithfull had five years before them) but in using this for an ad! Doh! If that’s Toshiba’s idea of ‘innovation’ then I think I’ll stick to using consumer electronics made by Apple, Asus, Panasonic and Sony (among others) and avoid Toshiba (unless they send me some nice freebies). And BTW, why so few mentions of The Association of Autonomous Astronauts in regard to all this too?
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: Anthony Isles, Apple, Association of Autonomous Astronauts, Asus, Babak Ghazi, Barry Watten, Bob Cobbing, Bridget Lowe, Bridget Penney, Chris Horrocks, Crow, east London, Facebook, Francesco Pedraglio, Gavin Everall, James Brook, Jane Rollo, Jeremy Ackerman and Hilary Koob-Sassen, Katrina Palmer, Laura Oldfield Ford, London, Maitreyi Maheshwari, Maria Fusco, Mike Sperlinger, Nick Thurston, Panasonic, Rob La Frenais, Robert Chrysler, Sally O'Reilly, Simon Faithfull, Sony, Toshiba, Twitter, Volatile Dispersal, Volatile Dispersal: Festival of Art Writing, Volker Nix, Web 2.0, Whitechapel Gallery, YouTube
Posted in advertising, culture gossip & parties, literature, performance, Web 2.0 | 17 Comments »