Showing posts with label digital writing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label digital writing. Show all posts

Saturday, September 30, 2017

An unexpected present.

The present appeared in a tweet from Kentucky.

When I say "the present", I mean that as an antonym of "the absent".

I have a book on my Kindle.

"The attention merchants" by Tim Wu.

I have not taken the time to read it yet.



Amazon cares not.

Amazon counts my clicked clientele.

Twitter cares not.

Educauses care for what?

Those who are "resident" on social media.

Are they really "present"?

Are they really "present" for you?

Are they really only present for your clicked clientele, your likes, your retweets, your plus ones, your node, your gold in their death star?

If I ask these questions, it is because I am sure that we are unable to be really present for others unless we risk leaving a part of ourselves here.

Will we accept being bait for their hooks?

I use the word "they" for those who would deny others lives and cultures respect.

Les absents ont toujours tort.



Charles Perry

Bloody Gold; the California Gold Rush and state sponsored genocide

100,000 California Indians killed during Gold Rush genocide

The absent (minded) are always wrong...


The present appeared in a tweet from Kentucky.

When I say "the present", I mean that as an antonym of "the absent".


I am humbled by Terry's and others' presence of mind, of the care and the attention that he, that they  show.

I sit down and type out my existence...an act of defiance in this alienating wilderness.

The lines, the between the lines are traced and transformed by acts of generosity which make me feel appreciated for whatever I am.

And then I see other tweets

And I feel drawn to those human connections.

And I feel drawn by those human connections.

And I go and turn my thumbs, and look and think.



And then those human connections become


 And that emotional weft which binds us becomes tighter.



Thank you my friends.

This is my present for you.

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Wednesday, February 24, 2016

Bric à Brac.






Footnotes

I was reading a post of Kevin Hodgson which explained why he blogs. 

There was a line which resonanted: "I let myself surprise myself."

I thought that I might want to write a "why do I blog article" but I soon got bored with the idea.

That probably says something about why I blog...or how I blog.

I was curious how a mashup of past blog titles might turn out, particularly if I kept the links.

I was curious how this web of links might connect themes/formats through the titles.

I wonder what a mashup of other bloggers' titles would reveal...

 I wonder what posts people would write if they stole these lines...titles.



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Saturday, November 7, 2015

Impermanence

We are embraced by sound, light, shadow, relationships, emotion,  memory.

We stretch out, we point, we cry, we crawl, we walk, we run, we embrace, we walk, we crawl, we stop.







We surround ourselves with objects: clothes, furnishings, company, weapons, words...

All is in movement, all is in movement.

We stop, we observe, we make connections, we note, we keep for ourselves, we keep for others...

What is monumental, what is iconic, what is sacred, what is mysterious, we worship.

We celebrate our exploits, our kills, our scrapes, our epics.

I am reminded of Mes Emmerdes and a living monument that is Charles Aznavour:



We aspire to meaning, to leaving a mark of our passing.

We are as leaves to the wind, ephemeral, dependent, soon to fall, soon to be raked up. I suddenly remember those Feuilles Mortes of Jacques Prévert.



Those feuilles mortes...



We are constantly looking to beauty to remind us of the height of our summer. 




Those relics, which we embellish as the days shorten.

We are transfixed by those burnished images, fearing to look past a fixed mirror...

Can that really be us now?

What appears permanent, we hold onto desperately, a buoy in an ocean of alienation...

We stretch out, we stretch our for sure footing and to leave a mark, however futile, of our passing.

If I come to write all of this now, it is because I have some dirty secrets...

Behind these lines are the words of others, always the words of others....

Here are pages and pages of the words of others...

There was the writing of Kate Bowles.

I didn't search out her writing alone.  

I followed the traces of someone I trust:


I have been immersed in the conversations of fellow travellers...

I did not discover Walter Ong alone, nor the recorded conversations of Socrates.



I did not start independently to reflect on the nature of books, on the nature of social media alone....

I have been overhearing the conversations of others, and I have reflected...

What is the nature of this writing...this digital writing?

I fell upon an article in a Facebook stream, shared by another that I trust, it reflected on the 'Decay of Twitter', so young and yet prematurely mourned.
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/11/conversation-smoosh-twitter-decay/412867/

We are voracious culture vultures, swallowing icons, likes, kisses, quotes, beauty, terror, horror...

Such is our hunger for distraction.. from our own impermanence.

We erect statues: 

Shakespeare, Leonardo, Gandhi, Callas, Churchill, Monroe...

We protect their higlighted 'memories'.

We prefer to see the objects of our worship thus:

Better dead young
The Lonesome genius.
The rebel with a cause.
The martyr with a stirring soundbite.

Our reality is less statuesque.

What is the nature of our worship of books?

We carefully prop up their memory with convenient authorship, with defenders of the faith...

NO PLAGIARISM HERE.

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2002/04/on-plagiarism/302469/

https://www.ted.com/talks/kirby_ferguson_embrace_the_remix?language=en


Shakespeare.
Dylan.
Elliott.




We hold onto our myths, our stately lines as ships wreck...


We throw up our arms in ephemeral empathy before sinking into drunken stupour.

We find another icon, another golden calf to help in our distraction.

We take the moral high ground with fervour, I am not one of those, I am not one of those, those trolls.

We are above it all...

No we are not.

We are it all.


SMOOSH a word invented in an article already referenced

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/11/conversation-smoosh-twitter-decay/412867/

Discussions with friends...an article concerning Hyperobjects...

http://www.digitalwritingmonth.com/2015/11/05/online-texts-as-hyperobjects/



A question: What is the nature of digital writing?


An article here "Behind the image: Effortless - Essena O'Neill.

http://impedagogy.com/wp/blog/2015/11/06/behind-the-image-effortless-essena-oneill/


Followed by a discussion.

A reflection on loyalty and on the interest of memes...

A laugh which attracted my attention to some words...

"This is not a whole lot better".



A concern of a friend concerning the nature of reality and social media.

A meme.


An article from the Atlantic:

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/11/conversation-smoosh-twitter-decay/412867/

Twitter is in decay...we are in decay....

We are becoming ever more aware of the lies, the more or less savoury social ties behind our images, our icons...our cvs...

We stretch out for ship wrecks...for certificates of conformity, or quality.


We are becoming ever more aware of the lies behind our fixed images, our fixed borders, our icons, our words...

It is not comforting.

Everything is in movement, everything is in movement.

We try to hide our sorrow.

We try to put on a brave face on things...

But we our books are falling apart at the seams.

Navigating our reassuring 'reality' is becoming increasingly difficult.
Our sacred texts are brought down to earth.
There is no magic button.
However frantically we pour out our dismay.




There remains beauty in our digital decay...



We are humbled one and all the same...with the tools which become heavy in our hands.



So heavy in our hands.




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Monday, November 2, 2015

What the hell is digital writing anyway?

So "Digital Writing Month" #digiwrimo has been going on for two days now officially and I find myself spending a fair amount of my time writing by hand.

I spent Sunday afternoon writing with a pen that I found hidden in one of my bags, scanning existing typed and drawn artefacts from files on my shelves and printing them out on paper.




All of this 'hybrid activity' stems from a question that I have been asking: "What the hell is digital writing anyway?"

I can see evidence of this in a serious of tweets that I sent, or retweeted.





And tweets that I favourited:

This connects with work that I had been doing earlier in the year with the question of freedom in this post:
"This is freedom." 

It reminds me of Terry Elliott's animated handwriting that I have been seeing...


It then led to me starting to investigate this more systematically.

"What the hell is digital writing anyway?"

I have started a flipboard magazine to look into definitions of 'digital writing' which will benefit from your help here:
View my Flipboard Magazine.


I finally fell upon a new term: "Post-digital" and a very valuable article here entitled "What is Post-digital?" 

I recommend this article to anyone interested in trying to answer my initial question:

"What the hell is digital writing anyway?"

Heyho!

Digiwrimo has been only going on a couple of days but it is throwing me back towards Orality, Socrates, Printing Presses, Typing, and Punk DIY!

Not bad for a couple of days.

Am now off to post office.





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