Soliloquy, Solitude and SOAF
by Richard Lewis
In 2007 we are not short of soliloquy. Indeed, nor are we ever far from it. The mainstreaming of the internet, along with the facility it has given us for instant, worldwide self-publication, has meant that in a few short years, a whole generation has come of age never knowing the hubristic pain of the rejection slip. Never more will your voice -- your unique and special voice -- be censored, patronised or rejected. Unless you live in China, you do have a voice. You can make it heard. You think it, you type it and, in the blinking of an ftp protocol transfer, it is published. Published! In a few short hours your novel, poem, rant, libel or ill-advised bitch about a pop-star you’ve never met is spidered, crawled, indexed, googled and cached. Which means it never really goes away. It remains, preserved for posterity, somewhere on those giant servers, for all to see.
Theoretically. I mean, people still have to want to read it. The proliferation on the web of self-published writing, or “content” as it is now called, has meant the division between the elite, published auteurs and the great unwashed is gone forever. It has been a great leveller and this has given many pompous print media folk the willies. A year or so ago, when newspaper bosses started cacking it that the bloggers would take over and they’d all be out of a job, many papers launched blog sites of their own, where readers could post comments. How democratic. Sometimes, humiliatingly for the hack concerned, and entertainingly for the reader, the IT salesman on his coffee break did a far better job of analysing the day’s events than the journalist. But more often than not these events were often lost amid the excess. Almost invariably, these “comments” were just the self-validatory ejaculations of the erstwhile voiceless asserting themselves. The name of the Guardian’s own site, “Comment is free”, was a comment in itself. Of course it is free. Who would want to pay for all this surplus verbiage?
The mechanics of the blog software are brutal too. Is there anything more lonely than stumbling by accident upon the blog of an unknown and coming face to face with that neatly type-set page of bons mots, each with the date and time of posting, each with the blistering footnote: “Comments: 0”?
Well, yes, actually there is. They’re calling it “Twittervision”. For those of you who haven’t discovered this yet, the address is www.twittervision.com and its model is very simple. With space limited to a couple of lines, you post your thoughts to the site, from a mobile phone or wherever, and they are displayed for [almost] long enough to be read. The site shows a map of the world. It leaps from country to country as little speech bubbles pop up , containing the passing thoughts of the masses, in real time. It could be a masterpiece of installation art, a moving collage of juxtaposed haiku. A searing comment on the human condition. If it is none of the former, I suspect it is nonetheless very much the latter. Here are some posts I picked at random:
At working waiting for my lunch to be delivered. BTW, LOST was awesome last night! 01:17 PM April 12, 2007
Just made Guacamole and grabbed a beer to sit down and watch LOST 09:50 PM April 11, 2007
I’m bored. Wasting time on Youtube 10:54 PM April 10, 2007
Listening to MetroBuzz. trying to decide what candlelight vigil to go to the 7 or 9 one. or both, if i can handle it. umm about 2 hours ago
Just saw gas for over $3 a gallon. Dang it was doing so good for a while. about 2 hours ago
The early adopters of internet technology told us it would bring us together. There is some truth in that. But increasingly, whenever I venture out onto it, I am struck by how terribly lonely everyone still is. The internet, in the main, is making it ever easier to document those plaintive cries into the wind: is anybody out there? We paper authors, of course, already have an efficient way to find out that no one is reading us. But the royalty statement is mercifully infrequent. I’m not sure I could handle the sales figures in real-time.
Which brings me to my point, to which all the above excess verbiage is a laboured preamble. Some months ago, dear Gregor wrote me a personal note to say thank you for commenting on one of his blog posts and asking me, somewhat plaintively I sensed, whether I might like to write something for the site. I had remarked that perhaps the reason so few of us are engaging with the SOAF blog is that it is quite hard to do so. Perhaps, given my comment, my post could be about the relevance of the blog format for what we are trying to achieve, Gregor suggested.
So here’s what I think. The blog is a format for loners. And Gregor is trying to build a community. This is frustrating for him. At present he alone can post and we have to make a decision to navigate to the site, read the post, which he has had to write, and then comment on it. Which is laborious and we are lazy. Added to which, we cannot post ourselves. This actually presents an obstacle to the dialogue Gregor is trying to achieve.
That’s why I think there is a better solution. Yahoo Groups, for example, offers a free way to create a multi-way dialogue. You join the group once, that’s it. A moderator either lets you in or doesn’t, so we could limit membership to SoA/NUJ adherents if we wanted. You post by e-mailing to the group’s address. Your comment is then aggregated automatically by Yahoo Groups to all members, who can elect to receive real-time e-mails, or a daily digest, or just look at the postings on the site, where they are stored. It is as intrusive or discreet as you want it to be. I like this and I think it’s a good way to build an online community. And so I hereby vote that someone else sets it up.
In 2007 we are not short of soliloquy. Indeed, nor are we ever far from it. The mainstreaming of the internet, along with the facility it has given us for instant, worldwide self-publication, has meant that in a few short years, a whole generation has come of age never knowing the hubristic pain of the rejection slip. Never more will your voice -- your unique and special voice -- be censored, patronised or rejected. Unless you live in China, you do have a voice. You can make it heard. You think it, you type it and, in the blinking of an ftp protocol transfer, it is published. Published! In a few short hours your novel, poem, rant, libel or ill-advised bitch about a pop-star you’ve never met is spidered, crawled, indexed, googled and cached. Which means it never really goes away. It remains, preserved for posterity, somewhere on those giant servers, for all to see.
Theoretically. I mean, people still have to want to read it. The proliferation on the web of self-published writing, or “content” as it is now called, has meant the division between the elite, published auteurs and the great unwashed is gone forever. It has been a great leveller and this has given many pompous print media folk the willies. A year or so ago, when newspaper bosses started cacking it that the bloggers would take over and they’d all be out of a job, many papers launched blog sites of their own, where readers could post comments. How democratic. Sometimes, humiliatingly for the hack concerned, and entertainingly for the reader, the IT salesman on his coffee break did a far better job of analysing the day’s events than the journalist. But more often than not these events were often lost amid the excess. Almost invariably, these “comments” were just the self-validatory ejaculations of the erstwhile voiceless asserting themselves. The name of the Guardian’s own site, “Comment is free”, was a comment in itself. Of course it is free. Who would want to pay for all this surplus verbiage?
The mechanics of the blog software are brutal too. Is there anything more lonely than stumbling by accident upon the blog of an unknown and coming face to face with that neatly type-set page of bons mots, each with the date and time of posting, each with the blistering footnote: “Comments: 0”?
Well, yes, actually there is. They’re calling it “Twittervision”. For those of you who haven’t discovered this yet, the address is www.twittervision.com and its model is very simple. With space limited to a couple of lines, you post your thoughts to the site, from a mobile phone or wherever, and they are displayed for [almost] long enough to be read. The site shows a map of the world. It leaps from country to country as little speech bubbles pop up , containing the passing thoughts of the masses, in real time. It could be a masterpiece of installation art, a moving collage of juxtaposed haiku. A searing comment on the human condition. If it is none of the former, I suspect it is nonetheless very much the latter. Here are some posts I picked at random:
At working waiting for my lunch to be delivered. BTW, LOST was awesome last night! 01:17 PM April 12, 2007
Just made Guacamole and grabbed a beer to sit down and watch LOST 09:50 PM April 11, 2007
I’m bored. Wasting time on Youtube 10:54 PM April 10, 2007
Listening to MetroBuzz. trying to decide what candlelight vigil to go to the 7 or 9 one. or both, if i can handle it. umm about 2 hours ago
Just saw gas for over $3 a gallon. Dang it was doing so good for a while. about 2 hours ago
The early adopters of internet technology told us it would bring us together. There is some truth in that. But increasingly, whenever I venture out onto it, I am struck by how terribly lonely everyone still is. The internet, in the main, is making it ever easier to document those plaintive cries into the wind: is anybody out there? We paper authors, of course, already have an efficient way to find out that no one is reading us. But the royalty statement is mercifully infrequent. I’m not sure I could handle the sales figures in real-time.
Which brings me to my point, to which all the above excess verbiage is a laboured preamble. Some months ago, dear Gregor wrote me a personal note to say thank you for commenting on one of his blog posts and asking me, somewhat plaintively I sensed, whether I might like to write something for the site. I had remarked that perhaps the reason so few of us are engaging with the SOAF blog is that it is quite hard to do so. Perhaps, given my comment, my post could be about the relevance of the blog format for what we are trying to achieve, Gregor suggested.
So here’s what I think. The blog is a format for loners. And Gregor is trying to build a community. This is frustrating for him. At present he alone can post and we have to make a decision to navigate to the site, read the post, which he has had to write, and then comment on it. Which is laborious and we are lazy. Added to which, we cannot post ourselves. This actually presents an obstacle to the dialogue Gregor is trying to achieve.
That’s why I think there is a better solution. Yahoo Groups, for example, offers a free way to create a multi-way dialogue. You join the group once, that’s it. A moderator either lets you in or doesn’t, so we could limit membership to SoA/NUJ adherents if we wanted. You post by e-mailing to the group’s address. Your comment is then aggregated automatically by Yahoo Groups to all members, who can elect to receive real-time e-mails, or a daily digest, or just look at the postings on the site, where they are stored. It is as intrusive or discreet as you want it to be. I like this and I think it’s a good way to build an online community. And so I hereby vote that someone else sets it up.
posted by SOAF Chairman at 7:09 AM
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