In an hour or so of introspection yesterday evening I asked myself what my blog is actually for. I think my motivation is mainly curatorial. I regularly read the blogs listed at the left and find perhaps a few items each week which really resonate, either professionally or personally. They are my own choices, representing my own perspective.
For many years I have copied these stories into a folder pretentiously titled Research – it now bulges with over 1,500 documents and has since October 2002 added up to over 450MB.
So if I now decide to share this material via a blog it is in the assumption that my own perspective might be also that of others who might be glad to find in a single feed stuff from quite an eclectic variety of sources. And if my view of the world we live in – particularly as related to the media – provokes some to consider my perspective, even if they don’t share it, then surely this is what curating is about.
There are blogs which have that effect on me. Henry Jenkin’s insights do not always correspond to my own view of the future of media. But the Director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program provokes me to consider the futures (plural) of media and thereby leads me to new discoveries. The following quote comes from him.
“The media landscape will be reshaped by the bottom-up energy of media created by amateurs and hobbyists as a matter of course. This bottom-up energy will generate enormous creativity, but it will also tear apart some of the categories that organize the lives and work of media makers...A new generation of media-makers and viewers are emerging which could lead to a sea change in how media is made and consumed.”
What is more ‘bottom-up’ than a blog, the lone voice of an expat on the shores of the Arabian Gulf?
Being an expatriate implies distance from home. I do not have a house or flat in Europe but there are five cubic metres in a warehouse in Germany which contain belongings which I didn’t bother to bring out here to the Emirates. These personal effects include two or three folders – not, in this instance, digital but cardboard and filled with paper, pages torn out of magazines.
I must confess that in the era before the internet I was a magazine addict. My entry drugs, encountered at the impressionable teenager years, were surprisingly available at an international newsstand in Dallas, Texas. Then when I moved to London at the start of the Swinging Sixties my need was satisfied at the legendary Soho newsagents, Moroni’s. Cahiers du Cinéma, Continental Film Review, Life, Look, Show Magazine, Harpers Bazaar, Playboy (occasionally), Elle (rather more often), Architectural Digest.
Tearing pages out the accumulated magazines was a ritual which took place every time I moved from one flat to another (this was the decade of the ‘moonlight flit’) and needed to reduce the weight of my baggage.
What did I keep? Layouts by Marvin Israel, Henry Wolf and Peter Knapp. Photo spreads by Avedon, Hiro and Art Kane. I didn’t clip many texts, except for a few from the New Yorker, until Rolling Stone and Interview appeared. (I should never have loaned the pages of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas to that hippie in Zurich!)
My folders in the Munich warehouse must contain at least a dozen covers of Twen. There are even complete copies of very slim publications like Friendz, International Times and others, the mere naming of which would be “inconsistent with the religious, cultural, political and moral values…” of the country I now live in.
I think my addiction to magazines tailed off when I moved to Germany from Paris at the end of the seventies. Maybe I had less leisure time, certainly less disposable income. And maybe the eighties was not a memorable magazine decade, at least in the mainstream. Face and I-D were brilliant – how many who raved back then about Neville Brody would have imagined that he’d ever be recruited to re-design the august newspaper The Times (which I saw for the first time yesterday)?
These folders just grew and grew. Occasionally there was a ‘weeding out’ (Playboy centre-folds ceased to be iconic, somehow). Sometimes there was the urge to find a particular article or photo spread – this usually resulted in hours enjoyably wasted in reflective browsing.
And now… Yes, now I realize that I have been making selections all my life, battling information overload by choosing and saving the bits I find relevant, interesting and valuable.
When I am re-united one day with my five cubic metres of stored artifacts I fully intend to scan those clippings and tear-sheets and blog them; to create my own digital gallery of curated content.
Not an original concept, of course. Nokia calls it ‘life caching’, the MySpace generation treat their pages like virtual scrap-books. As NBCs Beth Comstock said: "Content may still be king, but the monarchy has been overthrown, and it's been overthrown by YouTube, MySpace, iTunes. It's the invasion of the pronouns in a world all about me."
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