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New Post on the Archivist

Posted on 3 September 2010 | No responses

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Visual Music Collaborative

Posted on 16 August 2010 | No responses

Visual Music Collaborative 2010 from Aaron Meyers on Vimeo.

Now

Posted on 16 August 2010 | No responses

I’ve been re-reading William Gibson’s last novel Spook Country in eager anticipation of it’s sequel Zero History, which is due out next month. Spook Country was the loosely related follow-up to Pattern Recognition, which will always and forever remain one of my favorite novels of all time.

Gibson is one of the few authors I will return to again and again to read and re-read, if for nothing else that his prose eludes comprehension the first time around. Each novels feels a bit stream of conscious and possesses a lucid quality. They are very contemplative in their pace, which he uses to pull in all manner of peripheral commentary on the fateful trajectory of our present future. They disorient you momentarily and then jerk you awake suddenly with a sly mixture of velocity, gravity, and the Now.

I first encountered Gibson in the way many fans do, through Neuromancer, which was given to me out of the blue back in 1998 by a Frenchman that had befriended me during my stint as a snow bum in the Colorado Rockies. I was recovering in the hospital from a snowboarding accident actually, and this guy (who was also quite keen on Moebius btw), insisted that Gibson’s world would take my mind off my circumstances. He could not have been more right. Neuromancer completely transformed my imagination. I have generated my own illustrations and my fiction writing out of the imaginary mental space that novel implanted within me in one variation or another ever since.

So as I eagerly await Zero History, I have been thinking much about the backdrop that seems to be fueling Gibson’s stream of consciousness coming out of Pattern Recognition and Spook Country and into this new novel. He mentions in a recent blog post that some fundamental shift seems to be well underway in terms of our collective attitudes toward the future (that is future with a capital- F). Apparently he is recognizing that we are becoming less interested in latching on to grand visions of our future. We have less confidence that it will be any one way or another and are increasingly sure that it will look nothing like any grand vision we have previously concocted, or will be able to muster. There will just be more “stuff” happening. And likely as we live out of that awareness, what will begin to solidify in the way of general attitudes, is more of an acceptance and embrace of living in the constant Now.

And I must admit that as I peer out at the prevailing attitudes and attention spans of teens these days I could not agree more. It is increasingly becoming a matter of sheer serendipity when and if younger people take any interest at all in older intellectual distillations from within the various disciplines, working to build off of them as sound and authorized foundations that are valid and necessary to inform our present and our future. It just is not as stimulating as receiving the moment. Perception and attention and analysis is becoming much more real-time, and new generations are sharing only the briefest of intellectual distillations, and these via wildly dissonant and unconnected ways.

In our new paradigm of ubiquitous social media I think we are resurrecting something approximating an oral culture, but one that is not at all intentionally enclosed, protected, or invested in maintaining close-knit bonds of community for the sake of shared knowledge, understanding, and preservation of culture and ways. There may currently be something approximating a default to such behavior if we are to believe Ethan Zuckerman’s take on the culturally silo-ed early stages of these new vehicles of exchange, but it is more a hidden and unquestioned consequence of the corporate media’s hold on our Weltanschauung than anything concerted at the individual or social level toward curating the invaluable threads of meaning across a shared time and space.

Rather, our current new media transmission of cultural artifacts bears all the shiftiness of meaning for the sake of raw short-term control and utility that orality lends itself to. Constant disruption of truth to influence. But influence for the sake of…what? Influence? I don’t think we know just yet, and if Gibson’s inklings are correct we may be subject to a long quotidian of not knowing.

As a lover of history and the role of cultural memory in various societies, I find that as time goes by, my primary responsibility to the past appears to be trying to understand the transforming approaches that people are taking to it. I could very easily lament the general decline in young peoples’ interest in the past, but it is far more interesting to me to just try and make sense of how this trend of giving way to a seemingly interminable Now paves the way to other sources of meaning for orienting ourselves.

I’ve told myself time and time again to avoid becoming the stereotypical old man that has nothing better to do than harp on the way that the younger generations are sending the world to Hell in a hand-basket. And furthermore, as long as I have nurtured the importance of researching the past to make better sense out of the present, I have never been able to point to very many meaningful examples of how this search has had any net impact on avoiding the repeat of so many of history’s tragedies…which used to be the original point of looking backward in the first place right? This is and always has been due to a fundamental breakdown in social communication due to the prioritization and imperative of the Now anyway, right?

So, folks will excuse me if this cultural memory buff takes a warming to Gibson’s observations. He’s not the first to point them out, but he’s the one who has my attention right Now.

Make Some Waves

Posted on 4 August 2010 | No responses

A number of posts back I mentioned the importance I was feeling for cultural memory workers and the institutions that they serve (libraries, archives, museums, historical societies, etc.) in ‘Becoming Curators of Concern.’ By which I meant that we should be actively fostering an ‘informed and active citizenry’ that engages with the health of their communities, their states, and their nation through focusing on the core issues of democracy that our communities, states, and nation are clearly struggling with: the erosion of civil rights, increasing poverty, discrimination, broken judiciaries, embarrassing education systems, among so many other issues.

Naturally this is encouraging such institutions to get off the fence in many ways, stop being passive curators of pop-culture artifacts (which albeit have their own inadvertent redeeming potential), and develop an agenda that quite honestly should be a no-brainer, but that as yet they often fail to live up to fully. I am talking about these institutions taking a much more overt role in promoting civics and democracy in their communities. And I think there are lots of simple and creative ways that different institutions can do this in more proactive ways.

I’ll start with public libraries in today’s post and will talk about other institutions in future posts.

I’m not aiming to be exhaustive and revelatory here, so I’ll just throw out one obvious example of a way that I see our public libraries being able to do a more programmatic job of encouraging an engaged citizenry. Starting with facilitating local media fact-checking. And I don’t think this needs to be a head-on sort of battle. I mean let’s face it. I’m not naive. If a local public library were to specifically call out local newspapers or regional news corpse to do a better job of what they typically do a piss-poor job of…namely digging up dirt and inconsistencies on local candidates and exposing biased economic initiatives, then the local library director would find themselves on the curb in no time.

But there is nothing stopping lower-level librarians from highlighting and underscoring to their Public Relations Director, their Outreach Coordinator, their Circulation Supervisor, and yes the Director, the need for their library to take a more active role in promoting citizens’ awareness of their individual roles in ensuring accurate and revealing journalism on broad levels.

I mean, let’s face it, librarians craft displays all the time for the promotion of relevant and popular topics (far too often of faddish fluff). Why not start with the topic of Citizen Journalism and New Media, for which there is simply no shortage of provoking literature these days. It’s an inspiring theme. Run with it!

Here are some good titles to build out from (please use your local library catalog and/or ILL to locate and procure):

We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People, by Dan Gillmor

Public Journalism 2.0: The Promise and Reality of a Citizen Engaged Press, by Jack Rosenberry and Burton St John

The Death and Life of American Journalism: The Media Revolution that Will Begin the World Again, by Robert W. McChesney and John Nichols

American Carnival: Journalism under Siege in an Age of New Media, by Neil Henry

And then couple it with some activism. Reach out and rope in some guest speakers who can talk candidly about the transformations taking place in the world of journalism, and the ways that social media, online connectivity, and digital technologies are making it easier for everyday citizens to gain access to pivotal events and expose their discoveries to broader audiences. Encourage them to speak pointedly to attendees about the general ways in which this might be able to apply to improving access to local information and about the responsibilities (sources and willingness to disclose) that accompany such dissemination. Hold some follow-up displays and bring in guest speakers (particularly to youth) that can discuss topics related to the practical use of  social media as general tools for self-expression. Powerful and catalyzing stuff!

Remember…you are not changing a damn thing in the world if all you are doing is buddying up and playing it safe when it is most convenient for you (i.e., staying silent and playing the game). Make some waves. Stir $#!t up!

We Need Global Curators

Posted on 28 July 2010 | No responses

Ethan Zuckerman on Global Media

Would You Ask This Man For His Papers?

Posted on 25 July 2010 | No responses

Write Your Representatives Today and Make Sure this Abhorrent Legislation Does Not Spread to Your State

(feel free to pilfer and tweak the letter below that I just sent)

Don’t let our state become Arizona

Dear [Representative],

I am writing to express my outrage about the bill that was just signed into law in Arizona. It invites and virtually compels racial profiling, and I don’t want such a law to spread to my state.

Among other flaws, the law requires every police officer in Arizona to ask people for their papers based only on some undefined “reasonable suspicion” that they are in the country unlawfully. To avoid arrest, citizens and non-citizens will effectively have to carry their “papers” at all times.

By signing this bill into law, Governor Brewer has threatened the civil rights and liberties of millions of people living and working in Arizona. She is forcing every police agency in the state to divert scarce resources away from promoting public safety and solving serious crimes.

It is discriminatory, unfair and inconsistent with the U.S. Constitution and comes at a high cost both to Arizona taxpayers, our treasured civil liberties, and simple human decency.

Quite frankly, the most frightening aspect of this legal setback is that Arizona is increasingly approximating the behavior of history’s worst examples of a police state, around an issue that invokes racial discrimination no-less, and this is now beginning to spawn similar efforts elsewhere. As a graduated student (with honors) in the history of the social rise of radical racial politics in Nazi Germany, you’ll beg my pardon if I absolutely refuse to allow the spread of this kind of legislation to my state. And I would urge you to become a stalwart national advocate to pressure Arizona to repeal this legislation and pursue a more admirable and constructive approach to illegal immigration.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

“The Weapons of War Must be Abolished…Before They Abolish Us”

Posted on 3 July 2010 | No responses

Sign the Global Zero petition!

New Post on The Archivist

Posted on 27 June 2010 | No responses

Check it Out!

Posted on 25 June 2010 | No responses

New Post on The Coastal Cultural Contemplative

Posted on 18 June 2010 | No responses

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