How about a nice game of Plomley?
Sep. 23rd, 2004 07:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hirezThe problem with friends-lists (and Orkut and...):
In their current version, social networks are a performance device. We construct our identity in terms of other people. We collect friends and communities to signal who we are, what we believe in. We pad our blogrolls with people that we admire. These signals say a lot of things, but they do not say anything about our actual social network - our trust relationships or information flow.
(Referenced in this fine article by the estimable Joel Spolsky.)
Meanwhile, here's a section from David Toop's 'Haunted weather' that rather struck a chord: (as it were)
Like Patrick Pulsinger's unrealised ambition to encase acoustic musicians in a soundproof glass box, or the confrontation of digital and corporeal at Heights Gallery in Tokyo, this Berlin concert presented me with a symbolic encapsulation of some of the challenges now affecting live music. What remained unresolved was the reason for those challenges and the way in which live music might adapt to accommodate them. Based on my experiences as a fan, as a concert reviewer and as a performing musician, I had begun to feel that live music was anachronistic. Concerts continue to flourish, of course, but too many of them are content to be signposts to the past: musicians twenty or more years past their best, bands re-formed to feed the illusory nostalgia of an audience too young to be aware of them the first time round, the stubborn endurance of the pre-20th century classical repertoire, copy bands selling fakes of U2, Abba or The Doors in the absence of the originals, 'classic' jazz and rock groups recreating past eras with young substitutes depping for the dead or otherwise indisposed stars, new bands copying old bands or playing music so perfected and dominated by control systems that the audience might as well be watching DVD. As the adverts used to ask (somewhat optimistically, since this was analogue cassette tape under discussion), is it live or is it Memorex?
If that gives anyone the impression that I'm likely to be found listening to improvised concerts given in builder's yards in a thoughtful and Jazz Club manner, then that would be substantially correct.
In their current version, social networks are a performance device. We construct our identity in terms of other people. We collect friends and communities to signal who we are, what we believe in. We pad our blogrolls with people that we admire. These signals say a lot of things, but they do not say anything about our actual social network - our trust relationships or information flow.
(Referenced in this fine article by the estimable Joel Spolsky.)
Meanwhile, here's a section from David Toop's 'Haunted weather' that rather struck a chord: (as it were)
Like Patrick Pulsinger's unrealised ambition to encase acoustic musicians in a soundproof glass box, or the confrontation of digital and corporeal at Heights Gallery in Tokyo, this Berlin concert presented me with a symbolic encapsulation of some of the challenges now affecting live music. What remained unresolved was the reason for those challenges and the way in which live music might adapt to accommodate them. Based on my experiences as a fan, as a concert reviewer and as a performing musician, I had begun to feel that live music was anachronistic. Concerts continue to flourish, of course, but too many of them are content to be signposts to the past: musicians twenty or more years past their best, bands re-formed to feed the illusory nostalgia of an audience too young to be aware of them the first time round, the stubborn endurance of the pre-20th century classical repertoire, copy bands selling fakes of U2, Abba or The Doors in the absence of the originals, 'classic' jazz and rock groups recreating past eras with young substitutes depping for the dead or otherwise indisposed stars, new bands copying old bands or playing music so perfected and dominated by control systems that the audience might as well be watching DVD. As the adverts used to ask (somewhat optimistically, since this was analogue cassette tape under discussion), is it live or is it Memorex?
If that gives anyone the impression that I'm likely to be found listening to improvised concerts given in builder's yards in a thoughtful and Jazz Club manner, then that would be substantially correct.
