Monday, 28th November, 2005

Lecture Notes

Bugger. Reality

I should point out here, before I even start on this, that this might end up being a bit weird. I've a vague notion in my head that seeing as Postgraduate students are, by their very nature, mature and sensible beings, that I might just end up using myself as an example in what I'm doing tomorrow night.

In which case, they're going to see this.

Hi Dave. Hi Pete. Hi Ben. /me waves.

(Ben is now staring at me. How off-putting)

See, the thing I have very intention about talking about tomorrow night, is how different the general perception about "the web" is to those of us who live on it.

To some extents, most of the world is stuck in the idea of the HomePage. For a lot of people, the development of the internet stops with Geocities.

But it's come a long way since then.

Now, maybe I'm being a little unfair here. Maybe, perhaps, my disdain for The Public At Large™ is exactly the thing that will be my undoing one of these days, but in my experience, when I talk to people about the "Online", I'm usually met with either blank faces, or some kind of mismashed perception that has its roots in a William-Gibson-Cyberspace meets Information-Superhighway ball of cliché

In general, when I talk to art students about doing things "Online" (which I will be capitalising and putting in inverted commas for the entirety of this post BTW), the immediate response I get runs alongs the lines of "I want to make a website so I can put my work online and then people will look at it and then buy it and then comment on it and I will be famous and rich".

I dunno. The idea of the web as somewhere you "put" things is dead, IMHO. The "publishing" metaphor is irrelevant, I feel. It has a publisher->consumer attitude that I don't feel applies anymore.

Let me try and use myself as an example here.

This isn't a website. Really, it's not. It's a conversation.

If it were a website then it would be more akin to a monologue — but that's not the point of it.

It was really interesting talking to Miss K about one or two things this weekend. Not least the discussion we had about the completely different ways we approach this webloggin' malarky.

She thinks about what she writes. She takes time to read through, correct spelling, prepare ideas — that sort of thing. As a result, her writing is beautiful. Every post she makes is a carefully woven tapestry of text. Whether she's reminiscing about her band, or just throwing a short clump of links out there, you know that she's agonised over each and every word. Each and every punctuation mark.

Me? I just sit at the keyboard and go Bleurrrrrrrrgh.

K writes. I talk. That's the difference.

See, for me, there have been one or two moments of utter revelation in the history of this weblog (nearly 4 years — I'm thinking of having a party BTW). The two key moments, in the context of what I want to talk about specifically, are (a) the day I wrote the first part of the script, and (b) the day I wrote the comment script.

(There has, of course, been about a hundred other days of either adding to the script, or writing new scripts — but I'll gloss over them for a second)

The first one, is perhaps, the most significant — at least in the context of what I want to talk about tomorrow. Up until October 2002, I wrote each diary page by hand in Dreamweaver.

Now personally, I blame Dreamweaver for a lot that is wrong with the web at the moment. See, I have come to the conclusion that there is a perception (you may disagree with me here, but that's OK — you're still wrong) that the web is some kind of proprietary Macromedia format. Almost daily, someone will come up to me and say "I want to make a website, but I don't know/have Dreamweaver. Can you help?"

And obviously, my net-savvy readership, we all know that the web is just text. You don't need a hulking-great monstrosity like Dreamweaver to make a web page. But this "I need software X to make thing Y" attitude is pervasive throughout digital media:

"If I knew Photoshop, I could take great pictures", "If I knew Word, I could write a novel".

And the assumed-relationship between the Web and Dreamweaver is just as estsablished.

But the Web isn't about that anymore. Doing stuff "Online" (told you ) can take many forms — it isn't about putting HTML pages together.

For example, this weekend, a bunch of us went to Birmingham. It was a bunch of people whose main connection was a series of links on a map that I made. It was a bunch of people that even though we might have known of each other through other means, our main reason for attending was because we were linked to (or linked by) someone in a tight bunch of people who use "Online" tools to write about stuff.

And, of course, true to our nature, we recorded such event in various "Online" ways:

K and I were uploading pictures of it as it happened. The minute each of us got back home we all wrote about it. And even before the event happened Becky had set up some resources to pool everything together afterwards so we could all see what went on.

(Nice montage Becks Just out of interest, was that anything to do with what Tom was talking about this morning?)

...

But I'm straying from the point a bit perhaps

Basically, what I'm getting at here is that we didn't all go home, fire up Dreamweaver, and craft a few nested tables to share what happened. We just stuck it "Online".

The way the Web works these days, it's not about designing things — it's about doing things.

This whole weblog is based on a series of scripts I've written over the course of four years, that let me put things here as easily as possible. WHen I started writing, I maybe wrote (if you were lucky) one thing a month. But as soon as I made it easy to write, I started doing it every day.

And this is something that I feel sometimes eludes artists and designers when they start to think about using "Online" forms of expression. They get so involved in the look of something, without really taking much of an interest in what's actually going on in the space, that they get left behind.

...

Of course, I'm probably totally wrong on that one, but before anyone pulls me up and shouts at me for not really knowing what I'm talking about, let me totally change the subject and talk about the other most significant thing that happened in the evolution of this here blog...

Comments. Ah, lovely sweet happy comments

I'm very proud of my comments. I know I say this over and over again, but I still think they're fucking unique. Seriously — someone point me to a weblog that does them the same way as me, and I'll eat my, um, stockings.

But that's not the issue really. The issue is one of interaction and audience.

See, when I first started this, I had no idea who I was writing this for. I suppose I just wanted to get down in some form what went on in my life. But after I wrote the OctoberScript (which it will be hereafter called), I started getting emails and IMs and stuff that hinted that people actually read this shit.

That was an eyeopener in itself, but it wasn't until I wrote the comment script that things got really interesting.

Because that's when this became a dialogue. That's when this became a collaborative space.

And ever since then, this notion of collaboration — and, to a degree, a notion of audience has been very important for me. It's about sharing — and sharing with the specific intent of hearing what else is going on.

And that's (I feel) what makes the Web at the moment so interesting. It's the two-way interaction, rather than the old-style "broadcast" model of publishing. It opens up so many doors to collaboration and discussion — in a way that top-down publishing just can never achieve.

...

I have no idea what's going to come out of the discussion tomorrow. (Ha! "Come out"! ) But I think it might be interesting.

The one two things that I would say though, is that (a) This is not a well written piece, and (b) Tom wrote about this *ages8 ago, and put it better than myself. Damm him.

Glad to see you had an Apocaliptic Saturday Night.

Aye And as usual, April manages to capture my entire night on film...

(Note to self: Add attribution in the morning)

I certainly publish to readers, rather than share with collaborators.

Yes, but you're taking the word "publish" out of the context I was using it in — which is totally my fault for not pulling my head out of a Dreamweaver-based rant, and using words that need more elaboration.

By "publishing metaphor", I was meaning a very print-based approach — with its roots in the early days of the web's attitude that it would replace print-based mediums. I meant "static" perhaps more than I meant "publishing-based".

Sorry.

I guess what I was trying to get across, was the idea of seperating content from structure — but perhaps described in a clumsy way.