Hello there. When I started writing the blog again, I committed myself to a schedule to wit I would write a blog post every other day, and make sure I had a good split between discussing contemporary news, writing reviews on music and views on writing and philosophy and stuff. I guess this counts as stuff but I do apologise for the complete lack of anything resembling fascinating discourse or argument in the next thousand words or so.
In life, things tend to appear in cycles. As we move between boom and bust in the financial front, most things around us tend to move in similar cycles. We move from slickly produced committee-created music in favour of wonderfully earnest “real” “alternative” music. We stop stuffing our minds with popcorn films and watch more frugal artistic fare. Clothing styles change with the tide. To a degree these are financial based: Who would fund overpriced crap in a recession for instance? And as for music, why do people want to hear about people bragging about being so mind bogglingly rich it causes most people to transcend sanity. In the past it's how art and life interlinked: Art fit the needs and attitudes of the people and to a degree vice versa...
The new millennium may have changed that a little bit.
Maybe this is just me looking back, but with the evolution of the internet going far beyond anyone's expectations and its simple far-reaching nature meaning that uprising and protest and world change is increasingly returning to the hands of the people. People in large numbers can incite change, for good or bad. But what has been lost in the midst of riots and uprisings and despots being upturned is the other massive revolution of the internet brought by its sheer scale and vastness; the fact that there is room for all voices to be heard on it in some form. Hell, the very fact you're reading these words proves it, and the media has fought like Canute telling the tide to go back is the fragmentation of the audience. In the past, music tastes being cyclical made sense; you heard music in record shops and on the radio, and so when audiences got bored and turned off, something else would take its place to begin the other step of the cycle. People picked up their guitars, then put them down when they got sick of the earnestness. I use music as an example primarily because the difference between the two cycles is so readily apparent; on one end you have digitised slickly produced music with relatively simple messages appealing to an audience that likes the way the hegemony is treating them, and when people get sick of that, the underground rises; the music of the people gets its time in the spotlight to shine. With the internet, everyone has the chance of getting the best of all worlds; commercialised music thrives but at the same time the individual taste of a lot of underground subcultures gets their chance to be catered for, and it's hard for a usually very single minded set of old industries to get their head around, over 20 years after the internet started to thrive in earnest, they still don't.
What does this have to do with anything, let alone the frustration of creating a blog post?
My point is the internet is everything and nothing in the world and in terms of media and communication has an appeal for all niches. If you want to write tiny messages about your day, you have Twitter and Facebook to suit you. I've heard various stories over the years in typically graceful moderate language of how the internet is ruining language, industry, music, film, literature and pretty much anything else. The arguments typically being given from old industries and folks who are not entirely well versed on the Internet’s great power for communication, and would rather see the locking down and ruination of it than allow the world to change around them. Either the internet will change society to fit, or as many enterprising individuals and small groups have realised, ways to make money on the internet will be found and really the only thing at risk from the internet as it is are the huge monoliths who crow about it.
It's such a shame they seem to be the lawmakers now...
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