I attended the press conference that began His Holiness The Dalai Lama’s trip to Edinburgh yesterday, and was able to ask him some questions. I will be writing up his answers in the next day or two and will post articles on these pages, and hopefully over at The LIP Magazine. Stay tuned.
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As Open Source Media launches as a huge aggregate of blogs, bloggers and journalists, and Tim Worstall’s book hits the shelves, the blogosphere is itself under the spotlight again. We are always told that the media likes nothing better than a story about itself. Perhaps the debates about the future and nature of blogging are a signal of a growing maturity of the medium. Some friends of mine returned from the land of the Pharoahs with a beautiful blue vase. It was wrapped in newspaper, the page covered in curls I do not understand. The box below caught my eye. If a number of possible languages use the same vocabulary; in some of them, the symbol library allows the correct definition a ubiquitous and lasting system of hexagonal galleries, but in other vocabularies library means bread or pyramid or anything else, and these seven words which define it have another value. You who read me, are you sure of understanding my language? So it is with my salvaged scraps of paper, hastily scanned and posted here. Those of you who are bilingual, and would translate them for me: please do not. Yours is only one possible language, and one possible interpretation. There are countless others, locking away their secrets, the ramblings of a people who may never have existed, yet whose history is chronicled meticulously, in some book in Borges Library. The quality of the articles on race and identity at Minority Report is consistently very high, so I have added the site to my blogroll. David’s latest post is titled Overlapping Circles, and highlights the curious world of national sports. A country’s sporting heros are usually its most famous citizens, held aloft as model citizens who exemplify the national character. And yet in the sporting arena, nationality is a very transient quality indeed. Sport takes nationality fairly loosely at the best of times. Or rather, in order to cast the net wide, rules are relaxed. At one time it seemed that to play for Ireland the requirement was only that one of your grandparents had sipped a pint of Guinness. Another stark example of this is in the world of cricket, where many members of the English side have been of Southern African origin (with Kevin Pietersen the notable, recent example). A lament at the talent drain from the Zimbabwean national side forms the beginning of Let’s Talk Cricket from ZimPundit. White players are alienated, if not overtly excluded from the side, as their race becomes increasingly at odds with their nationality (as defined by their government). Those that remain, black and white, are abused and disrespected by the authorities: … if you want an idea of how well a society is doing, take a look at their sports. Pure blue skies. People in anoraks and kilts gather in a traffic island, next to a pub and a billboard that advertises insurance. Vehicles stream past, ignoring the throng.
In a three line post, Cynical Bastard suggests that one day the blog bubble might burst. I wonder what he means by that?
When the dot-com bubble apparently burst, it wasn’t the concept of web-pages that was discredited, or the concept of having a company web-page… or even the concept of doing business on-line. It was merely the idea that money could be made faster and easier online, without the constraints that business traditionally had to deal with. When it became apparent that the same rules of business applied to online services as to the other industries, people stopped over-inflating the value of these companies, and investments were made in a less frivolous manner.
Despite protests to the contrary, blogs can survive without huge financial resources. While many blogs have the ambition to be hugely influential nodes in the network, I suggest that part of the point of blogging is actually being one very small link in that chain. That there are so many bloggers out there can be a strength, not a weakness, because (just like the internet in itself) there is no central point that can be targeted, no bubble to burst and disrupt the system. To continue the analogy: the blogoshere is not a bubble – its a gigantic pile of foam, rising high over the bath-tub.
What might not be sustainable are the larger blog sites. If their size and influence grows, so they become more like the traditional media. The key bloggers (and their researchers) need a salary, and get some office space to manage the expansion, which costs money, which means adverts, marketing campaigns, subscription-only content and copy deadlines. There’s nothing wrong with any of this per se, but the difference between the pigs and the humans will become harder to discern. How long before we hear complaints: “Open Source Media didn’t publish my article, they’re control freaks!” or “Samizdata have smeared me!”. From there, it is a short step to ‘watch’ sites set up just to fisk these blogs… at which point we ask how much of an ‘alternative’ they really are. Perhaps it was better when everyone was alone, and in pajamas.
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I post it on these pages without the faintest idea what it says. It could be a short news report, a sports result, an obituary, a religious edict, or an advert for a washing machine.
My grandmother found the following inscription inside a notebook belonging to her brother, my great-uncle. Apparently the writer was a young Indian man, a student friend, who stayed with the family in Bargoed, in Glamorgan, for the summer.
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It is signed and dated 1937, and we don’t know what it means.
Is it really necessary to find out? I think it could be a shopping list, but my grandmother hopes it is a message of kindness to her brother, from a young man who was shown hospitality in a strange land. My great-uncle was struck down by a heart attack thirty-five years ago.
It is as though these papers belongs to Schroedinger. Someone will be able to decipher them, but for my grandmother and me, the meanings are in our imagination, and perhaps we should keep them that way. Perhaps the true answers will throw up more questions than they solve.
Imagine the Arabic speaker, or the Urdu speaker, who cannot read English. They might stumble across this page, read the images that they understand, and be baffled by the words that surround them. What fantastic meanings might they believe my paragraphs to contain?
In Jorge Luis Borges’ fantastic Library of Babel, he imagines a vast library, which he calls The Universe. It holds every possible combination of letters, every possible book. It is the collected works of the infinite group of monkey typists, complete and unabridged.
Then, at one minute to eleven, the policemen step confidently into the road to stop the traffic. The pedestrians pause and look towards the gathering in the centre of the junction. A lone piper plays The Last Post. The traffic lights keep changing, from green, to red, to amber, and back to green again. But nothing moves.
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