It’s Not The Years, Baby…

I’m getting old. 

It’s been 18 years since Kurt Cobain died. 18 years. I was a sixth former at the time and remember the outpouring of grief and anger. I was only vaguely aware of him, and music as a whole, at the time, but I soon got caught up with all the stories and conspiracy theories – was it a suicide? Was his murder covered up? It became an iconic moment of my generation’s pop culture landscape.

And it was 18 years ago.

That’s not as bad as hearing an interview on Kerrang Radio. The band Bowling For Soup were talking about their teenage years and the fashions of the time, when the host said something like “So, was that what it was like in the 80s?”

Frankly, that was terrifying. The 1980s were last week as far as I’m concerned, but as far as that radio presenter was concerned, he may as well have been talking about the Roaring Twenties – “So was that what it was like when the flappers were around? Do you think women should have the vote?”

I remember the Berlin Wall falling. There are grown adults around now who don’t. It may as well have been the Palaeolithic era. I feel like that mammoth they dug up in Siberia recently.

And they’re rereleasing all the films I saw the first time around – Back to the Future and Ghostbusters I can just about handle, but Titanic?! I remember when Titanic was 2D, thank you very much. Yes, I remember when films were only in two dimensions, all of five years ago.

Here’s something that will freak out younger readers – I remember what it was like before the internet. I remember what it was like before home computers. Music used to be stored on shiny discs, and before that, on magnetic tape. We used to tape songs off the radio when the Top Twenty was announced on Sunday afternoons.

I’m aware that all this is making me sound like I’m claiming a pension and telling kids to get off my lawn. But I’m 35. That’s nothing. I’m not getting old, history’s speeding up. It’s probably a quantum thing, but it’s not fun.

 

PS. I also remember when we only had three TV channels…

 

What’s the Point of Blogging?

There are times when any long-term blogger looks at their site and says “Why?”

Sometimes this is a positive thing. It’s always worth reflecting on what a blog’s purpose is, whether it’s to provide an outlet for creativity, or to act as a hub for citizen journalism, or to serve as a launchpad for the next great novel. Blogs tend to evolve a purpose of sorts, even if that purpose is just to get some of the random thoughts out of your head and into black and white. It’s good to have a purpose.

Of course, “Why?” can be a different question, a soul-wrenching cry born out of near-Lovecraftian despair. I had a moment like that earlier this week – I think all bloggers do from time to time, when you realise that the post you’re incredibly proud of, that expressed wisdom and insight, that was the result of hours of hard work, has been read by almost no-one.

It shouldn’t matter really. We’re doing this for ourselves. Search Engine Optimisation is a fickle mistress. Blah, blah, blah. The fact is, when we don’t get readers, we take it personally. Maybe it was something we did wrong – maybe we picked a dull subject or split an infinitive. Maybe it’s the rest of the world that doesn’t get it, the Philistines, and we’re left unappreciated, like Van Gogh.

That’s a particular problem with general blogs like this one. The received wisdom is that you should pick a subject and stick to it, building up a niche audience. That’s probably sensible, but I like having a blog that covers politics and religion and Indiana Jones and Bruce Springsteen and Superman’s folksong influences and the visionary Martin Luther King. Probably not a recipe for becoming the next big breakout star of the blogosphere, but enough to keep me interested.

And that’s the trick, I guess. Remaining interested, maintaining the passion, writing for your own enjoyment and out of your own experiences, beliefs, principles. If they don’t reach a wider audience, well, let’s not kid ourselves, it sucks, especially when the stats of the posts you love get mauled by illiterate kittens. The trick is to get over it – swallow the disappointment and carry on. If you don’t reshape blogging as we know it, so what? Very few people do. What you can do is touch someone’s life, change how they see the world, make them think, make them laugh. Those things are worthwhile, certainly more worthwhile than a thousand hits from Russian spambots. Keep on blogging!

 

The Importance of Curiosity

Right now, I’m imagining a big red button. Next to that button is an important-looking sign: “DO NOT PRESS!”

What do you do?

I know what I’m doing. I’m looking at that button, desperate to press it. The only thing that’s holding me back is the unlikely possibility that I’ve telepathically linked to the US nuclear arsenal and that this could end badly. But I want to press that button. The button wants me to press the button. The button is, sooner or later, getting pressed.

So, to those people who’d press it, despite the sign saying otherwise, I have one question: Why?

My answer to that is simple – I want to see what that button does. It might open a door. It might change the TV channel. It might set off an alarm. It might launch those nuclear missiles I mentioned, I don’t know. But it’s better to know than not know, right? I don’t care if the word ‘curiosity’ is derived from the Latin for ‘careful’, just press that stupid button!!!

“Curiosity is lying in wait for every secret,” said Ralph Waldo Emerson, which is an idea I can get behind. Curiosity is one of the driving forces behind human discovery – what if Galileo had never bothered to look through his telescope? What if Moses had just ignored that burning bush? That drive, the passion that makes you look at something and then want to find out the story behind it, has changed the world thousands of times. In that sense, curiosity is one of our chief emotions.

In the US, the company Skillshare has launched a video manifesto entitled ‘The Future Belongs to the Curious’, asking us to see learning as a more natural, organic, communal thing than education sometimes makes it. After all, while qualifications are valuable, they can’t be the be all and end all of education, simply because learning is something intrinsic to our everyday lives. We learn to drive, learn to cook, learn to fix things, learn how to have relationships. The trick is to build on that, to not just develop skills that help us survive but which also help us grow as individuals. If you’re interested in learning how to play the riff from Sweet Child o’ Mine then go ahead and do it. If you want to learn flower arranging, then heck, I could probably put you in touch with someone who could help you out. Go for it. You’ll be happier as a result.

(And this is before we get onto the sneakier skills, like how to MacGyver day-to-day objects to do something they weren’t supposed to. Check out Lifehacker!)

I’ll admit I sometimes allow my curiosity to wither on the vine – I think it’s related to how I sometimes stop reading, despite loving books. But despite this annoying tendency I still wander what’s behind that door, what’s over that hill, what that strange building in the middle of nowhere is, what happens when you press that button. I think a lot of us are like that. Maybe we just need to embrace that more and see where it takes us. After all, it once took us to the stars.

(PS. I’ve just found out that Jedward tweeted in 140 characters what it took me a whole post to say: “BIG RED BUTTON! What the sign says: DO NOT PUSH. What we read! PUSH when people are not around.” I’m not sure how I feel about that…)

 

See How The Monsters Fall

I’m just old enough to remember the dying days of the Cold War, news reports full of Strategic Defence Initiatives and the tick-tock of the Doomsday Clock as it moved closer to midnight, inspiring nightmares and Watchmen as it went.

Then, in 1989, the whole house of cards collapsed, seemingly overnight but I guess the cracks were showing long before, at least to those with eyes to see. The Bogeyman had fallen and he didn’t even get chance to launch all those nuclear missiles. The monster had been felled.

I wonder if that’s how it felt to all those living at the end of the Second World War, hearing that the spectre who had cast his deathly shadow over the fields of Europe now lay dead in a bunker in Berlin?

Libya was once another such bogeyman, responsible for terrorism and the Lockerbie Bombing. Heck, Libyans are even a destructive presence in Back To The Future. But somewhere along the line, Gaddafi became the comedy uncle of global dictators, at least in the western world that didn’t have to live under his regime.

It was a different story in Libya, of course, and yesterday the revolution that started in February reached something of a climax with the death of Colonel Gaddafi. Another dictator down, another fallen regime.

I’ve said before, probably too many times, that this is turning out to be a very strange year, almost as if 2011 has served notice on the leaders and institutions that are corrupt, oppressive or simply anachronistic. Maybe we felt that they’d last forever, that their power would pass to the heirs and nothing would change. Suddenly that no longer seems to be the case, and it ‘s steange and disorientating and a little scary, but ultimately hopeful.

GK Chesterton said, in so many words, that fairy tales don’t teach children that monsters exist – they already know that – but fairy tales do teach them that monsters can be beaten. And maybe, in some less mythic way, the same is true of protest songs and Twitter. We’ve learned that monsters – Gaddafi, corporations, media corruption – aren’t invulnerable, aren’t immortal, aren’t omnipotent. That knowledge is liberating and empowering and intimidating, because it confers on those who’d succeed a monster the responsibility to do a better job.

And, as 2011 seems to be restructuring the world around us, that responsibility necessarily falls on us all. We are the 100%.

 

What’s Going On? Protests, Riots, the Internet and a Changing Civilisation

When the winners write their history books, the one thing they’ll agree on is that 2011 was a really weird year.

It’s been a whirlwind of revolutions and crumbling authority, and while it’s way too early to try and get some perspective on the events that started with the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi and seem, somehow, to have resulted in the peaceful Occupation of Wall Street, Boston, LA and other US cities, that’s never stopped me before!

I can’t help thinking that all this isn’t (just) about rich verses poor; after all, if you can use an iPhone to Tweet about the protests then you’re not poor, at least not globally speaking, not when 1,345 million people in the developing world live on less than $1.25 a day. However, let’s not kid ourselves; the same corruption that forces the American middle class onto the streets to protest the potential loss of their homes also contributes towards poverty in the third world. And the developed, western nations aren’t exactly utopias – 80% of NHS hospitals face severe financial difficulties, rising food prices in Scotland are forcing Scotland’s poorest to miss meals, and youth unemployment has reached 21.3%. Similar issues affect America and Europe, and at times it feels like the giants have lost their golden goose and are waiting for the beanstalk to fall. Add to that issues like the closure of libraries and the bread and circuses of mainstream media and it’s starting to feel like one of those years, like 1914, 1939, 1968, 1989, years when everything shifted and changed.

I suspect a lot of this is about people being disenfranchised. The Arab Spring was largely about people rising up against corruption amongst their rulers; the Occupy movement sweeping the States is a reaction against corporate corruption. Heck, even the UK riots, which didn’t really have a criminal component, kicked off in areas where prospects are limited, to say the least. Keep denying people a voice, either deliberately or as the default outcome of political ideology, and things will start to happen.

It’s interesting that all this is happening in the age of social media; the beauty of the Internet is that everyone can contribute to it, and that’s why, when those historians are writing about 2011, they’ll need to dig out Twitter archives rather than film from the mainstream media (and why fears of a Digital Dark Age should be heightened during all this – these are historical records, not digital emphemera). It’s interesting that the mainstream media has been lagging behind when it comes to coverage of Occupy Wall Street and its sister movements, but perhaps not surprising. After all, it’s part of the same corporate culture that people are reacting to – the phone hacking scandal and the resulting can of worms showed that human diginity and privacy are expendable when it comes to profit.

And yet if this is about people needing a voice, the rise of social media and citizen journalism raises questions for its most enthusiastic proponents; there’s still a Digital Divide, both globally and within individual nations, and that’s only going to get worse with sweeping cuts to library services (and don’t forget, those and other public service cuts arose from a global recession caused by corporate malpractice). I love Twitter, but I bet my mom’s never heard of it, and if social media is going to be the new grassroots ‘mainstream’ then don’t forget that you’re not going to get a lot of political insight from the Top 100 Most Followed Tweeters.

That’s a key point in other ways – the battlelines have been drawn, but the opposition doesn’t understand what’s going on. David Cameron described the UK riots as “criminality, pure and simple”; Veterans for Peace were beaten by police describing them as “anarchists”; Libyan rebels were said to be on “hallucinogenic drugs”. The response from authority figures to the protests has ranged from disingenuous to deranged conspiracy theories; I guarantee none of them are avidly following the Occupy Together hashtag. And that’s a problem with the Internet as a source – search engine technology has progressed to the point where it can now pretty much tell you what you want to hear. Things are becoming more and more filtered in an age when what we really need is to be challenged, to hear opposing voices, to enter into rational and constructive dialogue. It’s difficult to do that if everything we read backs up our existing prejudices, and while the mainstream media do that anyway (hello Daily Mail! Hello Fox News!), the mosaic nature of the Net may well exacerbate things.

But in the end it does feel as though things are changing. People are more willing and more able to let their voices be heard, and the leaders that dismiss those voices are actually starting to look irrelevant. Heck, maybe the institutions we’ve relied on for so long are starting to crumble and/or evolve – the general assemblies of the Occupy movements would seem to be more truly democratic and representative than Cabinets made up of millionaires – and the onus is on us, all of us, not just those who are protesting on the streets, to make something good and positive as a result. Something good and positive that brings in the disenfranchised and treats them as friends, not enemies.

After all, wouldn’t it be nice if the 99% could one day become the 100%?