I love it when I see a band playing together and they really are playing, you know, with their instruments and each other and the crowd and music and life and I want to join in so much it hurts a little.
And so it is… another semester draws to a close, we throw our pointy black hats in the air and walk off, arms around shoulders, but not before we stand on our desks with cries of “oh captain my captain”… Or alternately we barely notice we’ve finished subjects in the chaos of lastweeklastminuteohmygodhowdoIdothisessayinanhour pandemonium, safe in the knowledge we’ll do it all again next term.
In NetComms I have learnt a lot. And I have been interested more than I thought I would be when I started and some guy was all “oh dude. My mate did net comms last year, and he couldn’t pass. He couldn’t. And it’s boring” and I was all “shit”. I am really enjoying the internet now, which sounds like a statement from an informercial (“The Internet”! Where it’s safe to be a nerd!), but it’s true. I loved hearing and reading about social theory behind the different facets of the web, I love it that I actually know stuff now– like what web 2.0 is and you know, about youtube celebrities and stuff.
Writing blog entries has been fun and I certainly intend to keep them up, possibly a little sillier, a few more music related posts, a few more imagined conversations with fictional characters. I have learnt through the experience that it’s tricky being a blogger. Sure, you just write whatever crap comes to mind, but you pour your heart and soul onto a page that most likely friends will say they’ll read and then never follow up on. You say you don’t want to be the next internet thing, but there’s always a part of you that wants someone in blog land (a king or a duke) to notice your lowly scribblings, recognise your superior wit and excellent cultural referencing and give you a blog in the palace. Or you don’t, but it is hard. And I found that writing entries about actual topics made it difficult to be light and airy. I wanted to be funny, but then I got all interested in what I was writing. Which maybe shows how average at sticking to a theme, or being consistent I am. Sigh.
Another thing I’m real average at is writing essays, which explains why I failed one earlier. But, what excites me about the webs is that as Geert says, anyone can blog; it requires no tech knowledge or special skills. I can write as me and not be afraid because I’m not like everyone else. All my part in the internet requires of me, is my self. Goodo.
As stated, I want to continue my burgeoning affair with the world wide web (we’re taking it slow, but.. it’s getting pretty serious), and I want to learn how to share and be shared with and to explore more the idea of a public commons and or sphere. I want to think more about piracy and its cultural relevance and if it’s ok. I want to learn about why the internet –effectively people– does what it does.
And I want to upload pictures of cats.
So many cats..
I’m excited.
Like I don’t think about sport very often (actually ever), I don’t spend any time mulling over ways to make recipes better, or much dwelling on politics. Some stuff just doesn’t get much air time in my head, as it’s already quite full of shiny things, and the oh-so-excellent Band I Love The Most that day and reflections on if the Cookie Monster is happy with his lot.
I have never thought about copyright, nor whether I’m breaking copyright law (save for now when writing essays). It seems clear that this type of law is one of the most forgotten but oddly powerful and far reaching types of law there can be. If everything is under copyright, and simultaneously we live in a society where originality is hard to come by, where does that leave us?
Scholars of the copyleft school say we are born to share: ideas, thoughts, files, food etc. I would agree, because I’m a massive hippy at heart. But some more than idle thoughts need to be given to whether or not I, as an individual publishing content on the single most important piece of communication technology known to man, am going to do the same.
At first my gut instinct is to laugh at the notion of putting a copyright on the brain poo that leaks onto my blog. Having thought about it for a while now, I still find it difficult to believe that anyone would ever want to use my thoughts and ramblings for any purpose of their own, and perhaps no one ever will. As a writer (of sorts) who is, thanks to the ease of the internet, effectively published now and as someone who finds the issue particularly pertinent to the future of creativity on the net, however, I think I need to take a stand.
So this bloke, Lawrence Lessig, who I mentioned earlier. He has written a whole heap around the copyright debate, and started an alternate licensing corporation called Creative Commons. Lessig believed the whole copyright thing, as it stood at the time to be a ridiculous farce, designed to make money. While reading a couple of his essays, I was inclined to agree (he is very convincing). Lessig proposed that we needed a new system, one that encourages sharing of ideas and thoughts freely, and one with more freedom to move than the old.
I quite like the ideas behind Creative Commons. General copyright law seems outdated, and the freedom to share and share alike is something I’m sure more interesting people than me can make good use of. As pointed out by another theorist, Armin Medosch (paid in full: copyright, piracy and the real currency of cultural production) however, the ideals behind CC can’t cover every extreme. Lessig’s (Open code and Open Societies) seeming view that the economic side of copyrighting will work itself out seems idyllic and often unrealistic. Having said that, if making money from your creation is paramount, there is licences under CC that stops other people from doing the same, however it does not stop them from reproducing yours, slightly tweaked and giving it away. So the issue of how does one profit from their art remains a little unsolved by the CC crew.
Creative Commons offers a few different options, mainly around whether you want your work to be changed at all, and whether you want people using it to profit or not. To be honest, I struggle to care. Not in a gen x way, but because I feel like taking out a licence that says “as long as you credit me” or “as long as you don’t make no money” makes me a bit of a wanker. If I’m honest with myself, it’s the credit thing that would bother me the most. I wish I didn’t care who took credit for what I wrote, but I do. I want the world to know that I am witty, not some rando. But again, I have to wonder if this actually matters. Putting aside my stuff, I can totally see Lessig’s point about creative types sharing their treasures, and I guess as it doesn’t hurt me at all, and if it can increase awareness about other styles of licensing, I’ll give it a burl.
I ended up picking the licence that meant that people can use my work, but they have to credit me and they can’t profit from it. I still feel like a miser, and part of me is like– if they can make money where you can’t, then more power to them, but I think my stuff is not about making money and I don’t like the idea of it being used for that.
That is all, I guess. The moral of the story being that perhaps while I am producing average blog entries, now someone has the right to make them less than average on their own terms. I like that we’re all in this together.
In The Beginning… the word was with Dave
“So think of the things that you’re good at, what you do all the time..” my tutor said, the t’s falling from his words like ash from a cigarette. We were being instructed on how to create our blog for assessment, and encouraged to pick a niche. It seemed like it should be easy, after all, everyone in the world has a blog now, how hard could it be to find something worth writing about?
I thought, and then I thought some more, looked around me in a sort of bland panic, thought some more and within me was birthed the uncomfortable realisation that I am not actually good at anything, nor do I have any hobbies that I commit to enough to write about them in any sort of authorative voice.
I am fairly average, in most ways one can think of.
Just by way of example.. Ahem:
I own a guitar, but am always about to change the strings and start learning
I have a book collection that I am quite enamoured of, but am yet to read half of it, along with any Tolstoy or Woolfe, I’ve never even cracked the cover on Catcher in the Rye
I don’t cook
I enjoy art, but have next to no artistic talent aside from free-postcard-sticking-up-with-blutak, and I don’t even have enough technical knowledge to fill one of them
I love music, but only what I happen across. I read music reviews that are like “clearly this, his fifth album was influenced heavily by the Pixies early work..” and my brain explodes. I think I know who the Pixies are
I write, but not often and not very well
I like movies and I watch them, but have yet to enjoy David Lynch, or attend a film festival of any kind
Woe. Woe is me and my too many but too few niches. Woe.
And then it hit me. The reason blogging is such a big deal, and the reason so many people do it, is because you can write whatever you want. And statistically, the majority of blogs are going to be fairly mundane, pedestrian affairs. And so, perhaps the niche that I can appeal to COMPLETE MEDIOCRITY. I can handcraft the most extraordinarily average blog the world has ever seen!
But of course noone would read that, as would be a piece of shit.
I then decided I could record my routine journeys into fair-to-middling town, for all to read and feel better about themselves by comparison.
The Competition.
Obviously a “mediocre blog” can mean a couple of things, one being a blog that mainly focusses on an inept and terrifyingly boring author chronicling his/her/its daily sojourns to the fridge and or toilet, the other being a blog dedicated to the understanding that mediocrity is something we all face and most fear.
Mylifeisaverage.com is the latter type and exists to show up how much meaningless tripe is fed into the internet daily. As opposed to other humorous blogs, its content is generated by users of the site, who submit stories of their funny/ inane lives in the hopes of having them read by all the other nobodies. It’s really funny a lot of the time, and some of the stories are actually anything but average. If you hit the MLIA official blog, you’ll find an homage to the wonder of the average. Attention is paid to things like toast, and socks, and how good those things are despite their inate anverageness.
I like this site, particularly the official blog, as it is a celebration of sorts of all that is normal, as opposed to the wonder of freakish parkur men, or Lady Gaga and her bandaidie outfits. What drew me to the subject matter is its necessity, and its often unsung beauty. That and my inability to do anything well. Cough. MLIA.
In terms of appearance it would certainly go against the very idea of the blog if it was anything but average, and it certainly doesn’t disappoint. Mylifeisaverage itself is smeared over a fairly inoffensive and wah grey background, it is easy to find your way around, the font is readable, if a little uggo, and the couple of ads are not too in you face and seem to appeal to a twenties to early thirties sort of crowd who for the most part would be the appropriate audience.
I found another site that seems to be about the everyday, normal stuff (shocking I know, on the www, right?!). It’s called Exceptional Mediocrity, which of course is right up my alley. This one is more of the first type of mediocre blog, in that it the charting of one man’s life and thoughts about the things that occur in it day to day. It is actually well written and interesting though. This blog obviously doesn’t have the same “everyone get on board” appeal as MLIA, so advertising isn’t an issue, and it is a Blogger blog, so it is a fairly run of the mill layout. He uses snappy headings like “Why are drug reps hot?” and “the Gay Dog” which totally gets you reading, the entries could probably stand to be shorter, but they are for the most part amusing and written with intelligence, so one wants to stick with them.
I’ll leave with a look at my fave sort of average blog. It is not average in name, really, or in its aim, but more so in its covering of such a wide variety of things that it cannot actually be a blog about anything except maybe Everything in the Sky. Ryan writes about his job(s) his dad, his walks down the street, his favorite new gadget and music he digs. He basically puts anything he thinks is rad on his site, which of course is the whole point. Ry-ry, as I have started affectionately calling him, does have technical leanings, but there is too much of a peppering of music bits and excellent photo bits to really be a techie blog. What I enjoy the most is that he is funny, really really, I’m fairly jealous of his sharp as a rapier wit, funny– but he can also turn a poised and thoughtful phrase like nobodies business.
And that my friends, is my niche. A bit of overshare, but that’s how we do.