It seems that, although I have easily moved
the old link-dump that was (and is) Inchoate Satellite from old Blogger to new Blogger, it is not possible to combine it with this 'ere Still Inchoate. A bit of a shame that, as I'm all for keeping things simple and together. I stuck nearly 1200 interesting links on that Satellite, after all, and it is if nothing else a pretty good record of what I was webly doing at the time. I mean, occasionally people even commented on it. Can you imagine...
Still, boring. Blog-bore supreme. I mean, with a live broadband connection in front of one, who needs to look at someone else's idea of a good time, right? Or am I the only one who tends to use the web as an unfocused psycho-geographical tool for exploring the world? I just like to wander. As I do my real life wandering, and I have to admit that this is in a pretty limited radius around my lair for the most part, my reactions to the environment are as much to do with the weather and the imagined lives of the people I see and the memories evoked by certain places as they are by the physical reality of what is there. Moods can be evoked or dispelled, alternate lives explored, and other people's houses lived in - if only in the imagination. Imagination, of course, has a pretty seamless interface to "reality", as any scrutiny of eyewitness reports of anything soon shows. And the psycho-geography of the web is all the richer for being able to see text and images (live, if on web cam) mixed in together. What a way to travel. Without, of course, the people on the whole. But this is a minor detail...
Still, I suppose that all web content tends to be generated by people at source, so all that is really missing from this huge networked electronic palimpsest of the world is the smells and the ability to move freely in physical space. Imagination will fill in most of the rest. It would be fascinating to compare a virtual traveller's experience of a city with that of a real visitor, wouldn't it? But you'd fairly quickly run up against problems of filtering out subjectivity, and none of us is any good at that if we're honest.
Off, virtually, to St Helena for me. It's not an exile, it's a hobby.
Still, boring. Blog-bore supreme. I mean, with a live broadband connection in front of one, who needs to look at someone else's idea of a good time, right? Or am I the only one who tends to use the web as an unfocused psycho-geographical tool for exploring the world? I just like to wander. As I do my real life wandering, and I have to admit that this is in a pretty limited radius around my lair for the most part, my reactions to the environment are as much to do with the weather and the imagined lives of the people I see and the memories evoked by certain places as they are by the physical reality of what is there. Moods can be evoked or dispelled, alternate lives explored, and other people's houses lived in - if only in the imagination. Imagination, of course, has a pretty seamless interface to "reality", as any scrutiny of eyewitness reports of anything soon shows. And the psycho-geography of the web is all the richer for being able to see text and images (live, if on web cam) mixed in together. What a way to travel. Without, of course, the people on the whole. But this is a minor detail...
Still, I suppose that all web content tends to be generated by people at source, so all that is really missing from this huge networked electronic palimpsest of the world is the smells and the ability to move freely in physical space. Imagination will fill in most of the rest. It would be fascinating to compare a virtual traveller's experience of a city with that of a real visitor, wouldn't it? But you'd fairly quickly run up against problems of filtering out subjectivity, and none of us is any good at that if we're honest.
Off, virtually, to St Helena for me. It's not an exile, it's a hobby.
posted by Jim at 12:52 am
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