The Play Ethic

Meso-blogging: or, posting between the poles of micro- and macro-blogging

I brought this conundrum to a recent conversation with the estimable JP Rangaswami, and after we parted it became clearer to me. We know about blogging; we know about micro-blogging. But is it time to start thinking about macro-blogging, and after that, meso-blogging?

Macro-blogging for me is a grand(iose) term for how my own blogging, done through a standard publishing platform (Typepad), has evolved. It's become a place where my research, journalism and presentations are "publicly" stored - all the better to enhance my intellectual brand. But it's also become a place where I can "essay", travel forth, into subjects, in a way that satisfies my own editorial sensibility (like now), rather than that of a client, publication or broadcaster. As JP said, micro-blogging - which for both of us meaning sending the same message to Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed, etc - "takes the static out of one's blog writing". 

For us both, our blog - or macro-blog - has now become a very Enlightenment-style space, a place for extended publication (and for me, sometimes, textual restitution - saving newspaper pieces from the tender mercies of subeditors). I'm planning my entry into the world of ideas podcasting at the moment: and I would certainly put my 50-minute audio or video discussions in the "macro" category, in more senses than just byte-size. I want people to dwell with this material, to have it operate as the stimulating background to their commute, or housecleaning, or Sunday glass of wine, in the way that traditional media does. 

So like slow food, you could call the content of macro-blogging slow media: the long-read, the long-listen or the long-watch, dwelling with a voice or approach over some duration. I note from JP's blog that Cory Doctorow is putting his new book Makers on his blog, chapter by chapter - which adds "Dickensian" to "Enlightenment" as descriptors for the macro-blogging space. Many authors are using their blogs in this way - as a kind of open rumination and development of their books (Kevin Kelly's The Technium is the most magnificent example of this I know). 

If I want to be aphoristic, or be immediately useful with a one link-reference (which can, of course, be to my macro-blog entry), I go to the land of the Fat Wee Bird. The Moses of the Net, John Perry Barlow, recently described Twitter as a place where "genius last ten minutes... Twitter is casting pearls before mayflies".  Funny, but only half-true: tweet a link from a macro-level blog, and it can operate as a gear changer, moving people down a few speeds from their skittery cybernetic loop. (I attempted a map of some of these subtleties at my keynote at the Media 140 conference in London a few months ago, relating real-time media to old-time media). 

But if we posit the poles of micro- and macro-blogging, there must perforce be many gradations in between - what we could call "meso-blogging". 140 characters is indeed valuable for the concision it imposes, and the haiku-like or newspaper-headling-like editing it compels. It's also a kind of input that, with the right device, can easily happen in the tiniest interstices of a busy day. But what happens when what you have to say spills over that long-lost telco engineer's arbitrary text limit? When you have a small story to tell, or a sequence of sound or movement to bear witness to? How do we gently ease out from the limits of 140, yet still retain our spontaneity, our responsiveness to our environment, our thrill of instant publishing? 

Meso-blogging already has its obvious phenomena - eg, rich media clips generated from a mobile device by the man or woman on their feet (Qik, Audioboo). I've used Audioboo on the iPhone reasonably successfully in the past - but one or two deeply frustrating failed uploads, as the content squeezes and sputters its way through a toiling 3G connection, make me think that the bandwidth isn't really ubiquitous enough for that, nor are the devices (or their apps) properly configured. 

Posterous is clearly intended to fill the meso-blogging gap. It simplifies its input mechanism to the basics (an e-mail - manageable by almost every device these days, static or mobile), but it receives every form and size of file, from photos to MP3's to documents to video. (I've never used Tumblr, though JP made a strong recommendation). Posterous also narrows the gap between creation, utility and publicity by giving all audio its immediate iTunes link - a very seductive integration (though I'll be using Typepad-via-Feedburner). 

One can easily imagine another modality of blogging coming through this kind of platform - one that's more experience-and-affect based. Capturing epiphanies at arts, sporting events or family gatherings; enabling a richer record of holiday, tourism, expeditions; presenting rich, personal and multimedia records of practice or craft. All of this is scattered across various services at the moment, from YouTube to Flickr to SlideShare - which of course the diligent macro-blogger harvests and embeds to garnish her deep-dives into topics and interests (see my Micheal Jackson essay with the opening You Tube clip, and for a supreme master at macro-blogging, Momus's Click Opera). But the idea of creating a service which presents all modes of capturing experience and thought, easily and tidily, seems right on the button to me. As I say: not quite macro, not quite micro, but meso-blogging. 

Yet I still think we're pretty far from a web interface that could adequately express this 'dream-catcher' element of meso-blogging. I've had a great experience over the last 18 months with the Ning social network platform, and particularly with its ability to let you quickly shift blocks of rich media around its front page. In terms of interaction design, mainstream blog platforms need to think more expansively - breaking out of the essentially "one-column-with-fringes" format, and re-conceiving the norm as three, maybe four contiguous columns of rich multimedia content. (I know that there are open-source content-management systems like Joomla and Drupal that could do this for me - but as the King of Pop didn't exactly once sing, "I'm a user, not a coder").

The diverse input that's coming from our smartphones, netbooks and (probably) tablets needs a more polyphonic (or perhaps better, polymorphic) kind of display mechanism on the web. Facebook's endless tinkerings with its interface - still far from right for me - are evidence of how much pressure is building up from the tsunami of user-generated content that's coming from the populace now.

As our devices become smarter and more mobile, and bathe in an ever-richer soup of Hertzian frequencies, we will each have the chance to become 'mini media-moguls' - writers, dialogists, broadcasters, retailers, folksonomists, community and friendship network managers. I'm also wondering whether meso-blogging might also interleave with the long, tottering fall of mainstream journalism. Is the hyper-local, super-specialised media that Jeff Jarvis keeps imagining actually awaiting richer blog platforms and smarter devices - where localities narrate themselves across a range of media streams, and journalists modularise and editorialise these flows (seeking, as ever, the elusive ad dollar...difficult to do with socialist infrastructure, I know...)

Meso-blogging might sound like setting up your laptop over the starters at a Japanese noodle bar...But there's certainly (ahem) a soup of possibilities between where we are with Twitter, and what dignified middle-aged men like me and JP are starting to do textually with their Wordpresses and Typepads. These might not be exactly the polarities you want to measure this field by. But please, choose your own. And when you do, meso-blog me about it.

Jock 'em if they can't take a fuck: review of Momus's The Book of Jokes and The Book of Scotlands

Here's a long-ish essay I just did for the Scottish Review of Books this week, on the conceptual artist, songwriter, blog-mandarin and accursed Bataillean communist Momus (aka Nick Currie). The SRB's text isn't online - but thankfully, I am. (Note: Nick has mailed me with corrections, which I have integrated. And there's a post on Click Opera with some reasonable comments). 

I've been an admirer (and sometimes commissioner) of Nick's writing and thinking for many years. But he's the most untrammelled of players, and thus often intensely troubling, as his two new (and two first) books, The Book of Jokes and The Book of Scotlands - the pegs for this piece - both exemplify. A real ethical wrestle with an uncompromising talent, below. 

MOMUS

The Book of Scotlands (Sternberg Press, Berlin)

The Book of Jokes (Dalkey Archive, Illinois)

Reviewed by Pat Kane for The Scottish Review of Books, Sunday Aug 18th, 2009

If you don't know about Momus, aka Scottish musician, writer and conceptualist Nick Currie, then you need to know about him: for me, he's one of the most challengingly brilliant Scottish minds of the last twenty years.

On the trivial, arts-page level,his CV is impressive. Momus was an early star on Creation Records, home of Oasis, and part of the lineage of the 'Sound of Young Scotland'. His career then became exotic and exilic: Currie has both been a pop writer for Kahimi Karie in Tokyo, a living installation in the Whitney Biennial and a disembodied voice in the Venice Biennale, and a wandering conceptualist in New York and Paris. He has been sued by corporations and artists for his controversial albums of "folktronica", which combine an Eno-like intelligence about music with a lyrical extremism that splits the difference between Leonard Cohen and the Marquis De Sade. Momus has written for both Wired and the New York Times (though recently replaced there by, of all people, Bono). 

He also maintains an extraordinary life-blog called Click Opera. This combines a honest account of the fragility and openness of the modern bohemian life (he currently just about survives in Berlin), with cultural commentary on design, technology, music and politics that rivals any of the greats – Greil Marcus, Paul Morley, Lester Bangs. In short, he's worthy of a Scottish review.

But like Alasdair Gray and the masochistic and misogynist fantasies that suffuse his writing, or Ian Hamilton Finlay and his veneration of the murderous Saint-Just in Little Sparta, you have to grapple with the dark, all-too-playful side of Momus's creativity. His first completed two books are out simultaneously, and I'm glad that the second exists to qualify and contextualise the first.

Abstract for play paper at 'Digital Labor' conference, NYC, 12-14th Nov, 2009

First time I've ever done an abstract for an academic paper - and for the exciting and forthcoming 'Digital Labor: Internet as Playground and Factory' conference at the New School in New York, yet. 

Believe me, when deep in the mechanicals of popular music-making, this is my idea of playful fun:

Taking reality lightly: play and the constitution of the Net 

Pat Kane

In scholarly debates about the nature of our interactions on socio-technical networks, play is often invoked as a descriptor or modifier of existing behaviour. But rarely is there any deeper connection made between the multi-disciplinary zone of contemporary play scholarship – particularly in biology, ethology, neuroscience and complexity theory – and the constitutive forces that maintain (despite various enclosures) the openness and creativity of the internet society. 

This paper will explore these connections, and claim that the age of informational plenitude has disclosed a socio-biological 'ground of play', or generic capacities of potentiation, that might explain the enduring resilience and inventiveness of cyberculture. 

The presentation will also draw on the author's direct and daily experience as a web enterpreneur in music and journalism. This will illustrate how the constitutively playful structure of the Net, and its ambiguous and open social dynamics, shapes the development of network enterprises at least as crucially as commercial or governmental forces. 

Two cheers for universality: Pat Kane's review of Rushkoff's Life Incorporated

My (none-too-impressed) review of Douglas Rushkoff's Life Incorporated: How The World Became a Corporation and How To Take It Back appeared on Friday 31st July, in The Independent newspaper. Here's the unedited version (only slightly different) 

It takes a global village to enrich our local lives

Life Inc, Douglas Rushkoff

Reviewed by Pat Kane

The Independent, 31 July 2009

When faced with windy laments of civilisational decline, you can always rely on British popular culture to worm its antic way into your brain. Throughout this overstated thesis in praise of bottom-up community against top-down capitalism, I kept seeing and hearing the frightening visages of the BBC's The League of Gentlemen: "We're local people… doing local things".

Unfair, I know. But Rushkoff is so infuriatingly magisterial in this book that you reach, with some desperation, for the nearest court jester.

It's the right moment to read long-view analyses of our commercialised society. Ruskoff's Life Incorporated is as fluent and well-researched as any of his books – but its target is too large, and too badly constructed, to help us much. In a heaving rush of anti-modern sentiment, Rushkoff bundles together vast and complex trends over the last half-millenium – political, economic, scientific and cultural -  into a monolith called 'corporatism'.

For him, corporatism isn't just a form of commercial enterprise cooked up by 15th century merchants and monarchs to control and standardise the varied social markets of the early Middle Ages – an account he takes, accurately, from the great French historical masters Aries and Braudel. It's also a kind of permanent civilisational war – abstraction, universalism and individualism, versus the face-to-face, the local and the communitarian.

But like a CGI-generated Transformer robot with a faulty program, the monster's pieces just don't hold together. For one thing, not all universalised standards – a brand which Rushkoff sizzles into many hides, from the first central currencies to the latest "flashy" social network – are as implicitly "fascist" as he suggests.

How about that brutal reduction of our oral traditions known as the printed book? A format so standardised, both physically and in terms of the settled national languages it regularly deploys, that it can convey the new verities of the village to audiences all round the world. Rushkoff deprecates the cultivation of interiority and subjective reflection in almost every realm except the one in which he plys his own trade.

So oppressive is the shadow of this corporate behemoth in Rushkoff's mind that the actual historical forces of resistance to capitalism and imperialism (more boring but more accurate terminologies) end up being downgraded or ignored. The Renaissance and Enlightenment is nailed for being an epistemological hand-maiden to domination by distant, centralising powers – its "clean, universal truths [keeping] people's attention and eyes upward, and off one another": a disconnection that allows David Hume to support slavery and democrats to ignore the rights of women.

But what about Romanticism? With its celebration of the organic and the rooted, its passionate feminists and early ecologists, casting off the "mind-forg'd manacles" of industrial society – and fuelled by all that nasty subjectivism?

Rushkoff's attitude to the labour movement as a corrective to the march of corporations is also, as he might say, kinda weird. He often bundles unions in with other "community-minded" groups, whose hands-on, in-the-streets sociability is swamped and subverted by a miasma of capitalist ruses – everything from housing regulations to self-help courses, never mind the obvious traps of easy credit and ad-driven consumerism.

But again, is this really a battle between local, face-to-face virtue versus universal, faceless vice? Rushkoff undercuts his own argument when he supports industry-wide collective bargaining on wages and conditions. Yes, you could see it as part of the Sabbath tradition of holy days of collective rest – but it's also a continuing modern struggle conducted (at its best) in a supra-local way.

That Rushkoff is a sinner in repentance has been evident from his last few books. He turned spy on the marketing industry that initially feted him in Coercion, urged companies to eschew consultants in Get Back In The Box, even attempted to create his own open-source version of Judaism in Nothing Sacred. But there's something particularly galling about a one-time evangelist of 'cyberia' and 'playing the future' (titles of his earlier books) who decides to wizz all over the current vibrancy of social media.

Yes, it's a battleground between the copyright enclosures of the corporations, and the frankly neo-communist behaviours of users, hackers and convivials – but there is a battle of values going on. One which shapes Californian internet platforms so much that they find themselves being used as tools for Iranian insurgents – their locality becoming our world responsibility, through (guess what?) the robustly universal protocols of the internet. In Rushkoff's Tolkien-esque, Mordor-like vision of corporatism, that simply shouldn't have been permitted.

At the beginning and the end of this book, Rushkoff evokes what's wrong and what's right about the community values of his own upstate New York neighbourhood. With children and wife in tow, the writer has been clearly moved to celebrate the immediate, the friendly, and the love-driven, from the place where he lives and nurtures. No argument there. But such bucolia can't justify Rushkoff's gross misreading of the societal structures of the 21st century. It's an ultimately disempowering account, which makes you feel (wrongly) like a deluded dupe for even trying to engage with current realities.

To paraphrase our friends from Royston Vaisey, "universal people doing universal things" (meaning not just corporate elites, but daily cosmopolitans) have to be part of the progressive picture too.

Pat Kane is author of The Play Ethic (www.theplayethic.com), and one half of Hue And Cry.