| Author | Message | ||
| iotar Username: iotar Registered: 6-2006 |
Just occurred to me when talking fridge jokes with Dan that absolutely *everything* is online. Or rather, I started thinking about the exceptions to this deeply flawed statement. So tell me: what isn't on the internet? | ||
| al Username: al Registered: 11-2006 |
By mentioning *it* surely we put it on the internet? | ||
| iotar Username: iotar Registered: 6-2006 |
You can always allude to it or perhaps this could turn into a thread for riddles describing things which are not online? But yes, we are indeed calling the thing into the mirror by typing its Keyword of Power. | ||
| al Username: al Registered: 11-2006 |
'Nothing is, but what is not' Quite like the idea of a thread devoted solely to riddles - at once defining the non-internet, and protecting it by refusing to name it. | ||
| dan Username: dan Registered: 10-2006 |
> By mentioning *it* surely we put it on the internet? Yes, it's like Googlewhacking. Or quantum physics. The very act of doing it also destroys it. Anyway, our fridge joke discussion on Flickr has already thrown one up: the other fridge joke which I can't remember from my youth. 1: What's white and climbs trees? A fridge. 2: (insert second fridge joke here, and it has nothing to do with Rupert Bear trousers) 3: What's blue and white and dangerous? A fridge in a denim jacket falling out of a tree. I have a niggling idea that the second joke may have involved fridges playing snooker. But that's just silly! | ||
| al Username: al Registered: 11-2006 |
Hmm, not quite a fridge joke, but... How can you tell if there's an elephant hiding in your fridge? | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
The internet does't exist. The internet can't be on the internet, is the one thing that isn't on the internet by being it. There are very few smells on the internet, if any. Air is short on the internet. It is difficult to rubber stamp anything. Some bits of yellow paper. A coffee stain. Dried splashes of orange juice. Scissors. Iceland. A worn out peaked cap. A petrol-like efflorescence. So not a great deal. | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
Footprints in the ice-cream? Something like that. | ||
| iotar Username: iotar Registered: 6-2006 |
>>Footprints in the ice-cream? Is that the story about how I was walking through the ice cream with Jesus all my life and in my times of trouble there was only one set of footprints in the ice cream? There are various places that there are no pictures of online: the broom cupboard in the closed fast food franchise, the stone that you kicked down the street one day last July. There isn't any reference to these things either. Do things become devalued when they find their way online? | ||
| al Username: al Registered: 11-2006 |
Almost! - Footprints in the butter, ho ho ho. >> I was walking through the ice cream with Jesus all my life and in my times of trouble there was only one set of footprints in the ice cream? Hmm, by that cosmology Jesus is a fridge dwelling elephant. I for one welcome this new incarnation of his majesty. Altars are going to undergo substantial changes. >> There are various places that there are no pictures of online: the broom cupboard in the closed fast food franchise, the stone that you kicked down the street one day last July. There isn't any reference to these things either. No pictures but there ARE (now) representations of these places. In fact is that what the internet is? A network of simulacra? Language made incarnate? Things don't become devalued - they become represented. Their status as a part of an individual's self-reflexive narrative made plain. | ||
| iotar Username: iotar Registered: 6-2006 |
I guess what we're looking at here is essentially nostalgia-based. When search engines first appeared we could suddenly find information about all sorts of subjects - the obscure and the common given equal weight. So you start to dig into the collective memory. Youtube is a particularly ripe current example: Hey look they've got x! Hey look they've got y! For the generation that was born in the late 90s however their cultural memories will have already have been uploaded. It can be taken for granted that it's represented in there somewhere. Will they need to remember stuff in the same way? Memory has already been changed by the internet - it's less a matter of knowing things than knowing how to find things. The skills of the archivist and librarian. | ||
| alex Username: alex Registered: 10-2006 |
I guess in the future there will be websites longingly remembering other websites that have gone. Oh, hang on: http://www.archive.org/web/web.php | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
Did someone say "archivist" ..? *Comes out of kennel wearing clown suit* But seriously, folks - As a very much pre-90s person, I find a lot of my media memories have slipped past the inter-mesh. Things weren't recorded, or they've been wiped, got lost, or are tied up in strange copyright tangles. Like what? Well, one early '70s equivalent to the Fast Show was (believe it or not) the Andy Williams Show. You occasionally see kitsch clips of this featuring the Jackson 5 or the Osmonds - but there was also a great deal of Rowan'n'Martin catch-phrase humour, including someone who appeared each week in costume as a hip talking grizzly bear: hilarious stuff for that time and my age. These old routines may be buried on some obscure streaming site - but I've never found them. Also, as a broader observation, the pre-Interworld rarely feeds into the present tense without a hiccup. It's like watching "Life on Mars" : despite the attention to detail, the '70s haircuts are slightly wrong, and the clothes aren't quite cheap or sweaty enough. Media adapts and streamlines, rather than replicating its object. Occasionally, though, you stumble on film which was *exactly* what you remember - and I'm just old enough to remember the b&w bakelite culture (and the weather) in the cautious England captured here: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2952519171 635367594&hl=en | ||
| al Username: al Registered: 11-2006 |
Hmm, interesting that - for me (younger), it's the bakers and butchers everywhere that I most obviously miss... | ||
| iotar Username: iotar Registered: 6-2006 |
Actually rather enjoyed Acker Bilk, The Shadows and The Tornados! | ||
| dan Username: dan Registered: 10-2006 |
>> The internet can't be on the internet, is the one thing that isn't on the internet by being it. Yes! Quiver, mighty Internet, even you are not immune to Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem! >> Hmm, by that cosmology Jesus is a fridge dwelling elephant. When you open the fridge door, does Jesus cease to exist? A bit like quantum physics and Googlewhacks, and the opposite of the fridge light. >> For the generation that was born in the late 90s however their cultural memories will have already have been uploaded. It can be taken for granted that it's represented in there somewhere. Will they need to remember stuff in the same way? It's true, computers and then mobile phones have completely changed the way my memory for phone numbers works (it used to. Now it doesn't). And even 5 or 6 years ago, I was amazed at the different approach of young people in my employ who, a generation younger than me, had pretty much grown up treating the Internet as an immutable fact rather than as one of the wonders of the modern world. I was also pretty surprised when we asked one of them to design a sleeve for a magazine and make it "like a gatefold album". He replied "what's a gatefold album". The irony is, of course, that now he's buying more vinyl than I ever did. >> I guess in the future there will be websites longingly remembering other websites that have gone. I've been getting dewy-eyed over lost websites for the best part of a decade already. I particularly mourn the loss of my own websites which I forgot to archive properly (and which disappeared off the web before the Wayback Machine got around to doing regular archives). I would kill for a full 1998 version of gspot.co.uk. But one of the biggest traumas of my life was some 5 years ago when Bullseye Art took down all of their online content. Fortunately they did have an archive, and a few years later they re-appeared as Magic Butter: http://www.magicbutter.com/ Complete with the absolutely wonderful Woodcutter, possibly my favourite website of all time: http://www.magicbutter.com/content/thewoodcutter.h tml | ||
| dan Username: dan Registered: 10-2006 |
By the way, here's my website longingly remembering other websites that have gone: http://www.sumption.org/2003/12/09/no-sir-no-sir-n o-sir-no-sir/ | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
Needless to say, there's someone in the US who's trying the archive the whole Net: which is like trying to trap the sea in a bucket. >Actually rather enjoyed ... Me, too! The Acker Bilk was a tune my dear mum tried to master for years on the piano; "Wonderful Land" still sounds the most innocent and optimistic piece of music ever written, all capuccino froth, space-age tower blocks, and new toys made of smelly, Hong Kong plastic. As for "Telstar" - well, despite (or maybe because of) it being Margaret Thatcher's favourite, it's weirder than ever: a gay Krautrock dream that's tottered out of the future in platform heels and a bacofoil dress, powdered face lit up in a halo of "Sister Ray" feedback, only to find itself a gorgeous orphan in a world of snow and cheap hair oil, where almost everybody looks like their parents. You could weep, you really could. | ||
| iotar Username: iotar Registered: 6-2006 |
Also interesting 1962 news items, such as the one about Americans eating per head five times the amount as the British. I wonder if that balance has ever been restored? My dad had a cassette, I remember it specifically being a cassette, of The Shadows sometime around 1976-78. It sounded to me, as a child, both dated and futuristic. Even at that age there was something about the major progressions and old spring reverbs that didn't quite fit. When the Burmese side of my family came over in the sixties they absorbed Cliff Richard, Elvis and The Everly Brothers - and didn't move on much further. That was as much of the West as they needed to assimilate. They might have been right. Even to this day they watch television with the colour set too high so that everything saturates into gaudy Technicolor. | ||
| al Username: al Registered: 11-2006 |
>> someone in the US who's trying the archive the whole Net Isn't that... the net? Always been awed by that Shadows guitar sound - the romance of tattered High Street Odeons, waiting for the film to come on and watching as - the lights going down and you can't quite see everything around you - for an instant you really are in an entertainment wonderland. Then you move a foot and it still sticks to the floor, and the ad for the Curry House round the corner comes on. As for the curry house ads - whatever happened to them? And cosmically retro Estate Agents ads. | ||
| al Username: al Registered: 11-2006 |
Always fascinated by Hank Marvin - a man with one of the most evocative, questing, roaming guitar styles ever, wedded to the musical taste of a rather timid accountant from a suburb in Middlesex. Witness this rather odd disco version of 'Ghost Riders in the Sky'...: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AwNcFkIQvlY&mode=re lated&search= | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
The future that never was: one of the reasons why the era lingers on with some people - we got just two licks at an iced lolly from 2062, really liked the flavour, then found it was all gone. But I wouldn't go back. Behind the Beatle wigs and the James Bond glamour, the country was full of porky folk lurching about in the after-shocks of the war and Suez. They couldn't get used to the idea that "their finest hour" had passed, nor to the notion that "knowing your place" was no longer a virtue, and the result was a bland and starchy place, full of petty snobbery and under the counter violence. A lot of the schools verged on child abuse; a lot of the adults that I remember should have been seeing psychiatrists - and the same goes for their grown children, who surround us now. Glad to leave it behind, frankly. | ||
| al Username: al Registered: 11-2006 |
>> A lot of the schools verged on child abuse I saw it at first hand; the bloke in the bed next to me being handcuffed down and buggered with a slipper , etc. Oddly enough his mum only came to take him home after he was lamp posted (ie his bed pushed up against the wall at a 90 degree angle with him in it) a few weeks later and his leg was terribly badly bruised. After a few days he was felt to be OK again and could come back to school. One of the buggerers was expelled; the other ended up becoming head of house a few years later. What was really disturbing about the whole thing wasn't so much the event itself but the reaction to it - a general feeling that the important thing was to pretend it had never happened. The school I was at was fed by a junior boarding school; one of its young rugby stars was in my year, my house and addicted to sleeping pills at 13. The junior school head used to shower with him after matches - he never played rugby in any serious way after he left junior school, tho' he was a very talented athlete. The junior school itself was raided by social services at one point, but the head received a fulsome send off when he finally retired, multiple tributes from the senior school, etc. I'd burn the whole corrupted, self glamourising, self absorbed, brutal place down, if I could. I've never felt as betrayed as when I discovered the difference between the myth the school uses to sel l itself (a kind of perpetual Edwardian summer's afternoon) and the reality. Still stuck very accurately in the 50s, by the sound of it... | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
My outstanding memory of school has nothing to do with horror stories, though. It's just a few seconds from somewhere in the mid-60s. I stopped to think - and saw that I was the only person in the classroom who wasn't reading or writing: the teacher taking us was absorbed in a book of his own, while everyone else had their heads down, and was busily scribbling away. The room was full of midday sun: and, for a moment, I had a tremendous sense of the space outside that drab building, and the light in the silence that no one else seemed to have noticed. I didn't know it then, but audiences at UFO were paying good money to experience roughly the same thing. | ||
| al Username: al Registered: 11-2006 |
Hmm - funny, my best positive moment is quite similar. I was reading Shelley under a tree in a hidden bit of the garden, listening to people playing croquet on the lawn, with golden Dorset sun coming in through the trees. Perfect moment! For a second I was *in* the myth. | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
Always magical to discover the real world, isn't it?  | ||
| iotar Username: iotar Registered: 6-2006 |
>> Glad to leave it behind, frankly. I'm alternately horrified and intrigued by my reaction to eighties revivals. I didn't enjoy the era - culturally, personally. But I can sometimes enjoy other people's flawed reinterpretations of it - even those of people who weren't there. And I wonder if that's partly because you can only look back with a certain degree of clarity. Once your entire cultural past is retrievable with high definition detail, once the resolution of memories becomes artificially enhanced how will people be able to escape the past? Maybe they won't have the same degradable shading-off into forgetfulness, and of course, perhaps they wouldn't expect to. >>...a man with one of the most evocative, questing, roaming guitar styles ever, wedded to the musical taste of a rather timid accountant from a suburb in Middlesex. That's not so bad. I'd be happy with that as an obituary! | ||
| al Username: al Registered: 11-2006 |
>> Always magical to discover the real world, isn't it? Yup - and it's that version of myself, and of the particular school experience, that has been most constructive in my life since then. The other wonderful literary moment - reading 'Frost At Midnight' about 30 miles from where STC wrote it at about 2am after finishing a late night essay - being astonished by the language - and then looking out over the Pageant Gardens next door, misted with frost and luminous in the full moonlight... the poem incarnate before me, almost made the whole thing worthwhile! >> I'd be happy with that as an obituary! Hmm, better get to work on those easy listening cover versions then... *awaits release of 'Cocktail Night at the Krishna Lounge' and similar* | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
>Questing ... the very word! >Eighties ... I've tried very hard to wipe it all from my mind. A terrible, terrible few years spent in a warped dimension of monetarism and mullet hair-dos where many people I loved deeply fell over and didn't move again. Those porky post-Suez folk found their vampiric champion in Norman Tebbit, while things you once laughed at turned into the very things that could keep you nervously awake through the small hours. Somehow, it became quite natural to see beggars sleeping in the doorway at Top Shop, for Ian Botham to go on charity walks with elephants, and for New Order to use the same clap-drum sample for years on end without anyone thinking it that odd. High point: toasting midnight on Dec. 31, 1989, and thinking - thank god I got out of there alive ... | ||
| iotar Username: iotar Registered: 6-2006 |
>> toasting midnight on Dec. 31, 1989, and thinking... Oof! I went into that countdown on a double-dipped purple om having eaten an eighth of hash (I believed the CIA were going to board the boat). Ten, nine, e-----i----ght, sevensix, f---------i-------v------e, s-i-x, 6, SIX, xis, 6, f--i--ive... I'm not sure it ever got to midnight. | ||
| arturo Username: arturo Registered: 10-2006 |
There is a spanish saying wich goes : others will come later that will make you look good. Well I am not a fan of wikipedia but ... http://creationwiki.org/ | ||
| iotar Username: iotar Registered: 6-2006 |
Yeah, I hear that they've been having problems with people editing their wiki in inappropriate ways. | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
Worth it if only to note that the barn owl and the Sombrero Galaxy have *exactly* the same colours! | ||
| arturo Username: arturo Registered: 10-2006 |
The result of intelligent design no doubt ( that one is what your atlantic counsins would call a no-brainer) | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
No doubt: so long as they have a deity who sees soley in the human spectrum. But then, as He looks exactly like Them, He would, wouldn't He? "God? She's black." - G. Corso. | ||
| al Username: al Registered: 11-2006 |
>> editing their wiki in inappropriate ways in mysterious ways, surely? Tho' come to think of it they should really encourage that. | ||
| iotar Username: iotar Registered: 6-2006 |
On increases in data usage: "How one year's digital output would fill 161bn iPods" http://tinyurl.com/26ossx | ||
| iotar Username: iotar Registered: 6-2006 |
Further thoughts on the 5 exabyte theory of human language: http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archive s/000087.html | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
>Store everything that every human being has ever said. All a bit (byte?) Arthur C. Clarke, isn't it? "Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out." |