Just been on the phone to The Lady being altogether too verbose about setting up The Trawl and why it was important to me that any site I set up included my Twitter feed. She asked, as a few people have over the last week or so, why I actually use Twitter, what do I see in it?
When I first set up The Polaroid Press I used the phrase “Inspiration Engine” to describe it: essentially I wanted a space where one contributor could post a photograph in the morning and by the time evening rolled around another would have posted a poem as a response. It didn’t happen, but I wanted, ideally, a space for artistic conversation that relied on original input to feed a group culture. In the long term I see Twitter – or, rather a Twitter-esque system – as being the easiest and most effective means of achieving that. Once the system, or one like it, can handle packets of data more than substantial than microblogs (i.e. photos, audio, video etc) then you can create a space for artistic discourse that can actually work in the field. That’s important. Social communication is most effective when it’s actually social, when the participants are leading lives that encompass varied pursuits and they can share their experiences.
Now, of course, that particular view is imperfect, broken perhaps, because it runs the risk of forcing the artist/participant into a position where the sharing of the experience becomes more substantial than the experience. Arguably that’s what artists have always done, but never before so immediately, however I have faith that adjusting to the input/output opportunities is fairly easily done: Certainly nobody I’m currently following on Twitter is a filthy lifeblogger.
But there’s another factor that holds huge sway over my faith in microblogging: I’m a firm subscriber to so called ‘Burst Culture’. I first encountered the term in a Bad Signal mail-out by Warren Ellis, which suggested, simply and effectively, that web distribution of material like blog entries and mp3s has created a consumer culture that works at its best through clean, concise distribution, utilising the speed and mass-communication capacity of the internet to its best advantage. I don’t know anyone other than my Mum who isn’t downloading mp3s on an almost daily basis, even my grandparents are doing it, and that’s not killing the appetite for longform works in the least: I’m certainly still part of a literate nation, an album buying nation, who enjoy serialised fiction and cinema as much as viral ads and blogs.
I also believe, nation be damned, that effective communication shouldn’t need hundreds of thousands of words. Far from ‘dumbing down’ I think understanding how to use few words to say a lot is an art form, and a hell of a thing if done well. Not only is The Polaroid Press an exercise in finding some authorial voice but it’s also me trying to say, with a body of work, that it only takes a couple of hundred words to move somebody, or educate somebody, or better understand my own thoughts on something.
I still want to build that ‘Inspiration Engine’ and I still want to see how a group of people can fit into this new cultural model, if it lasts.
