{"id":1812,"date":"2009-05-05T10:03:50","date_gmt":"2009-05-05T10:03:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/2009\/05\/05\/crap_rotation\/"},"modified":"2024-11-27T21:42:28","modified_gmt":"2024-11-28T02:42:28","slug":"crap_rotation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/2009\/05\/05\/crap_rotation\/","title":{"rendered":"Crap Rotation"},"content":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve had analog stuff on the brain lately.<\/strong> I may be someone who\u2019s been online for a long time<\/a>, and who stays tethered to the internet throughout the average day in one way or another, but I\u2019ve always been a little ambivalent about the medium. And I don\u2019t just mean how much I hate building web sites, despite running one (or a few, usually) for such a long time. I guess my ambivalence is more about the culture of the medium, more than the platforms themselves. I\u2019m always fascinated by how the online world changes and surprises me, but I\u2019ve been at it long enough to miss some things that have gotten further than what I liked about them. It was a lot more fun to participate when online life was an immature mess that was in the middle of sprawling outward.<\/p>\n

I used to make stuff \u2014 actual, physical stuff<\/i>, like zines and mixtapes and paper and postcards \u2014 a lot, and the tactile aspect of that was a huge part of wht I liked. I don\u2019t make so much stuff anymore, and I miss the way I enjoyed the making and the sharing of it. I stumbled into the web because I was curious about this new thing that was emerging, and it was easy enough to tinker with it and feel it out. Throwing up a web page built with Mosaic<\/a> was also a cheap alternative to putting out the slightly<\/a> ambitious<\/a> zine<\/a> I had been making, so the first pages I made were supposed to be a staging ground for what I\u2019d publish the next time I had a little extra scratch lying around. Then they became a repository for stuff I was posting on discussion groups, and then a repository for what I\u2019d published in my zine, and then Blogger<\/a> happened and then GreyMatter<\/a> and then Movable Type<\/a> and then Flickr<\/a> and then Twitter<\/a> and other stuff and it became more and more and now here we are. Now, I find myself constantly expanding and contracting in the online world \u2014 testing new things, leaving them when they don\u2019t give me something I like. I don\u2019t really like the endless networks that can spin out in all directions. I like a smaller net with edges that are just blurry enough to leave room for serendipity. I like a bit more community and a bit less…well, a bit less onslaught of everything, I guess.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

This isn’t a new thing. The WYSIWYG Talent Show<\/a> started because it felt like blogging was an activity that was getting a bit less intimate and a bit less personal than it was when we stumbled into it early on. The glimpse at the person, and that person as a filter of the world around them, was the bit that I miss. As much as I appreciate that there are people out there who have the focus to maintain a repository of targeted content, I still bristle at the idea of blogs as necessities, marketing tools, or places that have to be<\/i> about just one thing. When I read someone saying that they have six blogs about different topics, I wonder why they don\u2019t just have one that\u2019s mostly about the six things that interest them so much, and anything else they throw in. It\u2019s still the person that\u2019s the point for me. Just the other day, FPO<\/a> \u2014 a great blog about print design projects, but yet another precisely targeted project within a cluster of sites \u2014 appeared, and they say<\/a> flat out:<\/p>\n

Through different venues \u2014 some in conversation, other in interviews \u2014 we have expressed our theory that niche and highly targeted blogs are the ones enjoying the most success, as they hold the assurance that no matter what day of the week you log on, you will get exactly the kind of content you expected to find.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And as it gets easier and easier for me to find web sites about the endless things that interest me, I find it harder and harder to hear voices within the chorus, even my own.<\/p>\n

So I\u2019ve been paying more attention to the stuff that people are making. People (including me, now and then) have been making stuff all along, but there\u2019s been this slow build about the joys of stuff, and making stuff that\u2019s deeply imbued with the quirks and the presence of the maker. I\u2019ve been to a few small-press and zine fairs in the last year \u2014 they\u2019ve been having<\/i> zine fairs again for the last couple of years, and they\u2019re packed \u2014 and I see things swinging around for another pass. More people are making stuff \u2014 stuff with smaller scale, smaller audiences, and a bit more magic. Even when the topic at hand is just as targeted as any blog, something like a zine or an independent comic usually ends up being about the maker than anything else, and I like the way the person blends with the point so easily.<\/p>\n

And yeah, it is just another thing that\u2019s swinging around. In the \u201990s my buddies and I were wondering if better tools and more polished zines were pushing the personal toward the commercial too easily. And yeah, they did, and we let market forces do what they do while we did other stuff and then that stuff is everything I just wrote about above and I feel like the zine field has lain fallow long enough that it\u2019s fertile enough to bloom into another generation of glorious immature mess.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve had analog stuff on the brain lately. I may be someone who\u2019s been online for a long time, and who stays tethered to the internet throughout the average day in one way or another, but I\u2019ve always been a little ambivalent about the medium. And I don\u2019t just mean how much I hate building … Continue reading “Crap Rotation”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1812","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ultracultural","category-ultrapersonal"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1812","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1812"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1812\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":71455,"href":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1812\/revisions\/71455"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1812"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1812"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1812"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}