Robert Plant, 40 years after, Skip James, Jonathan Wingate, Big Issue, Cool Geezer, Exmouth Road, Ahmet Ertegun, Blues classics to Rock classics. ‘Here Comes Everybody’ by Clay Shirky explains and justifies the self-absorbed inane posts on my weblog (or another one just like it).
09h30-BST Wednesday 23 April 2008-CE
Robert Plant was on the cover of BIG ISSUE #792 so I had to buy it. The cover piece by Jonathan Wingate was well worth reading. In 1969, Robert Plant (20) became lead singer of Led Zeppelin. I was sharing in Exmouth Road, Devonport with Cool Geezer. He bought the LP with ‘Whole Lot Of Love’ on it. It revealed a whole other shelf of music. Contemporarily, Marc Bolan’s T-Rex was equally exciting at a slower pace. Jonathan asked RP:
“Can you actually believe you’re coming up to your 60th Birthday?”
“No, but I don’t really care. When I looked forward as a teenager, did I ever imagine a man like this? No, I didn’t think anybody could be this old. When I was 16, I used to go and see Skip James, and I’d be looking at this guy going… ‘look at the state of him’. But he was born in 1902, so in 1962, he’d be younger than I am now. I don’t even know what ‘now’ is.”
There were 90 million attempts to register for 20,000 tickets for the recent Led Zeppelin reunion show, commemorating Ahmet Ertegun, in the first 12 hours after the event was announced. There certainly is such a thing as a ‘classic’ Rock number. And none are to be found amongst the grotty-spotty Brit-twits who just covered an American record in the charts. It is a different world to sensationally arrange a Blues classic into a Rock classic.
‘Here Comes Everybody’ by Clay Shirky is very good. I am a third the way through. He remarks on social networking sites and the way “most users interact with only a few others”. Then I like this bit on weblogs:
“…dozens of weblogs have an audience of a million or more, and millions have an audience of a dozen or less. It is easy to see this as a kind of failure… It’s also easy to see why the audience for most user-generated content is so small, filled as it is with narrow, spelling-challenged observations about going to the mall…
“And it’s easy to deride this sort of thing as self-absorbed publishing. Why would anyone put such drivel out in public? It’s simple. They’re not talking to you. We misread these seemingly inane posts because we’re so unused to seeing written material in public that isn’t intended for us…
“Most user-generated content isn’t ‘content’ at all, in the sense of being created for general consumption, any more than a phone call between you and a relative is ‘family-generated content’. Most of what gets created on any given day is just the ordinary stuff of life -gossip, little updates, thinking out loud- but now it’s done in the same medium as professionally produced material…”
Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of WIRED magazine is quoted in the cover blurb of ‘Here Comes Everybody’ as commenting: “How do trends emerge and opinions form? In this delightfully readable book, practically every page has an insight that will change the way you think about the new era of social media. Highly recommended.”
FIN 10h39
