So I am the gold-star class master of blogging while swinging. As in on a swing set, like in a playground.

Found this panorama on my phone. I don’t know what it is or when I took it. One of my dogs is in there somewhere.

Handmade

Dan was a duck in Staffordshire,
not the fastest or the best.
He went to a diner in Paris,
and ordered pheasant from a vest.

‘But that cannot be, monsieur!’
yelled the black, unbuttoned vest.
‘We do not service cannibals,’
it did yell in protest.

Dan the duck was defiant:
‘My own my meal shant be!
A duck and a pheasant are not the same.
I’m only half a cannibal, you see.’

‘I’ve traversed the globe in my time,
sampled the finest in fowl and feather.
But a duck I’ve never eaten,
and could not in any weather.’

‘You had chicken, pigeon and quail?’
The baffled vest asked the duck.
‘Of course,’ said hungry, old Dan.
‘Even emu, just for luck.’

The vest was sated with the duck’s story,
satisfied was he
that he asked the chef to cook
every bird that he could see.

‘it’ll be a treat for Dan!’
the fancy vest decided.
‘He’ll have a feathered feast for free,
and oh, will he be delighted.’

Of course the vest wasn’t so dumb
as to not point out his mate,
to the eager chef who came too close
to putting his head on a plate.

‘The duck by the window, my friend,
the little one with the bow tie,
don’t cook him or kill him or eat him just yet,
he’s just too thin to fry!’

‘Serve him some of our poultry scraps,
we’ll make him nice and round.
When he’s full to bursting,
then we’ll take him down.’

‘He’s a bird who eats his friends,
the strangest kind of guy.
We can cut him up with the cleaver
and serve him in a pie!’

‘Just that duck alone
would make a splendid pie.
His belly could be full
of many things that fly.’

‘It’s already got chicken, pigeon and quail,
a bit of emu too.
What other birds could we serve
to this doomed, perverted fool?’

And while the diner staff mocked
the poor unknowing Dan,
the duck waited eagerly for his favourite:
twice-cooked chicken flan.

As he waited he let his mind wander
from what his meal could be;
‘Why how nice that vest is being,
oh how very nice to me’

So here I am, listening to ‘Better Man’, thinking about the unlecture which I, again, did not attend.

I have Victoria Landale’s fantastic notes guiding me. Hi, Victoria, I have no clue who you are but it’s nice to meet you. Your observations are incredibly useful to lazy assholes like me.

The song has ended (it was pretty much over when I started this post). Our tune for this evening is now ‘Round Here’ by the Counting Crows.

Anyway, the symposium this week seemed to cover the same stuff from last week, as well as a few ideas brought up in the Murphy & Potts reading. More scale-free network talk, which is greatly valued. I guess. I get it, I really do, and I’m tired of having it defined to me.

I’m not overly sure that the discussion format works so much. I’ve raised my concerns before, but it seems like the heads of this forum just rehash the same ideas all the time, because they are the same people, with the same ideas, talking about the same subjects. Of course we’re getting repetitive.

‘Jimmy’ by MIA has just peeked in. I enjoy this song, so I might get distracted.

Seemed to me that most of the tutors aren’t really technological determinists. I’m certainly not, but they all had something to say about the contexts of technological development. That’s interesting, a little. Is it?

Ok, I’ll stop bullshitting. I don’t care.

I mean, I am so adamantly against the idea that technology appears out of nowhere and just causes social change. How does that even make sense to people? Part of technology is demand: society asks for something, people try to fulfill their desires. Easy.

‘You Get What You Give’, the New Radicals. Eh, could be worse.

Computers were a slow progress that stemmed from society’s gradual speeding up of calculations. Yes, it’s hard to define its invention outside of technological terms, but you can’t say that it was bound to be invented then, and that it changed everything. Ok, we can with the computer, but we were prepared for it when it arrived. No one can just say ‘and suddenly all these computers just appeared and everyone facebooked’. No, rich people could afford the early prototypes, talk of these spread down, more people bought early computers, more word and advertisements. They became gradually popular (‘Better Be Home Soon’ by Crowded House) and their demand increased, the profit margins of manufacturers increased, computer development increased, their technology improved. Computers became what they are because of the social responses to earlier technologies. Not because they were born out of the ether.

We wanted them, they appeared (That was a short song, ‘Only if for a Night’ by Florence and the Machine has already taken over). And that’s why technological determinism fails, in my opinion.

Any questions?

‘If you blog and no one’s there to read it does it still matter?’

Thanks, Nick. In my clear attempt to make a spur-of-the-moment blog post that relates to Networked Media, my dear friend Nicholas angrily retorted my prodding with this pearl of wisdom, unabashedly stolen from the whole ‘tree in the forest’ philosophy.

I’d make a few adjustments to Nick’s assumption, and posit that a case of whether a blog can or does ‘matter’ is irrelevant, and that we should instead focus on a more basic level: is a blog a blog if no one reads it?

Google defines a blog as : A Web site on which an individual or group of users record opinions, information, etc. on a regular basis.

By that definition a private blog is still a blog, but I would argue that the modern reading of the word extends into its audience; a blog, by understanding, is a public space. One with a totalitarian sense of single-party control, but a public space nonetheless, one where whatever is there is public. So, can a blog no one reads be considered a blog?

A dictionary would argue yes. A blogger, perhaps not. What is the point of private blogging, or – if you’d let me define it – blogging without the intent of letting one see what is being written. This excludes drafts, only encompassing writing that is NEVER meant to be consumed by the public. I might even argue that blogs only able to be read by a chosen audience of the bloggers meets the same hurdle: is it a blog, or more of a forum? The public doesn’t matter, the people there know why they are there and presumably have context and understanding most others don’t.

A real blog is one where context can’t be relied upon. I could be – if you’re only reading this entry and no others – a Japanese school girl with six fingers on my left hand. My father could be a fisherman and I could be writing my first entry in this blog that isn’t somehow related to my normal routine of posting lesbian sloth porn on Fridays. A quick check of my other posts discredits that fantasy, but if you aren’t here because of my directing you, then chances are you don’t know jack about me.

Am I male or female? Gay or straight? Young or old? African or Eastern European? Have I had cancer? Am I an orphan? You probably don’t know, and that’s why the public is so important to a blog. All they have is what they’ve been presented with, and that is – in my contextualised definition – what a blog is, and should be. You shouldn’t know what the blogger doesn’t want you to know, it’s the blog that matters and you can build your interpretations around it.

If no one can read your blog, then why have a blog at all? This is for us, the Everyman, to ingest and enjoy. You may write it for your friends, you may make it private for them, but that rejects what I think a blog is. It is fine to direct it, but it’s designed to reach the public, and limiting that – I believe – is a defiance of what a blog is and should be.