Friday 1 July 2011

I didn't want a blog.

"I maintain that blogs are the preserve of obsessive compulsives who have opinions above their station, and feel the need to keep the world informed of the current state of their psychotic breakdown," I told My Producer Harry.

"I think anyone who has heard five minutes of the Radio Hour can detect the irony in that," he replied. So, I have a blog now.

Since Harry and I launched the Vile Arts Media Empire in January, I have become enmeshed in New Media. I think about it all day. Now that I have come off the citalapram, I have three extra hours in the day, while I sit up into the night and scratch my arms feverishly, waiting for the withdrawal to pass.You never know how addicted you are until you try to give up.

"Why don't you do one of those metaphysical monologues you inflict on me while the prerecorded interviews are on air?" suggested Harry.

"It will do you good to get it off your chest," my doctor told me. "Creativity is a great blessing."

Quite a bit of time is spent laughing hysterical about the Old Media's response to New Media.

Harry nudges me."Don't drift off into a personal language. Explain your terms." He is such an Aristotlean.

Fine. Old Media correspond to print - newspapers, those music magazines on a nostalgia trip, which I am now beginning to understand, books that come from the pound shop - as opposed to on your Kindle - anything that uses distribution networks that star a van and guys rushing into shops and hurling a bundle of paper at the floor. New Media come on a wipe-clean screen, nestles between hard-core pornography and is a mouse-click away from summoning up material that will lose you your job and haunt your sleepless hours.

Old Media are the Guardian, The List, The Skinny, The Herald. Even the Guardian website is old media, because it uses traditional methods of writing and resourcing. It's TV as well. New Media are Facebook, blogs, the Vintage Erotica Forum and that meme video involving two girls, one cup and chocolate ice-cream.

"Are you sure it is chocolate?"

It is easy to explain what the Two Media are - the blurred boundaries are par for the course these days, ever since philosophy noticed how categorisation was fundamentally a hegemonic project anyway. What is not so easy to explain is why everyone gets so excited about using New Media, and why they use it in a traditional manner.

It effectively undermines the qualities of the new, by saddling it with the past.

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