Place, Space and Music

In writing about responses to my piece on the Web as Utopia (which have turned into a discussion of the Web as a place). I somehow forgot to point to Tom Matrullo‘s densely beautiful musings on music as a metaphor for the Web. Sometimes reading Tom is more like swimming than like reading, and I mean that in the good sense.

And on the same topic, the last thing AKMA wants me to do is agree with him. But, darn it, I do. He is worried that the familiarity of the spatial metaphor will keep us from appreciating what is new and important about the Web. As he says, the shoe can begin to pinch:

The weird part is the Web I want to explore, and I don’t want to have trouble recognizing it because I’m wearing “space”-colored glasses.

Absolutely! It’s the ordinary about the Web that’s most extraordinary. New metaphors – new poems – are essential if we are to illumine the parts that have either been in the shadows or were too close to us to be visible. But – and here’s where AKMA and I actually disagree, at long last – I don’t think spatiality is a metaphor the way that, say, “Links are like caesuras,” as Tom suggests, is. Space isn’t a way of thinking about the Web. It is (in its weird webby permutation) how we experience the Web. You can’t replace a deep metaphor like that with even the most piercing and achingly true similes. It can happen, but only over time as language and its accents and dialects change.

Daniela at LivingCode writes beautifully about the meaning the Web place has for us. It’s filled with bloggable lines, such as:

…With all due respect Dave Winer is a place, more specifically the town square.

…I watch the destruction of communities, the mobility we have achieved, the shaken roots both of trees and people, how we have put a price on every step we take, how we are forgetting to do the part that we are really good at doing (being human) …

…Here at Livingcode (which is another spacial representation) we see Utopia as a transitory place, because nothing stays with the good intentions it was built on. That is the “real” web for me: Building spaces of honest and good intentions in which to perfect ourselves….

In the course of the blog entry, she points to InvisibleCities, a collaborative site that seeks to encourage being creative as an alternative to being entertained.

Categories: Uncategorized dw