So, ironically, given the title of my blog, this posting is my response to the overload of information I’m currently encountering in my increasing use of the internet. No vintage words here..preserved in a tucked-away second-hand boutique, available only to a select few to whom has been disclosed its secret location. Instead the great leveller, the mass, and the insistently modern.
Previously merely a social networking tool and a basic research facilitator, (i.e. my internet forays confined themselves to Facebook, Google, and Wikipedia), my experience of the net has now, in a classically rapid fashion, expanded enormously.
Now, instead of researching courses to take in universities or academic institutions as a physically present human being, I consider sending my electronic money out into the ether and signing up for online courses, trusting that ‘teacher-less’ and without fellow students, reliant only a well-stocked ‘multimedia’ curriculum, I will somehow still qualify myself.
What i will call my ‘internet encounters’ have also exponentially increased. Instead of running away in panic to bury my head in the sand when confronted with the plethora of youtube videos and online articles and blogs posted and messaged by my friends on Facebook, I am now their avid reader and viewer. Consumer.
In true avant-garde social media style, however, as a consumer I am also implicitly a producer waiting to happen. Hence, assumedly my desire to share with the aforementioned ether the story of my day’s internet activity.
Why exactly I feel anyone else would or should in fact be interested in what my personal, and daily experience of the internet is, I dont venture to explain or even examine just yet.
Instead, as a blogger with at least the spurious authority to post as much as I want about that eternal topic – myself – I will, without further ado, give you my
Internet Diary: DAY ONE.
1: I discovered a ‘clothing-optional airline’. just the name is great. http://econudes.org/node/266
2: I discovered 2 new amazing websites called wordnik.com and chemistry.com, both as a result of two stellar ted talks (ted.com) I listened to. I highly recommend the personality quiz on chemistry.com. Even if you’d rather not affiliate yourself with a dating site, its definitely worth it to do the test and cheerfully ignore the welcome or unwelcome consequences of now having ‘matches’ spread across the globe. As for wordnik, I still havent really oriented myself there…but I fully intend to be spending more time on the site, so I will update as and when.
3: During a frantic search, desperately trying to find some music to listen to on Youtube whilst packing, I typed in ‘best movie soundtracks’ or something similar, and ended up stumbling across some real gems I haven’t actually got in my score collection (now numbering around 700 and running out of things I want and dont have). One of these was the ‘stoic prison theme’ from the Shawshank Redemption (Thomas Newman can always be relied upon to make emotivally powerful though dangerously repetitive themes.) This one, however, is pretty good, and doesnt just let you relax through it. Like the movie, it keeps you riveted and involved, so that you have no choice but to suffer throgh the difficult parts and thrill to the exhilarating ones..
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-Vq9dFO0vc
4: In another chance encounter, I came across a mislabelled but fabulous track of the Italian composer Ludovico Einaudi on youtube, which i will now have to exert myself to find on iTunes listening to the 30second preview of each likely song until I come to the right one. But until then, who wouldnt want to hear this –
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2K7D-uMH2g&feature=related
5: Also, as mentioned above, I found this online copyediting course which I want to take with mediabistro.com, who are also sending me insane amounts of newsletters and blogs and stuff on the latest media and PR news, which I have, apparently, signed up for. One of these concerns itself exclusively with E-Books, which will in 10 years time be called simply ‘books’ as E-mail gradually proceeded through to email, and eventually graduated up to almost replacing ‘mail’.
6: Another of the Ted Talks i listened to was on Metaphor – excellent and well-worth a revisit. it was short, clever, metaphorical of course, and did a good job of making this seemingly arcane literary–grammatical category of language into something highly relevant – even indispensable – to a successful society.
http://www.ted.com/talks/james_geary_metaphorically_speaking.html
Ok, I think that’s probably enough for my first day. I feel I might need some assimilative sleep time to process all this new knowledge…just in case the blogging and sharing hasn’t worked..
Vintage Words 