This
is a rant, so be warned, but it is tongue-in-cheek too. I wrote it with
a smile on my face, although I'm not kidding about being irritated by
invented jargon and buzz-words.
I discovered today that my local history blog falls into the category of a "hyperlocal" blog. The mind boggles.
I'm not a web novice. I was involved in a life-threateningly complex e-commerce project in 1997, and I went on to have a cheerful career developing websites and internet applications for PC, interactive TV and mobile platforms. I wrote a document the size of War and Peace about the future of "chat" applications, with a particular focus on chat rooms (chuckle), supervised two projects about website personalization for two different companies and became a specialist on the underlying operations that supported all of this loveliness. It was my world. But still, I never got used to the ridiculously daft buzzwords that grew up with the brave new world of the irritatingly named "new media" that were presumably encouraged by the even dafter names that dot.com businesses, the poster-children for the web, were adopting for themselves. The industry newspaper New Media Age was a relatively sane voice of reason, but all the popular magazines that suddenly appeared like a virulent rash on newspaper stands all over London just couldn't help but invent a new and very silly vocabulary, some of which stuck.
The invention of the worst of the daft buzzwords probably became a
hopelessly unavoidable epidemic only with with the evolution of social
media and the development of web and phone "apps" - the inevitable
fallout of the appallingly named "Web 2.0" concept. Every time I catch
myself composing sentences containing verbs like "tweeting" and
"Googling" I shudder. I'm not even very happy with "smart-phone" and I
was one of the collaborators in the early development of the thing. The
term "web-surfing" was bad enough and I'll never forget the look on my
father's face when he discovered that he was a "silver surfer." Words
like "blog," an abbreviation of "weblog," hurt my sensibilities, and
where did "posting" come from anyway? The terms B2B and its rather lame
cousin P2P seemed to die an early and merciful death, but the first
time I heard someone used the term "ideation" in a meeting I nearly
burst into tears, and when I caught myself referring to "clickability"
at another meeting I swear I would have thrown myself off the conference
room balcony if the doors hadn't been sealed shut. One company I worked
for referred to the available advertising space on a web page as "real
estate" and an ISP for whom I consulted had named its own content (as
opposed to that nasty disorganized stuff on the real web) as "the
ring-fenced prairie." Oh, and let us not forget "astroturfing," just in
case we should be tempted to reinvent it. As a final whinge, please just
don't get me started on the BBC adopting the term "trending." But even
after having adapted to all of that exuberant nonsense to the extent
that bits of it now form an unavoidable part of my mental vocabulary and
are part of the grammar of daily life, I truly cannot come to terms
with "hyperlocal." Hyperlocal. Good grief.
So here I am, a hyperlocal blogger, at the grand old age of 52. And having found the grizzly term and realized that it applied to me, I did a bit of searching into what hyperlocal blogging actually is. And it is just what you would expect. Town, village or postcode, if your blog is focused on a tightly defined geographical area, then you too are a hyperlocal blogger. There's an article about it on The Guardian website, by Dave Harte, dating to January 2013 (that date confirming that I'm a bit behind the current buzzword times) entitled "Hyperblogging is deserving of its hype" (http://bit.ly/1oOOyHN). Really? Seriously? "Deserving of its hype?" Oh puuleeeese give me a break. But I worked through the trauma inflicted on my already fragile mental state by the ludicrous heading and read on. The article informs me that I'm not only a hyperlocal blogger, but that I am also guilty of "creative citizenship." Oh Surely not. Please save me now.
It's
not that I'm against the act of hyperblogging, if that's what people
really want to call it. There's a really nice article, called "New
experiences that hyper local blogging can bring" (http://bit.ly/1MopRx6)
about the Wake Green Park blog (or hyperblog). I'm all in favour of it.
But I still have no idea what creative citizenship might be because the
website to which the Guardian website referred was so hilariously full
of words and so fundamentally lacking in actual content that I am none
the wiser. Here's what the Creative Citizens website says (http://bit.ly/23ncNje):
"In this strand, we explore the relationship between current and emerging media ecologies within local networks of formal and informal creative practitioners and their linkages to places. The informal creative economy is driven by dreams, a bootstrapping process led by music and media production, but fashion, graffiti, comics, anime and other art forms are all in the mix. This creative energy may lead to the emergence of buoyant creative communities and places. Our investigation is sited in a continuum from informal, aspirational, semi-professional networks to identified creative clusters and looks at what kinds of value are enacted and created as subjects strive to move from the informal into the formal and economically viable milieu."
Reword that in English and it might actually say something worth pondering, but who knows?
A number of years ago I was consulting at a very new and truly interesting dot.com. On one day, the three 30-something founders of the company departed to the offices of another dot.com, which had just failed spectacularly and very publicly (boo.com, if I remember rightly) and was selling off all its office equipment. When the three of them returned with a car loaded with various pieces of very useful tech, the story emerged that one of the directors had had to be held down by the other two to prevent him buying an inflatable office. Need a meeting room but they are all occupied? Just plug in your electric pump and grow your own! A true symptom of the dot.com revolution - and its demise. As mad as a box of frogs.
The Internet has produced miracles, remarkably useful services, seriously funny gimmicks and a lot of stuff we'd much rather know nothing about and ought to get rid of for good. But even though I might have a secret and overpowering urge to own an inflatable office (preferably in translucent purple), I really don't want to be either a hyperlocal blogger or a creative citizen. It's all too hyper-prolix for me.
.
.
.
If you don't know me and are wondering what all this is about, my incredibly understated local history and wildlife blog (hyperlocal blog) is at www.russiadock.blogspot.com.
I discovered today that my local history blog falls into the category of a "hyperlocal" blog. The mind boggles.
I'm not a web novice. I was involved in a life-threateningly complex e-commerce project in 1997, and I went on to have a cheerful career developing websites and internet applications for PC, interactive TV and mobile platforms. I wrote a document the size of War and Peace about the future of "chat" applications, with a particular focus on chat rooms (chuckle), supervised two projects about website personalization for two different companies and became a specialist on the underlying operations that supported all of this loveliness. It was my world. But still, I never got used to the ridiculously daft buzzwords that grew up with the brave new world of the irritatingly named "new media" that were presumably encouraged by the even dafter names that dot.com businesses, the poster-children for the web, were adopting for themselves. The industry newspaper New Media Age was a relatively sane voice of reason, but all the popular magazines that suddenly appeared like a virulent rash on newspaper stands all over London just couldn't help but invent a new and very silly vocabulary, some of which stuck.
So here I am, a hyperlocal blogger, at the grand old age of 52. And having found the grizzly term and realized that it applied to me, I did a bit of searching into what hyperlocal blogging actually is. And it is just what you would expect. Town, village or postcode, if your blog is focused on a tightly defined geographical area, then you too are a hyperlocal blogger. There's an article about it on The Guardian website, by Dave Harte, dating to January 2013 (that date confirming that I'm a bit behind the current buzzword times) entitled "Hyperblogging is deserving of its hype" (http://bit.ly/1oOOyHN). Really? Seriously? "Deserving of its hype?" Oh puuleeeese give me a break. But I worked through the trauma inflicted on my already fragile mental state by the ludicrous heading and read on. The article informs me that I'm not only a hyperlocal blogger, but that I am also guilty of "creative citizenship." Oh Surely not. Please save me now.
"In this strand, we explore the relationship between current and emerging media ecologies within local networks of formal and informal creative practitioners and their linkages to places. The informal creative economy is driven by dreams, a bootstrapping process led by music and media production, but fashion, graffiti, comics, anime and other art forms are all in the mix. This creative energy may lead to the emergence of buoyant creative communities and places. Our investigation is sited in a continuum from informal, aspirational, semi-professional networks to identified creative clusters and looks at what kinds of value are enacted and created as subjects strive to move from the informal into the formal and economically viable milieu."
Reword that in English and it might actually say something worth pondering, but who knows?
A number of years ago I was consulting at a very new and truly interesting dot.com. On one day, the three 30-something founders of the company departed to the offices of another dot.com, which had just failed spectacularly and very publicly (boo.com, if I remember rightly) and was selling off all its office equipment. When the three of them returned with a car loaded with various pieces of very useful tech, the story emerged that one of the directors had had to be held down by the other two to prevent him buying an inflatable office. Need a meeting room but they are all occupied? Just plug in your electric pump and grow your own! A true symptom of the dot.com revolution - and its demise. As mad as a box of frogs.
The Internet has produced miracles, remarkably useful services, seriously funny gimmicks and a lot of stuff we'd much rather know nothing about and ought to get rid of for good. But even though I might have a secret and overpowering urge to own an inflatable office (preferably in translucent purple), I really don't want to be either a hyperlocal blogger or a creative citizen. It's all too hyper-prolix for me.
.
.
.
If you don't know me and are wondering what all this is about, my incredibly understated local history and wildlife blog (hyperlocal blog) is at www.russiadock.blogspot.com.
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