I was feeling nostalgic so here we go. This is a throw back to what the Greyrealm and Text and Hubris used to look like. Sometimes, simple is best.
What to do, what to do? I sit here and stare at my future. I have three papers to write and all I can do is ponder how to merge them all into a new media narrative. I feel so far behind and yet, in some ways, I am still ahead. My goals are coalescing. New Media narratives can and do exist but only by accepting that we cannot hold on to the paradigms of the past. That includes the paradigms of the the Internet.
New Media is not youtube, it is not the Gutenberg Project, or Google’s mad dash to digitize all text. Text exists within and without. Narratives are human creations and we now live inside and outside of the machine. Inside the machine the world is only slivers of grey. This is the Greyrealm that has hosted me for so long. Beyond the realms of that are only illusions and vast tracts of advertising. Narratives exist in between. They exist in the colleague who tells me of a dwarf who stands against the horde. They exist in a boy who delights in telling me how so silly tripe changed his mind and in the many shared laughs caused by that cursed narwhal song. They are teh reason that a crappy boy band from – what was it, Moldova – will be forever remembered for one really annoying song. New Media is the narrative of life and in that it is no different from the narratives of the past. The only real difference is that more people are talking and more tales are being told and the giants of old media are doing whatever they can to make money while the giant corporations of new media prepare to devour their forefathers.
Into all of this we are born, the storytellers of the digital age. Finally, I think I start to understand. The technology I have spent my life wandering through, the digital wastelands that encompass most of my life exist because I can tell a story with it. All this work…and now I sit and look and realize the tools before me. I have them. I am ready.
Wow…I hope I don’t fuck this up….
