The Borders of Things

a vast mud field of images: that's great....it's the reason i waited until i no longer could before i finally got a computer. of course, now i've been vacuumed up into a virtual lintball of tepid abstraction...................... i'm back in spokane after a few days in connecticut. love to chat poetry--or most anything else, really--sometime. know franz wright? james wright? we can just start in reverse alphabetical order.

As you will learn Jeff, I know *of* more poets than I have actually read. But we could also start with Milosz. A buddy of mine had to drive down to CA a few months ago and found M.'s house, which still had all of his stuff in it. He took a picture of his pen jar through the window. I thought of that reading your poem.

Paul;
I think the difference between the ideal movie-goer described in the quote and the users of the devices you have listed is the fact that most of the new media players require agency in order to use them. For example, you can't listen to your ipod without first buying the music (hopefully) and then putting it on your media player. This usually requires some discretion, as, even though the memory on these devices is enormous, there is still a limit. The ideal movie-goer, on the other hand, is in a perpetually passive state, letting the visual and audio stimulation wash over him or her, paralyzed to do anything other than absord the stimuli. I would argue that the concept of the ipod user is antithetical to this idea as it demands the user interact with the device in order for it to work. I would like to write more on this, but I need to get to class.

Mikey -- I think your argument for heightened agency has some merit, but I would make the argument that the ideal moviegoer, once acting as an agent by choosing to enter the theatre (or subscribe to TIVO, or whatever) willingly gives up his/her agency and becomes a passive consumer. This is the same thing the i-pod junkie does. The irony is that all of these new media are marketed as heightening one's autonomy when in fact it cuts one off from it.

This is the bigger fish: it cuts off one's agency by eliminating one's sense of community with those around one, which I would argue is necessary for a true sense of agency. There is nothing more eerie to me than to be walking in a crowd of students in the morning and to be one of the only people without a set of headphones plugged into my ears -- and thus the only one to hear the complete silence.

Whaddya think?

That's a big 10-4; I thought you were approaching this from a music point of view, not from a community angle. I see ipods as revolutionary in the sense that no longer do people have to be slaves to radio stations that play crap or even enslaved to the concept of buying cds from a multinational record label. The freedom to visit a new artist's website and buy some songs from him offers a new look to the traditional market scene. Granted, exchanges of ideas and music are not necessarily completed face to face, but the exchanges are still there and, it would seem, more and more frequent. I guess I would rather see an army of students listening to some new bands of value on their ipods than a bunch of clones consuming what they hear on the radio or in advertisements. Of course, an ipod user can listen to Britney Spears on their device, but it is my hope that the use of these devices creates a shift in the music industry to a market that is more responsive to talent, not marketability.

This is a huge topic obviously, and I could write a great deal on the subject. However, I think this captures the essence of my point. Once again, my post must be truncated as I have to hustle off to class.

I see where you're coming from here. I would agree -- except I get the impression that a number of my students still listen to whatever is being marketed to them.

But taste is a whole other ball of wax . . .