Last week I saw a play called The Four Horsemen Project at the Great Canadian Theatre Company in Ottawa. Created by Toronto’s Volcano Theatre, the play has received rave reviews both here in Ottawa and during its recent run at Factory Theatre in Toronto. I’d like to comment a bit on the play, and also point out how it connects - somewhat tangentially, but significantly - to social media.

The play is a fun, energetic and hyper-kinetic tribute to the legendary Canadian performance poetry ensemble The Four Horsemen. This was a group of 4 poets (bpnichol, Paul Dutton, Steve McCaffery and Rafael Barreto-Rivera) who studiously and ecstatically explored the limits of human vocal communication in a poetic context throughout the 70s and early 80s.

As someone who has also spent many years exploring the same fertile terrain as a poetic performer, the Four Horsemen were always an inspiration to me. Fortunately, I’ve had the opportunity to perform and record with the amazing soundsinger Paul Dutton on several occasions, and count him as a fine friend. (Hi Paul!) For what it’s worth, I also once won a poetry battle with bpnichol, but that’s a story nobody knows and I won’t recount here. Regardless, the point is that these guys were true poets - vocal angels and vocal demons, seekers, soothsayers and shit-disturbers - and as a result, despite a sudden and belated interest in their work due to this new play, they were by and large avoided and ignored, like all real poets, in their day. Basically, they scared the shit out of most people, even tho they inspired, enthralled and enraptured many others. That’s inevitably how it is with poets, the real ones anyway, til they are dead (R.I.P. bp) or disbanded.

As you may have gathered from previous posts on this blog, I believe that oral communication technologies are extremely relevant to our understanding of digital communication technologies. In other words if social media is all about ‘conversations’, then it makes sense to seek to understand the familiar dynamics of oral conversations as a means of gaining insight into new digital conversational models. More than this, I feel that the two technologies share fundamental commonalities that distinguish them from literate communication technologies, and that as a result oralists and digitalists need each other. They actively need to be allies if either hopes to fend off the predatory tactics of literate capitalists seeking to enslave the digital realm (via WIPO and copyright, via Geolocking content, via DRM, via penalties for sharing, etc.) as they have colonized oral cultures (a quick review of the legal clampdown on sampling in HipHop would be very relevant here, as would an examination of the negligible legal value of hearsay - i.e. hear-say as trumped by texts, writs, deeds, contracts, etc.).
All of this is to say that those people who push the limits of oral communication are important, they are juggernauts exploding hegemonic literate norms and positing radically new models of engagement, expression and communion. The Four Horsemen were ahead of their time, as were peers like John Giorno (another brilliant poet-friend and a wise and beautiful man) and his lower-east side poet’s posse, which included the likes of Patti Smith, David Johansen, Jayne Cortez, and his roommate, William S. Burroughs.
But it may be that their day has come, that a playful polyvocal poetics of improvisation, of dynamic digital engagement vs. static mechanical textuality, is on the horizon. It may be that the blogosphere, chat, messenger and the rest do not represent a pathologically pointless logorrhea, as some fear, but rather a liberatory linguistic lasciviousness, a collective rush to babble, to squawk, to sing - together. No longer fearing The Four Horsemen in their bardic beards, but becoming ourselves The 4 billion babblers of the networked talkalypse, making meaning, making media, making money.

We shall see.

I was sent an email recently that was written by Mark Surman, Director of Telecentre.org, with the subject heading: Get involved: Help create new Community Media Foundation from CTV / CHUM merger. The gist of the email was an appeal to Canadian new media activists to lobby the feds to promote the idea that the merger of two of Canada’s largest online and broadcast content players should only be approved if accompanied by a commitment to invest substantially in community media in Canada. This is a great idea and should be supported. The email includes a form letter that you can personalize and instructions about how to send it to the CRTC. Hit me back and I’ll forward it to you if you are interested in learning more.

I think community media is in dire straits in Canada at present and that the CRTC has a responsibility to be proactive in addressing the profound lack of leadership in this area, particularly with regard to online content. One of the great incongruities of online macro-economics is the disincentive Canadian access players (i.e. cablecos and telcos who own Canada’s broadband infrastructure) have in investing in Canadian content. See, in radio and TV, there is a symbiotic relationship between content producers and content distributors. Without the artists and labels, radio cannot survive. And similarly, without TV producers, broadcasters can’t operate. But this basic interdependence breaks down in the online sphere, where the broadband ISPs can sell access to the entire www without feeling any impulse to invest in the creation of content. And by and large, they don’t. When it comes to creating Canadian content champions online, as we have done in music and TV and film, Rogers’ track record, dating back to the days of Wave, @Home and Excite all the way up to the present, is pitiful, dwarfed only by Bell’s brainless lethargy for pure backwardness and stultifying disinterest in Canadian content, community-driven media and p2p creativity.

8 years ago I created a non-profit called the Community Media Lab that produced a number of online projects with street kids and other young folks. Since then the void in this area has only become more and more obvious, and yet almost nothing is being done to address it. When Alan Rock’ $3.5 billion Telecommunications Highway initiative was disemboweled by Paul Martin we lost a huge opportunity. It wasn’t a good plan, containing a measly $50 million for community media, but it was a start. Today Canada is wasting its global competitive advantage as a multilingual, educated and supremely wired environment because of the failure to invest in those strengths. Community media is one important area in which Canada could easily become a global leader, but our complacency and greed is blinding us to the necessity and the opportunity to look ahead, look around and look within. But there’s still a chance to turn things around. Let’s see if we can’t use our networked power to inspire some movement at the political level.

Finally, it’s back to my blog! The past few months have been brutal as far as workload - which is of course good - but bad news for blogging! I have a slew of topics I’m going to try to get to over the next couple weeks but first off just a quick announcement that I’ll be moderating a panel at ICE 2007 in Toronto on March 21. It’s a discussion with Joseph Pilotta of BIG Research and Bill James of The James Gang Advertising called Tipping, Slipping and Tripping:The Power – and Perils – of Word of Mouth Advertising. Here’s the descriptive blurb in the program:

Viral Marketing and Community Building have long promised to be the new “secret weapon” for online communities. And there have been some outstanding successes. But there have also been some failures that reveal that viral marketing can greatly amplify the power of Negative Word of Mouth. Is Word of Mouth the best thing since the invention of the ice cube tray? Or is it a slippery strategy that can lead to a tipping point – or a tripping point?

Can social media lead to a PR backlash? That’s certainly one of the big fears of clients considering taking the p2p plunge. We’ll hash it out at ICE. Hope to see you there…