I’ve been part of a terrific listserv for a couple years now. For those of you too young to remember listservs, they are an old-fashioned email-based form of community forum, many of which still thrive in the e-hinterlands, including the this one, run by the Institute for Distributed Creativity. And it rocks.

A lot of very very smart people contribute to it and the conversations tend to very sophisticated, very informed and often very provocative. Ok, I will admit that I do my part to make sure the provocation quotient remains comfortably in the red.
Which brings us to a most excellent thread that has been running on the list for the past couple of weeks. It’s titled “Immaterial Labor and Life Beyond Utility” and I’ve contributed several posts to the thread. We’re hashing out some fascinating ideas relating to the character of the socially networked ‘experience economy’, its relationship to wealth and to the environment, to Marxism, to “sovereign media’, the Italian mercato, the French philosopher George Bataille, the mechanics of YouTube and beyond. Very interesting stuff. For me it has been an excellent forum to articulate some of the theoretical issues underlying our new secret project, which is definitely plugged into the ‘experience economy’.

To tell you the truth, I’m kind of proud of some of my posts, but rather than simply pasting them in here, where they would be out of context, here’s a link to the iDC thread archive, where you can find the entire discussion. If you’re interested in the topics mentioned above, check it out here.

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.

For the past year or two I’ve been an active member of a terrific listserv moderated by Trebor Scholz of the iDC (the Institute for Distributed Creativity). The list features wide-ranging discussion of a very high calibre, as many of the world’s best-known digital artists, activists, curators, scholars and critics are subscribers and occasional contributors (Bruce Stirling, Lev Manovich, DJ Spooky, etc.). Anyway, there is currently a thread on iDC that explores the idea of Continuous Partial Attention (CPA). That’s one name given to the way people manage multiple datastreams as they work, and by and large people on the list have described this condition in very negative terms. Some posts have suggested, for example, that people go ‘blank’ when they try to manage too many incoming data streams. Here’s my post to the iDC listserv from last night, responding to this thread…feel free to add your comments after reading it…js
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I’ve been giving continuous partial attention to this thread for the past few days. It has casually nagged at me as it nattered discontinuously along (listservs are 90% CPA) until just now, when, as I lay restlessly in bed giving continuous partial attention to all sorts of dreamy thoughts, I found myself focusing productively on the notion of CPA for the first time. Which, in a way, is my point. That most of the time most of us are giving attention to many different things, and managing that aggregate feed quite comfortably, and choosing to focus on one stream or another only as needed.

In fact, I’d propose that the P in CPA might more accurately be changed to Peripheral, as in Continuous Peripheral Attention. That seems to me how we live most of the time, even when we’re unplugged. (All at once sensing faces, air currents, light sources, soundscapes, memories, hopes, destinations, calculations, companions, desires, aches and pains, etc.) And I don’t see that our wide-spectrum awareness need necessarily interfere with our narrowband focus either. As an improvising musician I’m always trying to balance my focused and diffused awarenesses when I play within an ensemble. It’s a technique. A sophisticated dialogical skill. Maybe such a skill has to be mastered to maximize the soulful usefulness of connected culture, like the competing Yin and Yang energies in Tai Chi, or the Jungian anima and animus energies.

Maybe our (I say our because I believe this holds true for the vast majority of the readership of this list) resistance to CPA stems from our collective allegiance to literacy, a profound attention-focusing technology that unlike aural/oral or digital networked communication requires that peripheral attention streams be extinguished to be effective. When there’s lots of noise we find it hard to read or write meaningful texts, and that makes us nervous. We ‘blank’. (Supposedly, tho I don’t really believe in techno-blanking, at least not as something significantly different from all the other forms of ’spacing out’ we know and love/hate)

But our conflicted experiences as literate emigrants to the datasphere don’t really matter here anyway. What matters is that there is a generation of kids out there for whom reading long texts is weird, for whom writing long texts is weird, for whom literate-style one-way communication that eliminates peripheral streams is downright freaky. That’s why I’d like to think that continuous peripheral attention is a more accurate description than continuous partial attention, because the former allows for the possibility of a focused stream within that peripheral awareness, of a constructive managing of flow that transcends superficiality and/or chaos. And thus it suggests to me – in my more optimistic moments anyway – that the kids having sixteen conversations at once might be leading somewhere I’d be like to go.