|
Wednesday, July 27, 2005
Coasting 
| | Ran down to L.A. and back today. Or not quite. I'm in the Starbucks in downtown Malibu right now, pausing to load more podcasts into the player for listening along the PCH and the 101 on the way back to Santa Barbara. Not easy with a completely insane woman at the next table who wants help getting a Windows CD-ROM to work on her portable DVD player. She won't take her earphones out, not that it would make any difference. She won't stop talking, either. |
| | I have time to write for a moment, since she's buttonholed some other customer, who is now listening to this person carry on, nonstop, about ... nothing. Her monologue isn't coherent enough to make sense of. |
| | Still, it's good she's able to operate in society, I think. A little bother to the rest of us beats most of the alternatives. |
| | Okay, back to the road... |
Bring your own string
| | I've been struggling lately to develop a guiding aesthetic for corporate bloggers and I've finally got it. Camp Fire Talk. We've been conditioned by a million years of camp fire talk to accept its steady, unadorned, agenda-free tone as trustworthy. |
| | Around the fire, after a day of grubbing for grubs or dancing between the legs of a woolly mammoth, our ancestors didn't harangue cavemates about how their new improved spear thrower would jump-start their sex life. You can't fool anyone around the fire, because you've all been doing the same thing all day, your frailties and strengths on display. |
| | During most of our history, there hasn't been much conversation except camp fire talk, and I'm not sure we accept any talk that doesn't pass the camp fire test. It's a tone that's almost impossible to fake, and it's certainly the only tone that one willingly endures for more than a few minutes. Camp Fire Talk is part of us, grafted onto our nervous system so thoroughly that speakers stray from it at their peril. We all know what it is and, better, what it isn't. Blogging is forcing us to remember how to do Camp Fire Talk. |
| | Blogs are so constant and frequent and informal that we're being forced at last to drop the stridency and expert tone and false eloquence that orators, and their progeny, corporate communicators, have felt obliged to use. |
| | I like that last line. There are lots more like it. Go dig. |
Been there, mapped that
Hats on
| | If you're in or around Santa Barbara, come to the edhat rally tonight. In case you hadn't already heard, edhat is Santa Barbara's best online publication. The rally is to gather the faithful to co-think some good ideas for ed, and how to make his pub more popular, remunerative, or both. |
Couple of things
Copyright 2009 The Doc Searls Weblog
|
