I went to a debate at the RSA yesterday lunchtime. Jeremy Paxman was defending the motion (or not) that English was “on the skids”. It wasn’t a particularly incisive debate, revolving around the idea that English grammar has always been more descriptive than prescriptive, and the possibility that the diversities of spoken English were a sign of its vitality.

Paxman was groping towards a valid point, which is that any language depends upon some consensus, upon some commonly accepted conventions, in order for it to work. He let himself be sidetracked by the description/prescription worry, but if the idea of “English grammar” is to be meaningful at all, the possibility of consensus, of inclusion and exclusion, needs further exploration.

Both debaters acknowledged that children needed to be given basic skills, so they could communicate adequately away from their particular tribes (so they could hold down a job and so on). All the same it’s a common worry that the rules of this “standard English” are a bourgeois fiction and we need to find another way of saying “anything goes” which all the same acknowledges the practical reality of the rules.

I think we should be clear that “standard English” is a tribal version of English as much as any other. It just happens to be the language of the ruling tribe, the tribe in power. There’s nothing wrong with speaking a local patois, but if you want to be accepted by the ruling tribe, then you will have to learn to speak its language. That language is evolving, is a living thing, but that doesn’t mean it has no worthwhile conventions, and it certainly doesn’t mean that anything goes. If you show ignorance of those rules the tribe will exclude you, or at least look down on you. That’s how tribes work.

So when a business turns around and demands that its name should take a plural verb (as the insurance giant Aviva has) this is not an act of creative inclusiveness. It is an act of ignorance by an incompetent and unqualified manager. The convention for the moment is clear: collective nouns take a singular verb, with the odd exceptions of sports teams and the police. If you ignore this, as far as it is possible in English you will be making a grammatical error as serious as saying “we was”. Perhaps this will become a lost cause, in the same way that we have lost the useful distinction between “disinterested” and “uninterested”, or the way the third person plural pronoun is now used as gender-neutral third person singular pronoun. But for the moment at least, the convention stands.

I am all for creativity with the language, but creativity demands the conscious manipulation of limits. If you don’t know where those limits are, then you literally don’t know what you’re doing. Naiveté has its charms, but our tribal language of power offers a lot more than charm.

So I had to vote against the notion that English is on the skids: that’s a ridiculous claim. On the other hand I want to stand up for education over ignorance. Specifically I’d want to say that people in business or the media who would claim to be professional communicators but who are ignorant of the conventions of the tribal language they use should be sacked.

It’s often said we are living through a revolution called the Digital Age, and I’ve talked a little so far about how technology might be changing how we read or consume narrative. But I wonder if this sense of time calls for a different way of writing on a more fundamental level, a level that can address the spirit of the age as well as its attention span.

The Spirit of the Age was the title of a book by the great English essayist WIlliam Hazlitt published in 1825, and it seems that this desire to speak to and for your times became commonplace in the 19th century. It’s true that people appear always to have been conscious of their lifetimes as part of an era, but the sense that a distinctive era might require a distinctive formal response from its artists is certainly more prevalent from the late 18th century onwards. Shelley gloried in the possibility. Tennyson worried about it, and as the century turned it found its most articulate expression in the eruption of Modernism.

Modernism as a self-conscious movement was partly a response to the advent of some radical new technology, but also a sense of discontinuity, a fracturing of links with the past, with received views on belief and authority thrown out of the window. It’s no co-incidence I think that its two most important early representatives in English literature were Americans living in Europe, outsiders trying to feel their connectedness, to trace whatever continuities were still left to them while rejecting the shackles of tradition. Ezra Pound noted that while he threw the bricks through the windows, TS Eliot sneaked in around the back.

Time and familiarity tames what once seemed radical. Returning to Eliot’s verse after a gap of many years I was struck by how comprehensible it was, where once it seemed almost impenetrable. I could blame school: in the sixth form we worked through The Waste Land line by line, deciphering its allusivness, and killing practically all sense of it as poetry. But Eliot’s “back door” to modernism was a persistent lyricism. It was not like Tennyson, (actually in his different way Tennyson had written about many of the things that preoccupied the Modernists, but he did so within the traditional forms of rhymed or blank verse); but it was like he was trying to find a way to carry a sense of dissonance and fracture within a form that still mostly looked and read like lyrical poetry.

I think what also got in my way was a sense that Eliot was writing as a philosopher, and needed to be understood that way. This was not perceptive or helpful. Eliot famously declared that writing poetry was an escape from personality, but that does not mean that the work can somehow be read as free from personality, as somehow purely theoretical. He himself rejected the idea that The Waste Land was an epoch-defining statement saying rather it was the grumbling of a disgruntled young man. But its success is in being both these things. He found a way of reaching into himself to create a distinctive common language for his time.

That’s to use “common” in a special sense: Eliot’s range of cultural references is not something most of us can share directly, but that’s part of the point. He is teasing out connections that have influenced Western culture, which indirectly sit behind the possibility of a common cultural inheritance, but which also set him apart as an individual. Poetry rests on the paradox of finding your own voice which is all the same a reaching out to others, a seeking of common ground which may contain the shared awareness that the common ground will be limited.
So what is the spirit of this Digital Age that we might need a new kind of formal expression? I’m not sure that our serious preoccupations are that different from those in the early part of the 20th century. The things that seem new like the cult of celebrity, or the resurgence of an anti-scientific religious sensibility, may yet prove ephemeral. The sense of a new transparency in public, business and to a lesser extent our personal affairs (where it is more like visibility than transparency) may be important and enduring, but it’s probably too early to say. All we can do for the moment is explore the possibilities.

I looked again at Hitchcock’s Vertigo last night, for the first time in many years. The film has a mad hallucinatory quality throughout, appropriate enough for a story about love and obsession. Afterwards I was thinking about its structure … the way it switches from the decidedly languorous pace of its first 90 minutes to the packed revelations of the last half hour, which in that intensity feel even more hallucinatory. It occurred to me that the film’s voice of reason, the doting Midge, disappears after speaking to the psychiatrist about James Stewart’s chances of recovery from his second breakdown, and in that last half hour without her you’re locked into the intensity of Stewart’s disturbed obsession. It struck me too that the story’s twist, in which Kim Novak has in fact colluded in the murder of the villain’s wife, could have been a fantasy in the broken Stewart’s mind, through which he tries to make sense of his devastating experience and loss.

You don’t have to read the film this way. There’s nothing to suggest it’s the “right” way to look at it. But it’s an interesting, perhaps enriching possibility and it made me think again about the consolation of stories, and the sense of “what really happened” that sometimes disturbs your reactions to a piece of fiction, and that I touched on when talking about Eden Lake a couple of months ago.

The questions were raised too in a recent discussion of Ian McEwan’s writing in the London Review of Books, which praised the end of McEwan’s Atonement for its self-referential sophistication, the way it teases the reader with expectations of resolution while veering off to worry about the writer’s need to make things good. I can see and praise the skill of much of the writing in Atonement, but thought the ending revealed a conceptual muddle and a betrayal of an underlying compact with the reader, a compact that in one way or another defines the form of a story (I probably need to explain that idea about form a little more, but not now).

The observation that we can be caught up in stories, that they can change our sense of reality, sometimes with serious consequences, may be worth noting in a context like this blog, but it’s not enough in itself to make for a satisfying work of art. Vertigo makes fruitful use of this idea, but it is not what the film is about (it harnesses your possible awareness of its own artifice to deepen your sense of the pressure of the unreal on the protagonists). My problem with Atonement is that while playing with the play of stories on our imaginations, it ends up only being about the act of writing. I can’t help feeling that when a writer ends up writing about writing s/he has nothing much to say.

That’s the problem with so-called post modernism (or at least, one of its many problems). Being self-conscious isn’t much of an end in itself. It can complicate the relationship between artist and audience, but I want to know that it’s complicating it for a reason. Ian McEwan may be worried about the kind of pleasure he offers his audience, but that worry needs working out in a way that continues to offer some kind of pleasure or formal gratification. The structural problem with Atonement is not so much that its aesthetic worries don’t make sense. It’s that you don’t care about the writer Briony in the way you cared about the main protagonists.

Hitchcock mastered that balance of artifice and formal gratification more than fifty years ago. McEwan, (an often great writer I hasten to add) who made his name with a sense of the everyday macabre that Hitchcock would have appreciated, could do with going back to his roots.

I haven’t seen Armando Iannucci’s In the Loop but it seems an Act of God that it should appeared on our screens at the dawn of the MP expenses row. The film (like the TV series it sprang from) excoriates the culture of spin that has so dominated these Labour governments, obscuring their many real achievements. The expense row could well be the end of that culture. It’s about time.

It’s important to note that the spin culture did not come out of nowhere. It was the media themselves who transformed and trivialised political discourse in this country. It was media hunger for big stories that left public figures unable to speak straightforwardly and honestly for fear of distortion. This is not confined to politics but part of a general malaise where a problem had to be described as a “challenge” and the word translated back by its readers. If someone had dared say “problem” people would not have thought “at least he’s being honest”. They would have thought “it must be really really bad then.”

Enlightened thought in business communication has for several years been arguing that the deep impact of the internet is the pressure it creates for a new transparency in all of our affairs. If there’s a fault in your product, it will come out. If you’ve been treating people badly, the internet will spread the word. You could not afford to treat CSR as a PR tool. You had to mean it. Many businesses were only just beginning to understand the implications when the tsunami of the credit crunch overwhelmed us. With senior management reputations in tatters it won’t be the same when the flood subsides.

Secrecy runs like a jugular vein through political life, and always has done. It’s part of the culture of power. So it’s probably not surprising that politicians have been even slower than business people to grasp the nettle of transparency. Now they have been stung all the same. We have a Freedom of Information Act because of this government, albeit one hobbled from the beginning by the kicking and screaming of the civil service, and the civil servants were right that the Act we have would prove the thin end of the wedge.

The Act might accelerate change, but it is not driving it. There’s a cultural shift in our expectations. In the past power partly relied on your ability to hide things, to control perceptions. Now you can expect to get away with nothing. That’s going to be a hard lesson for the current generation of politicians, but there’s a reasonable hope in the air that if they don’t learnt it they will be finished.

It’s very uncertain where traditional media will fit in this new reality. The justification for traditional media has usually been the need to hold our leaders to account, but with the journalists themselves accountable for whatever they put forward. Somehow we’ll need to ensure that scrutiny still works in the blogosphere, or indeed works better (the cost of litigation has meant that it was largely a tool for the rich).

But the confluence of catastrophes in the last 12 months means that the age of spin may decisively be over. Political and business leaders are going to have to learn a new language, as part of a real shift in their behaviour. It will be a refreshing change.

I’m going to stray a little into my day job for a while (copywriting for commercial clients) but there’s a relevance that goes both ways.

I was part of a discussion the other day where someone suggested that technology would change the way we write: he meant that as speech-to-text software became more sophisticated and prevalent we would abandon the keyboard and simply speak our thoughts, watching them appear on screen. Though I can see this would make many tasks easier for those who struggle with keyboards, I’m not sure it would change anything fundamental at all. It’s not as if the keyboard is the only thing keeping people from being fluent writers. Most people seem to speak more eloquently they can write, but that’s because we have different expectations when someone is speaking. Inflection and tone come into play. Hesitation and repetition often pass unnoticed.

There may be a point here all the same. If the mass of informal writing is effectively dictated rather than written I wonder if that could influence formal writing itself.

This set me thinking that what matters is not so much the technology with which we write, but the technology which we use to read.

There’s already been a substantial shift away from print. It’s likely you’re reading this on a screen. I have no doubt that as screen technology continues to improve, that shift will become almost total. It’s not that the medium itself influences how we read, but the way the medium facilitates design certainly has an impact: think about how different it feels if you read a short story in a magazine rather than a book. But if designers can make the most of the new screens and formats, (which themselves are becoming ever more comfortable to read) my guess is we’ll read on as we’ve always read, the medium itself becoming largely invisible just as it does with the printed word.

The more difficult area of a change may be in our attention spans. We’re told that the children of the computer age are so used to everything being delivered in a nanosecond that they will have no patience with longer text. I’m sceptical about this. It’s not so long since TV programmers decided that people could no longer wait a whole week between episodes in a serial: the days of the Forsythe Saga or War and Peace were long gone. But then along comes 24 and in its wake a torrent of often brilliant serials. Of course people will wait. There just has to be something worth waiting for.

The same is true of reading. It’s the nature of the internet and the browser “experience” that people will expect a quick delivery of top level information, but that’s hardly surprising when there’s so much information about. I think they will skim surfaces in search of the things that interest them, but when they find that information you had better be ready to give them as much detail as they could possibly want.

It’s not that people don’t have time to read any more. They just don’t have time to read rubbish. And there’s a lot of it about.

I live mostly alone, and mostly work alone, which means that when I do something like watch a film I have limited opportunities to share the experience. Often after watching a film I’ll look at the internet movie database (iMDB), usually to check out details like “where have I seen that actor before?” but also to look through the comments posted by other viewers. With honourable exceptions they are generally crass, but at least it gives some sense of discussion – against which you can gauge your own reactions. Here in these crumbs of sociability is one of the great virtues of the internet. And though most of the iMDB comments are crass, the facility to do this at all seems a good thing, and part of the strength of the site.

I watched the low budget British thriller Eden Lake last night. It’s pretty good, and twists away from the cheap gratification of showing rough justice – which what you’d expect if Hollywood tackled the subject. If you’re planning on seeing the film stop reading now because I need to discuss how it ends.

It’s billed as a horror film, but the most horrible thing about it is that its violence is carried out by a bunch of teenagers on an innocent couple camping for the weekend by a lake in the country. Many of those iMDB comments saw the film as a scathing and all too realistic comment on the youth of today, showing them to be without scruple or any moral feeling. The film asks for that reaction, but it’s not all that’s going on. It plays on our outrage that where we look to children for innocence (hence “Eden” Lake) we could find fully adult corruption. The children are nuanced: some have scruples, but all are pressurised by the leader into sharing the violence. You spend much of the film hoping that the couple will escape this nightmare of monstrous, “abnormal” children to find the normal sanity of the adult world, but when the heroine finally struggles back into that adult world those adults mirror their children exactly. I don’t think the implication is that it’s all the parents’ fault: it’s that the evil shown by the children, their capacity to inflict pain and even death, is elemental and not exceptional (rather like Lord of the Flies).

Judging from iMDB, the ending caused problems for many viewers. There is no redemption, no nemesis for the evil doers. The clear implication is that the adults are going to kill the surviving heroine to cover up the crimes of their children and in revenge for the fact that she has killed two of them (in desperation, including the youngest who is killed at the moment he appears to be trying to make things better – the film is morally unflinching). It’s a great ending, refusing as I mentioned above the facile revenge fantasies of a typical Hollywood survival film, but it also left me thinking “ah they won’t get away with it – there are too many bodies, too many questions to answer – the ringleader will get his comeuppance.” This is probably normal, but it is curious. It shows the way stories suck us in, and cause us to develop a sense of the narrative beyond the events we are shown. Reality is in the hands of the storyteller.

Strictly speaking the story of Eden Lake ends without resolution. We are simply not told about the future fate of some of the people we have been watching, and it would be legitimate for the writer to say that he or she does not know what “happened” beyond the ending, because of course none of this actually happened in the first place. The story ends where it ends.

This illustrates the futility of the notion of alternative endings – a problem with the whole notion of interactive narrative. Stories impress us because we are not in control. Eden Lake might have made us feel comforted if the protagonists had survived and the wrong doers were punished, but its grimmer ending is intellectually more satisfying, and paradoxically makes the film more enjoyable.

I’ve been away for a few days, specifically in Scotland for the Burns celebrations in Dumfries. It’s the 250^th anniversary of his birth. That’s right, 250. I suppose we have a natural affection for seeming milestones (they give us the illusion of order) but 250 seems a tad random, or more likely, a convenient hook on which the tourist authorities could launch their “Homecoming” drive. Reality it seems is what we make it.

Burns is certainly important in the history of literature, though I’m not sure he’s a great poet. I know that when in Dumfries the Scottish first minister Alex Salmond described Burns as “our national bard” he meant something more than Burns’ poetic skills. There’s an irony here: Burns was not much of a nationalist, but he did embody a kind of Scots distinctiveness, warm, compassionate, committed but down to earth and with a feeling for the land. In this sense he seems much more of a national bard than Shakespeare can be for the English, even though he’s often called that. It’s hard to think of anything distinctly English about Shakespeare (Burns had the advantage of writing in an intensely local dialect). I suppose the history plays deepened certain myths of Englishness, but no more so than the Roman plays did for the ancient classical world.

But perhaps this is because the English don’t have much sense of a distinctive culture, or worse that the English are culturally less interested in culture than the Scots.

Whatever, the interesting question for me here is how we have moved from the popularisation of poetry that Burns initiated to the idea that art can be somehow democratic.

It seems we have developed a schizophrenic attitude to virtuosity, which leaves creative work in an uncertain place. I don’t think people have stopped admiring virtuosity, but art establishments are worried about elitism, while technologies have vastly simplified the means of production. It used to be impossible to produce music without reasonable mastery of an instrument. Now all you need is a computer mouse and some software.

The end results need to be judged on their own merits, though I’ll say more about the relationship between quality, effort and refinement, between knowledge and appreciation, at some later date. For the moment though I just want to note that in a broad sense we seem to be moving to a different definition of popular culture. Where this idea of accessible art/entertainment once marked a shift in subject matter and reach (where poets might “speak for” a broad group of people or even a nation, it’s looking for the moment like a much more participatory concept, appropriate to the age of democracy.

I hope this is going to turn out to be a good thing, but I’m not sure. I’d worry if I thought it might reinforce the nerve-failure of movie studios who regularly “test” alternative endings – much of the power of a story comes from the sense that as a reader, listener or viewer you’re not in control, hence the desire to know what happens next. If everything can be bent to our wills then we face the grim prospect of a world no bigger than our imaginations. (I’m always puzzled by that cliched marketing assertion that “the only limit is your imagination!”; for most that’s quite a serious limitation.)

The paradox of this new idea of popular culture is that it has the potential to liberate individual voices from the tyranny of the lowest common denominator. I have a feeling that money will have a strong influence on the way it actually pans out (my guess is that we’re moving beyond the gold rush era of internet development).

Who knows what Burns would have made of all this. Then again, he might have been a populist poet before the idea really existed, but he had to make a living working as a taxman.

In the London Review of Books recently the novelist John Lanchester discussed video games (not that they have much to do with “video” as we usually understand the word), suggesting that here is a new medium almost entirely unknown to mainstream critics, though commercially the business is bigger than film.

Bearing in mind the likely ignorance of most LRB readers Lanchester goes over the usual preconceptions about these games, as well as their real strengths and weaknesses. He notes that as mindless entertainment goes, the best of them tend to be far more entertaining than the Hollywood blockbusters that aspire to the same condition. He is concerned about the influence of the money men on the young medium, but looks forward to a maturity in which the capacity of these games to offer an immersive experience of imagined realities is exploited to greater effect.

Although I wouldn’t call myself a serious gamer, I’ve been playing these games regularly since Doom in the early 1990s. Aside from the visceral pleasure of blasting a room full of aliens, and the frequent wonder of the visuals, I was drawn in by the possibiliies of narrative in a new medium, and one of the interesting ways in which they are like and unlike films (or novels) is how they are like or unlike games.

Games as we normally understand them have rules and constraints while their outcomes will depend on how well players perform within those constraints: the outcome of the game is the emergence of a winner. Although video games have very successfully developed mulitplayer modes (where different players go against each other via an internet connection) their roots are in something closer to the special cases of the card game Patience or the board game of Solitaire, where a single player takes on the game “system”.

A video game usually comes to its conclusion when you have succesfully completed its various challenges, but this is not so much like winning as reaching the end of a book or a film. In most real world games when you lose you’re out of the game. In a video game you can expect to be “killed” many times, but this is only a limited loss, forcing you to go back to your last save or checkpoint: sophisticated recent games like Prey and Bioshock have even incorporated this necessary game mechanic into their narrative structure, so being “killed” and then returning to the game has a kind of sense within the narrative.

What really drives you through such games is not so much the thought of winning, but of getting to the end. You struggle from level to level largely out of curiosity to find out what happens next, or in the best games to find out what’s going on at all. At the same time because these are games, and because what happens next will depend on what actions you perform, you will feel (up to a point) that the outcome is open and depends on you. I think this is why the games that offer a “first person” viewpoint, where you see everything through the protagonist’s eyes and so become the protagonist, are the most enjoyable and successful (though there are some interesting exceptions, most notably Max Payne and its sequel).

Game designers like to play with this sense of things being arbitrary and open. Far Cry gave unprecedented freedom to roam and find different ways to complete its tasks. Some also offer alternative endings, depending on how you choose to play the game. In the wonderful Bioshock – picked out for praise by Lanchester – there are two distinctly different endings, even if one of them is clearly “the right one” (essentially you can choose to be compassionate or ruthless, and compassion is duly rewarded).

This sense of relative freedom and potency can work to make a game more engrossing, more immersive, and as Lanchester notes, opens up new possibilities for creative imaginations; you can easily imagine how games could offer optional events or visions or activities which have little to do with the main narrative, but which all the same enrich or colour your experience of that narrative, without taking you into the shaggy dog territory of Tristram Shandy. But to be satisfying these games generally need to reach an end, and to get there certain things will have to have happened.

Because they depend on a narrative spine video games are more like films than traditional games, but in a commercial environment where alternative film endings are routinely tested against the reactions of typical audience samples, you have to wonder where this pressure for the narrative to be responsive to the viewer or player could lead us. I’ll be wondering some more about that in my next entry.

I went to see Richard Thompson performing his 1000 Years of Popular Music last night in London. As the title suggests it’s a little tour of songs from the 1200s (or perhaps before) to the present day (Nelly Furtado). Several songs required some mention of their original context – played in the court, in a music hall or wherever, a reminder of the fact that until relatively recently music existed only in live performance (or in notated form where it could only be “heard” by real experts).

I was reminded (ho ho) of Steven Rose’s point in The Making of Memory that a written language vastly increases the human capacity to remember, to recall both experience and knowledge because both could be placed beyond the individual consciousness. The internet takes this further. Before the internet knowledge was partly a matter of what you retained in mind, partly a matter of knowing where to look for further detail. With the internet an increasingly vast store of knowledge is available at the touch of a search engine, and where the infrastructure exists, it’s available to us wherever we are, whatever we are doing. This is likely to change how we think about knowledge, but it may also change how we think about experience.

I don’t mean that it will virtualise experience completely. An interesting consequence of transfer of recorded music distribution to the internet has been a resurgence in the popularity of live performance – interesting because consumers seem to have embraced the unpackaged freedom of internet downloads (where the emphasis is on individual songs, much as it was in the years before music recording) and yet they show an increasing appetite for live performance – where the artist can control the presentation of the experience. It seems we don’t want to be in control. Sometimes we want to let ourselves go.

Recording teases us with the possibility of repeatability, of non-linear experience. A few years ago when my children were younger we were watching a broadcast TV programme together and my son asked if we could pause it for a moment: he had grown up with video recorders and his expectations were conditioned by them. Of course nowadays with a PVR you could indeed pause the broadcast stream and we’re fast approaching the point where the notion of broadcast schedules seems quaint. Science fiction writers have long speculated on the possibility of implanted memory as a substitute for experience. All the same our experience remains emphatically, inexorably linear. The more the recorded world makes it seem easy to grab the new, then pause, and repeat, the more this capability can enrich our lived experiences, the more acute the contrast becomes between our virtual and real worlds.

Or at least it is if we lose perspective. Last night was a great night. I can revisit it to some extent when I listen to the recorded versions of the music, but they are no substitute. Ironically too perhaps that’s why I still prefer to listen to “albums” where the songs have a running order, the semblance of a linear experience. Art which seeks to offer the sense of repeated experience needs to recognise that when the repetition ends you’re not back where you started.

Shelley once wrote that poets were the “unacknowledged legislators of mankind”. Well, he was young, but in the mood of the times he could probably be forgiven for thinking the liberal imagination was rising to a new pre-eminence. Where “society” once indicated a tiny elite it was beginning to embrace whole nations. Literacy was spreading in an unprecedented way and with it an interest in literature of all kinds. Tennyson, though always uneasy about being the voice of anything but himself (even when he was laureate) became wealthy on the sales of his books.

This popular success would be unimaginable now. Poets once again address a niche interest. You could point out that from Pound onwards this was a deliberate choice, a reaction against Victorian populist writing, but it marks too a shift in the way writers see themselves in relation to their readers, a shift influenced in one way then the other by technology (cheap printing). Now I don’t want to get bogged down in too academic a discourse here, but I do want to think aloud about how this new publishing technology, the open space of the internet, could affect how writers (or indeed other artists) think of themselves, and what they are doing.

I don’t mean left field experimentation with collaboration and interactivity (though I think that will come into it). I’m talking about a something that will influence practice whether or not it results in formal experimentation.

That probably sounds mysterious, but I hope what it could mean will be clearer over time (not least to me). And there will be a few by ways to explore. It strikes me that in the visual art world the pre-eminence of the artist as someone with “something to say” is practically unquestioned, with dire results. One of the interesting consequences of working in this open space of the internet is that while every voice might find two or three listeners, the availability of millions of voices means that artists will have to work harder to justify the attention they want to claim. Quite how that it is going to work is very much what this blog is about.