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Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 12/18/2011 - 21:08
Tracing a Musical Linguistic Virus in the Internet Age
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 12/17/2011 - 21:37The other day, I was listening to the radio and I heard something that has set me off in the search of a Musical Linguistic Virus. The idea comes from Neal Stephenson's novel, Snow Crash. In Snow Crash there is a bio linguistic virus which ends up getting spread via virtual worlds. It seems to be a pretty virulent science fiction virus, but it seems like the idea isn't really all that far from reality.
Ideas, snippets of music, and memes have been spread from one person to another for ages. Perhaps a good example is an ear worm. Even without the Internet, ear worms can spread quickly. For people my age, I could simply mention, "Lovin' You" by Minnie Riperton, and many of my friends would not be able to get the tune out of the head.
Yet perhaps musical linguistic viruses in the Internet Age are more complicated. It wasn't a simple ear worm that I heard on the radio that I haven't been able to get out of my head. Instead, the host of the radio show was talking with guests from a band. They talked about key musical influences, bands from the eighties, and reusing samples. Perhaps they are taking musical DNA from the eighties and mutating it into new ear worms or musical linguistic viruses.
They mentioned Brian Eno, so I started to listen to some of his ambient music series on Spotify. This is a new avenue where musical linguistic viruses can spread. A thought came to me listening to a radio show. I pursued the thought on Spotify by listening to the music. Spotify posted to my Facebook Timeline that I had listened to Brian Eno and friends commented on it.
Steven L Johnson said, "That's what I listen to when I want to nap. :-)".
I responded, "Well, I've had a LONG week, and I'm actually going to crash soon." In fact, I did head off to bed soon after that, but my mind continued to turn about this. How does music affect what we think? How much does it reflect the current culture? Can we culture jam spreading different musical linguistic viruses via the Internet?
Perhaps an interesting project would be to create word clouds of the lyrics to the 25 songs of each year and tracking how it has changed.
So, what are you listening to? Why are you listening to it? How is it changing you? Perhaps most importantly, can we change what we listen to and how we talk about it to change our country and our world?
Music Monday, Barely....
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 12/12/2011 - 19:21I managed to make it home uneventfully, even though I was dead tired. It was one of those drives where it took all my energy to stay focused on driving, and if the trip had been longer than my daily commute, I would have considered pulling off at a rest area and taking a nap.
At home, I made a quick visit of various websites, and am now throwing together this blog post.
Fortunately, it is Monday, so I can pull together a few things for a quick Music Monday post.
Last night, Fiona interviewed Jen Alexander about Middnight on Main, a large New Years' Eve event that will take place in Middletown, CT. You can listen to the interview here
Also, yesterday I created a YouTube video, Rick Perry ROLLED. Yeah, it's what you think it is:
How to Invite All your Friends to New Years' Eve
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 12/11/2011 - 14:38I want this New Years' Eve to be one to remember, so I've been thinking about how to invite all my friends to a giant New Years' Eve party. Currently, I have 2,226 friends on Facebook, so I need to do something special.
First, the little house we're renting just isn't big enough for 2,226 people to come to, even if they come at different times. So, I needed to find some other party worth going to and worth inviting all my friends.
The Community Health Center where I work is a lead sponsor of Middnight on Main, a large First Night style New Years' Eve event in Middletown, CT. There are a lot of great acts and events that will be there.
As the Social Media Manager for CHC, I'm helping get the word out on Facebook and and Facebook has been particularly interesting.
While there are many different events that will take place at Middnight on Main, we decided to create one large overarching event for the whole evening. The question becomes, how do we invite everyone.
I could go through and click on each friend, one after another, but with 2,226 friends, that would take a while. However, there are people who have written about how to invite all your friends at once. This blog post is one of the better descriptions of the process. I've tested it in Chrome and Safari and it has worked for me, with a few special things to note.
First, it is based on Javascript, so you need to make sure you have Javascript enabled when you do this. If you are using Chrome, you need to make sure that 'javascript:' is at the start of the address line before you hit enter, or that you've turned off searching from the address bar. Otherwise, it will search for that phrase out on the web, instead of selecting all your friends.
Also, as noted in the updates, be sure to scroll down to the end of your friends list before running the script. Otherwise, it will only get the first fifty to one hundred friends.
The next thing to note. Since this is an event in Connecticut, it probably doesn't make sense to invite many of my international friends. I did invite some while I was testing, and others because I figured they would do a good job of helping spread the word. However, I really wanted to target the invitation to all of my local friends.
This is really fairly simple if you've started playing with lists. I've not been all that impressed with lists, so far. However, if you go to invite friends and click on Search By Name, you get the ability to select people in various lists. When you have the list up, you can run the same Javascript to invite just the people in that list.
Since I haven't done a lot with lists, my lists aren't still all that great, but I used this to invite a bunch of people that I thought would be interested, and for some lists, adding a special message to target my invitation.
2011 Still Life
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 12/08/2011 - 21:34One of my writing themes for this year has been about living your life as if you were living the great American novel, or at least a collection of great American short stories. It reflects the medium I am most comfortable with, the written word. Yet I know others that are more comfortable with visual representations, or music, and there are times that I stare at the blank screen, trying to conjure words for things I just can’t find words for.
Recently, many sites are coming up with their retrospectives on 2011. I look through the images and videos. I listen to the music, and I wonder how to pull all of it together. I remember during the beginning of the Iraq war, people defending the war suggesting it would lead to an outbreak of democracy across the Middle East. As we prepare to leave Iraq, we can look back at the Arab Spring. What role did the Iraq war play in this?
I also remember climate change activists talking about who climate change would bring about food riots and more severe weather patterns. What role did food riots play in the Arab Spring? What role did climate change play in the rough weather we had in 2011?
Then, there were the people predicting the end of the world; if not this year, then the next. Looking at war and political unrest, at earthquakes and extreme weather, it is easy to wonder if these are signs of the end times.
As I look at the economic turmoil in Europe, and the failure of leaders in Europe, here in the United States in our Congress, and across the world to address growing income disparities, and the unrest that comes from economic woes, I have to wonder where we are headed. Is this another warning of the end times? Will the economic unrest grow and lead us to another World War? Will Internet based communications change the way we deal with these large issues?
I look back to art, to words, images, and music. 2011 Still Life. Yes, despite the predictions at the end of 2011, there is still life, and perhaps it could be represented in some sort of image.
Perhaps a Twenty First Century Guernica, with images of uprisings and tsunamis, of storms and of pepper spray. Perhaps as the year comes to an end, we need an image of honey badger taking out Father Time, and because no internet image is complete without it, we need kittens and double rainbows. So intense.
