21st Century Writer's Fugue

Blogging and Nothingness... I must have dozed off mid-flight as we passed over the Middle East.  I was on my way to a conference in London, Culture and the Unconscious... I had in my cabin bag a copy of the paper I was presenting: 'The writer's fugue: a creative gift of magical absence'.


In my dreams the words scrolled across the screen in front of my eyes, and as I watched, hands-free,  the lines of text lit up and began to disappear...


Frantically, I clicked the buttons but the text was escaping without me.


I woke up, sitting on my bed in the cottage in the small Australian town. It's years later and I have been writing as if possessed by the spirit of the times, about terrible events in the world that jump out of the screen every time I turn on the computer. The Norway massacre... over seventy killed by a madman.... Refugee children turned away from Australia's shores and sent back into the darkness of unknowing...massacres, revolutions, wars, crisis after crisis...then the riots begin in England, London, pulling me back in my mind to the city of my birth.


It's the third day of the riots.


As I write the word "insurrection" my browser closes down. A dialogue box pops up. We are sorry [browser] has had to close unexpectedly. Please try to restart [browser] in a few minutes. I persist, restart.


A couple of days later I am writing a piece with the title Don't Blame Single Mothers, about "exemplary" punishments for single mothers who did not take part in the riots; reported in the global online media. One mother facing eviction from her council flat because her 17 year old was in the riots; another "single mother" given a five month jail sentence for accepting a pair of looted shorts- she  should have thought about the example she was setting for her 1 and 5 year old, the judge said.


As I write the word "gangs" the whole line highlights in blue: superfast scrolling up the paragraph, my hands are not even on the keys. The page flicks back to the first page I was writing, highlighting all the text as if looking for something- then just as fast scrolls down again leaving the paragraphs intact-  then flicks me back to the page I was writing. The two paragraphs I had just written about the single mothers, and housing estate children who join gangs, had been erased.


Disappeared.


I stare at the screen without a word. Blank to blank.


It's not just the cottage that's haunted. My computer is haunted too.


I remember that a similar thing happened just after Christmas, after I clicked "like" on a piece someone put up on Facebook with a link to an article in the New York Times on Julian Assange. I thought it was a good article, it seemed to be well researched, factual and seeking to give impartial and contextualised insight into the character and motivations of the founder of wikileaks, apparently it had taken the journalist months to arrange the interview; it read well.


I was surprised to find, a couple of days later, the same item on google  - it had been added to a Facebook group on Julian Assange; my name was prominently displayed- although what I was supposed to "like"  was unclear.


I pressed "unlike".


Instantly, the page started to wobble and shake, the text disappeared, and my computer crashed.


When I was able to restart it with some difficulty, I found that I could not get into my email account.  All my word files - around 1000, 8 years of writing- had disappeared from My Documents.


The files returned a day or so later. And I was able to re-access my email account the next week after contacting the provider and resetting my password.


That was in the end days of my (very) old computer, before I was able to buy a new laptop (a long story that I touched on in some of my early blog entries here).


What is going on?


What are these UFOs on the Other Side of the screen, that shadow us as we write?


That steal our thoughts and eat our words?


On social media sites, many spend considerable time constructing arguments in conversation, finding media clips, links to articles and podcasts, putting thoughts into words.


The page scrolls down and it all disappears.


Where does digital writing on social media sites go?


Forget writing into a void.


In the digital age of virtual reality


we're writing into Nothingness.


In the digital era,


Nothing


has never been more tangible.

21st Century Writer's Fugue

Blogging and Nothingness... I must have dozed off mid-flight as we passed over the Middle East.  I was on my way to a conference in London, Culture and the Unconscious... I had in my cabin bag a copy of the paper I was presenting: 'The writer's fugue: a creative gift of magical absence'.


In my dreams the words scrolled across the screen in front of my eyes, and as I watched, hands-free,  the lines of text lit up and began to disappear...


Frantically, I clicked the buttons but the text was escaping without me.


I woke up, sitting on my bed in the cottage in the small Australian town. It's years later and I have been writing as if possessed by the spirit of the times, about terrible events in the world that jump out of the screen every time I turn on the computer. The Norway massacre... over seventy killed by a madman.... Refugee children turned away from Australia's shores and sent back into the darkness of unknowing...massacres, revolutions, wars, crisis after crisis...then the riots begin in England, London, pulling me back in my mind to the city of my birth.


It's the third day of the riots.


As I write the word "insurrection" my browser closes down. A dialogue box pops up. We are sorry [browser] has had to close unexpectedly. Please try to restart [browser] in a few minutes. I persist, restart.


A couple of days later I am writing a piece with the title Don't Blame Single Mothers, about "exemplary" punishments for single mothers who did not take part in the riots; reported in the global online media. One mother facing eviction from her council flat because her 17 year old was in the riots; another "single mother" given a five month jail sentence for accepting a pair of looted shorts- she  should have thought about the example she was setting for her 1 and 5 year old, the judge said.


As I write the word "gangs" the whole line highlights in blue: superfast scrolling up the paragraph, my hands are not even on the keys. The page flicks back to the first page I was writing, highlighting all the text as if looking for something- then just as fast scrolls down again leaving the paragraphs intact-  then flicks me back to the page I was writing. The two paragraphs I had just written about the single mothers, and housing estate children who join gangs, had been erased.


Disappeared.


I stare at the screen without a word. Blank to blank.


It's not just the cottage that's haunted. My computer is haunted too.


I remember that a similar thing happened just after Christmas, after I clicked "like" on a piece someone put up on Facebook with a link to an article in the New York Times on Julian Assange. I thought it was a good article, it seemed to be well researched, factual and seeking to give impartial and contextualised insight into the character and motivations of the founder of wikileaks, apparently it had taken the journalist months to arrange the interview; it read well.


I was surprised to find, a couple of days later, the same item on google  - it had been added to a Facebook group on Julian Assange; my name was prominently displayed- although what I was supposed to "like"  was unclear.


I pressed "unlike".


Instantly, the page started to wobble and shake, the text disappeared, and my computer crashed.


When I was able to restart it with some difficulty, I found that I could not get into my email account.  All my word files - around 1000, 8 years of writing- had disappeared from My Documents.


The files returned a day or so later. And I was able to re-access my email account the next week after contacting the provider and resetting my password.


That was in the end days of my (very) old computer, before I was able to buy a new laptop (a long story that I touched on in some of my early blog entries here).


What is going on?


What are these UFOs on the Other Side of the screen, that shadow us as we write?


That steal our thoughts and eat our words?


On social media sites, many spend considerable time constructing arguments in conversation, finding media clips, links to articles and podcasts, putting thoughts into words.


The page scrolls down and it all disappears.


Where does digital writing on social media sites go?


Forget writing into a void.


In the digital age of virtual reality


we're writing into Nothingness.


In the digital era,


Nothing


has never been more tangible.

UK Riots: Moral Extremes Reflected in Social Media Use

By Ruth Skilbeck

'Barbarians' at each end of the social scale were blamed for the riots that swept Britain last week; media commentators and religious leaders linked the predominantly socially disadvantaged young rioters behaviour in looting hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of fashion, sports wear and electronic goods across the land to an ethical disconnection, a breakdown in civic identity, deficiency in education, and lack of moral role models and leadership in contemporary consumer society that has been hi-jacked by market values.

Whereas the uprisings in the Arab world this year have been fuelled by a drive for democracy; the rioters in Britain focused on breaking into shops and looting the kinds of consumer items they wanted for themselves. The riots were triggered by the murder of Mark Duggan, a Tottenham man shot dead by the police. The uprisings that swept the land for the next four night may have seemed disproportionate, and dissociated from that event, yet the responses of some commentators and moral leaders, suggest they may be understood as a spontaneous outburst of unlawful acting out that reflects the climate of greed and moral decay of the wider consumer society, at high levels; as Britain prepares for austerity measures. 

The Telegraph pointed out that the riots occurred in England shortly after a series of exposures of corruption, greed and ‘looting’ by the upper classes - through tax evasion, the excessive imbalances of wealth in the GFC and the immoral conduct of the News of the World hacking scandal which saw politicians glossing over the unlawful behavior of media magnates, in a blog article, by Peter Oborne, the Daily Telegraph’s chief political commentator: 'The moral decay of our society is as bad at the top as the bottom' (11/8/11). Amongst several  examples he gave of of high level corruption and greed he included the recent attendance of Prime Minister David Cameron at the News International summer party, “even though the media group was at the time subject to not one but two police investigations” related to the phone hacking scandal. 

Oborne condemned the award to former News of the World editor Andy Coulson of a position in Downing Street “although he knew at the time that Coulson had resigned after criminal acts were committed under his editorship.” 

Oborne pointed out that in order to ever face the problems that have emerged this week in the riots across the land, the problems must be located far more widely than in inner city housing estates. 

He wrote: “The culture of greed and impunity... stretches right up into corporate boardrooms and the Cabinet. It embraces the political and large parts of our media. It is not just its damaged youth, but Britain itself that needs a moral reformation.” 

Meanwhile, the Guardian UK Riots blog, and the Telegraph (12/8/11) reported that in an emergency sitting of the House of Lords, the Archbishop of Canterbury said the riots reflected a “breakdown not of society as such but a sense of civic identity, shared identity, shared responsibility.” He advocated education as part of the solution to revive a sense of moral agency and identity. He said. "Can we once again build a society which takes seriously the task of educating citizens, not consumers, not cogs in an economic system, but citizens.”

The same blog article in the Telegraph quoted the Bishop of London, the Rt Rev. Richard Chartres saying  a lack of “good role models”  for many children in disadvantaged areas was a contributing factor in the looting and disorder of the past week.

Social media was blamed in parliament for aiding the uprisings as rioters contacted each other through BlackBerry Messenger a closed network system where one message can be send out to multiple receivers. There were calls for more regulation. Blackberry agreed to work with the authorities in their investigations.  However social media in the form of twitter was also the means by which people came together in communities in local clean-ups after the riots; showing once again that what is important is not the technological tools of communication but how they are used by people.


© Ruth Skilbeck, 2011

UK Riots: Moral Extremes Reflected in Social Media Use

By Ruth Skilbeck

'Barbarians' at each end of the social scale were blamed for the riots that swept Britain last week; media commentators and religious leaders linked the predominantly socially disadvantaged young rioters behaviour in looting hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of fashion, sports wear and electronic goods across the land to an ethical disconnection, a breakdown in civic identity, deficiency in education, and lack of moral role models and leadership in contemporary consumer society that has been hi-jacked by market values.

Whereas the uprisings in the Arab world this year have been fuelled by a drive for democracy; the rioters in Britain focused on breaking into shops and looting the kinds of consumer items they wanted for themselves. The riots were triggered by the murder of Mark Duggan, a Tottenham man shot dead by the police. The uprisings that swept the land for the next four night may have seemed disproportionate, and dissociated from that event, yet the responses of some commentators and moral leaders, suggest they may be understood as a spontaneous outburst of unlawful acting out that reflects the climate of greed and moral decay of the wider consumer society, at high levels; as Britain prepares for austerity measures. 

The Telegraph pointed out that the riots occurred in England shortly after a series of exposures of corruption, greed and ‘looting’ by the upper classes - through tax evasion, the excessive imbalances of wealth in the GFC and the immoral conduct of the News of the World hacking scandal which saw politicians glossing over the unlawful behavior of media magnates, in a blog article, by Peter Oborne, the Daily Telegraph’s chief political commentator: 'The moral decay of our society is as bad at the top as the bottom' (11/8/11). Amongst several  examples he gave of of high level corruption and greed he included the recent attendance of Prime Minister David Cameron at the News International summer party, “even though the media group was at the time subject to not one but two police investigations” related to the phone hacking scandal. 

Oborne condemned the award to former News of the World editor Andy Coulson of a position in Downing Street “although he knew at the time that Coulson had resigned after criminal acts were committed under his editorship.” 

Oborne pointed out that in order to ever face the problems that have emerged this week in the riots across the land, the problems must be located far more widely than in inner city housing estates. 

He wrote: “The culture of greed and impunity... stretches right up into corporate boardrooms and the Cabinet. It embraces the political and large parts of our media. It is not just its damaged youth, but Britain itself that needs a moral reformation.” 

Meanwhile, the Guardian UK Riots blog, and the Telegraph (12/8/11) reported that in an emergency sitting of the House of Lords, the Archbishop of Canterbury said the riots reflected a “breakdown not of society as such but a sense of civic identity, shared identity, shared responsibility.” He advocated education as part of the solution to revive a sense of moral agency and identity. He said. "Can we once again build a society which takes seriously the task of educating citizens, not consumers, not cogs in an economic system, but citizens.”

The same blog article in the Telegraph quoted the Bishop of London, the Rt Rev. Richard Chartres saying  a lack of “good role models”  for many children in disadvantaged areas was a contributing factor in the looting and disorder of the past week.

Social media was blamed in parliament for aiding the uprisings as rioters contacted each other through BlackBerry Messenger a closed network system where one message can be send out to multiple receivers. There were calls for more regulation. Blackberry agreed to work with the authorities in their investigations.  However social media in the form of twitter was also the means by which people came together in communities in local clean-ups after the riots; showing once again that what is important is not the technological tools of communication but how they are used by people.


© Ruth Skilbeck, 2011