Interweb - the good, the bad, and the wiki.

2008. Good Crap.
I remember 10 years ago when I was in high school making mixed tapes, and zines. Sometimes the tapes included our own music recorded as we all stood around the ghetto-blaster, and the zines were full of pics of local events, and our own anti-everything articles. I remember when the radio was one of the most fascinating things ever - free music, cool DJs, announcements of all the local shows and events. Thanks to the internet all this has changed...

I made a mixed "tape" for Amei yesterday. That means I pulled up iTunes and drag-and-dropped a bunch of files into a playlist and burned a CD. Gone are the days of speaker-to-mic recording from your buddy's deck to yours. Gone are the days of double tape decks, pushing "play" on the left, and "record" on the right. The CD took 10 minutes, and sounds amazing. The tapes took hours and sometimes days, but sounded amazing.

Now if I was going to make a zine, I would probably use Adobe Publisher. Start with a nice template, import some photos right-click-copied from the internet, and arranged around my spell-checked rhetoric. Gone are the days of scotch taped cutouts aesthetically placed around typewriter editorials, then photocopied at the local kinko's for 5 cents a page. Gone are the days of hand collated pages, stapled down th middle, folded and placed in a backpack to be handed out at school or the next punk rock show.

And the radio. Maybe I take it for granted, but there are only 2 or 3 stations even worth programming into my one-touch favorites these days. Even these shows are bowing to capitalism, replete with advertisment for the newest and hottest text-messaging-GPS-mp3-cell phone that only costs $250 after a mail in rebate of $500. Sure these couple of stations still hit on local events. But it is all the filler that irks me. Gone are the days of truly independent, local, and interesting radio.

So maybe you are asking yourself "what the heck does this have to do with the internet?" The answer is everything. Thanks to downloadable music, there isn't much room, or necessity for porting around a walkman anymore. If you want some music, just open up google and type in the name of your favorite artist. I'm sure someone will have a sight dedicated to them, with a few free songs for your listening pleasure. Or if you want to fork out the buck a song, you can hit iTunes or other similar services. The radio? Sure you still turn on the radio in your car and listen to what they give you. But now thanks to streaming audio, anybody, anywhere sitting in front of a computer can access shows from all over the world. This means that local shows now have broad based audiences and the corporate bandwagon shows up with ad revenue enticements that fill up the majority of the air-time. The zine. The fact that I am writing a blog right now should answer that. Everyone now has free, reletively labor-less access to promote their ideas and media.

Ask yourself, has the internet done us a favor? or has it eliminated the true labors of love?

I miss the handmade zine, but I love instant access to a million ideas. I miss my ghetto-blaster, but I love my iPod. I miss my radio, but I love surfing the independent casts from around the globe.