We All Speak in Silence

As I’m sure you’ve noticed, I’ve been feeling rather… lacking in verbosity. Probably because most of my energy has been devoted to midterms.

Luckily, I am communicating through a medium where words are no longer necessary. Here, we are communicating in a space where we don’t have to create anything at all to express an idea. You don’t have to reveal even the tiniest bit of yourself. Not a single typed letter. Not one stroke of the pixelated paintbrush. All you have to do is link to something. An article, a picture, a song, a video, maybe even a feature-length film. You post a hyperlinked URL, a reader follows the link, and there you both are, occupying the same one-page world in asynchronous time.

Many professional bloggers make their living by posting links and adding a few sentences of opinion. There’s Kottke. And design blogs, like SwissMiss. Both interesting, well-respected and part of my daily blog diet.

Now I’ve noticed that there’s a growing number of sites that post links with even fewer words. Sometimes none. It’s not linked-to content for the purpose of commentary, it’s just linked-to content. Items neither created nor critiqued. An information remix.

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I’m fully aware that this is an incredibly old idea, and one that isn’t unique to the Internet. Homer (or somebody) sampled oral tales and stitched them together to create the Illiad and the Odyssey BCE. Mozart ripped off a gavotte dance rhythm in a piano sonata in the 18th century. Toward the beginning of the 20th century, the dadaists remixed visual art using collage; toward the end, musical artists such as John Oswald were mixing and mashing songs in the way we’ve become familiar with today (with the law close behind).

But what’s occurring now is different. All of the artists mentioned above were creating new works from old art. They culled together ideas in order to comment on them, or make them anew. I’m not so sure that that’s what’s happening with information remixes.

the things magazine blog is the first that I noticed doing something close to the information remix concept. In the words of the things about page, its writers (a cohort based at the Victoria & Albert Museum/Royal College of Art*) report on “objects and their meanings.” But the things blog is not as straightforward as this mandate would have you believe.

Each post is a sprawling amalgam of links and their descriptions, introduced by a large, striking image for a header. These posts are in partly narrative form, but usually even the most coherent descriptions are interwoven with sections of links separated only by forward slashes, the relationship between linked-to content ambiguous and undefined.

To me, these are the sections that manage to communicate the most. It’s not commentary, it’s not an opinion, it’s not some kind of new creation. It’s more akin to a mood. The kind of feeling evoked after reading Harper’s Findings. In this sense, such posts are more like a mix tape or mp3 mix than a remix. Maybe information composition is a better term.

By joining these links together, the post’s composer represents an idea, a mood, an experience. Sometimes this mood is born from the similarity of the linked-to items, and sometimes it’s a product of the tension caused by their juxtaposition. Often the initial effect is disorientation, but as time goes on, patterns of meaning emerge. It’s an experience not unlike listening to an aleatoric piece by John Cage.

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Other blogs create this feeling across the entirety of their domain. These encompass a broad, seemingly unrelated range of topics. Here, the disorientation is caused from post to post, rather than line to line within a single post.

My most recent find in this category is Fed by Birds, whose goal is to cover “strange creatures, complicated clothes and forgotten books. And robots.” And there are others, like Basically Whatever, started by a friend of mine. There, he and his collaborator post, well, exactly what it sounds like.

But do you notice how different those two moods are? There’s a reason why it’s called webspace. Clicking through to a page is like opening a door onto a mysterious room, and the opacity or clarity of the windowed door into that room is determined only by the context of link from which you traveled. Fed by Birds has the mystical and ancient feeling of a Victorian reading room, while Basically Whatever has the contemporary neon flair of a hipster nightclub.

While their creators might not agree, I think that’s exactly the point of such blogs. Of course, the primary goal of the information composition is to share information and use hyperlinks to usher readers along to other strange and mystical rooms. But the more interesting aspect is the result: the distinctive feeling evoked by these posts and blogs. It’s not an effect created by narrative sites, or even mini-review sites such as Kottke and SwissMiss.

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It’s important to note that all of the examples I have given are group blogs (if even just a pairing). That’s because when a work has multiple points of authorship — even when so closely selected and defined — it becomes a distributed narrative. This is, perhaps, the only kind of narrative possible for these blogs. A singular voice would be too easy to predict. Only a group could create the kind of organized chaos that’s essential to the information composition.

In this way, each member of the group plays a part in setting the mood of the (web)space. Just as good interior design becomes great with the implementation of the unexpected, the feeling of disorientation and surprise evoked by these blogs is heightened by the participation of multiple authors with varied but related interests.

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Not long from now, we won’t achieve all of this through linking — it will be thinking. You feel something or have an idea. You want someone else to understand your thought. So you press the node on the side of your head, and there the thought is in someone else’s mental inbox — which has the feeling of being private, but is in fact monitored by an overarching force (Google?). But maybe we’ll be in some other universe then.

*one of whom also writes for The Morning News