I was prompted by recent hubbub over videoblogging (or ‘vlogging’ if you must) to take another look around the BBC’s own “Video Nation”.
For about 10 years, Video Nation has been letting people record, edit and broadcast their own stories on national television. The website has now become the archive and dominant prescence of Video Nation when it is off-air. It recently redesigned to create a more accessible archive, and navigation by geography amongst other improvements.
In the history section of the site, a social research organisation called “Mass Observation” is cited as an inspiration for Video Nation.
Later today, while wandering around Kookymojo, various outwards links on psychogeography lead me back to “Mass Observation”.
When this happens, I pay attention.
Found therein, a quote from David Mellor:
“One guise which reconciled the twin demands of the Surrealist and the Documentarist was that of the Poet Reporter. In his BBC broadcasts of 1938, on the general theme of Poetry and the Public, Jennings posited a unity which once existed in English literature before the advent of the mass media in which the poet was a kind of reporter; and poet-reporter was in fact the title adopted by Charles Madge during these years, echoing the Utopian hopes of Mass Observation to have reconciled science and art after their separation brought about by the Industrial Revolution.”
I get a few more synapse-sizzles from this, reminding me of a pre-Newtonmas IM conversation with MattW about another little-known BBC product: “Open Country”.
Matt often holds that Radio is the once-and-future medium, and in this IM he pointed to Open Country as a premium example of why it’s different and better than anything else. I caught the 28th December edition, driving to London back from home yesterday and he’s right. It’s fantastic – reportage, atmosphere, happy accidents and connections are rendered in rich, real, audio: a great example of the poet-reporter in action.
I had another IM conversation today with a very smart person, in which I tried to recount this feeling of everything you see being densely interconnected and interwingled with everything else. It quickly moved to Borge’s library of Babel and the death of coincidence in the age of the interweb. As social networks and domains of knowledge become more and more overlapped, the way we find things is changing… it feels more like things are finding us: manufactured serendipity.
When the blogosphere/noosphere sometimes surrounds me so uncomfortably, it seems like the navelgazing about it’s nature is both restricting and constricting, like it’s headed to either a big-crunch, with nothing to guarantee its expansion. Or maybe a heat-death, with nothing but vast, undifferentiated internodal space almost indistinguishable from the rare, dead, dark node.
But then I remember not to take blogs or the internet so seriously; and that there are poet-reporters in the world.
Petafloptimism 
‘Crossing Continents’ isn’t as rich as ‘Open Country’, but it does things on a world scale. And ‘From Our Own Correspondent’, especially in its WorldService incarnation, does the job quite well, also. But yeah, it’s R4 territory.
Oooh . . . I’m trying not to turn into your own personal pedant, but if you’re gonna blog about both the Mass Observation project and Borges in the same entry, then I can’t help myself.
You link to an article about the Mass Observation project that’s hosted on the design dept servers at the University of Brighton, but if you head a couple of miles up the road from the Old Steine towards Falmer, the University of Sussex is the proud custodian of the entire archive from the Mass Observation Project. And they’re very proud of it.
And on to Borges. An overlooked element of Borges ‘The Library of Babel’ is that whilst it contains the possibility of every book that’s possible in the given language, at no point is this ever confirmed by those that roam through it’s hexagonal rooms. Indeed, those that do live in the library are doomed to die and turn to dust before completing whatever their quest was.
The key to the hexagonal rooms are the mirrors, which perfectly reflect the rooms themselves. Borges says that some have assumed that this means the library is not infinite, but he prefers to presume that this means it contains the promise of infinity.
Actually, the mirror is the infinity that the library promises – by perfectly reflecting the rooms it creates a self-referentiality that reflects the hopes of whatever occupant is there.
Back in ’92 I wrote this in an essay about what the internet offered, making the analogy that, like the mirrors in Borges library, it reflects what we desire, and holds the promise of infinity, but not infinity itself.
I still hold that this is true, and more recently the self-referential nature of blogs has made this only more true.
Anyway. Happy New Year.
Over two years later…. a comment….
I have just been employed by the Mass-Observation Archive at the University of Sussex as the new Development Officer. One of the things I have just set up is an email discussion and annoucement list – would you fancy joining it and perhaps participating in some discussion? It’s open to anyone and everyone interested in M-O in whatever way. See http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/massobs or drop me an email and I can sign up anyone who might be interested.