Hi, this is the first message on my freshly set up site.
I am so excited. Still, I have absolutely no clue where this blog will lead me and what will come out of it.
Will it be a diary? Will it be a dictionary, and moreover will I write in German or English or both?
A reminder of what I have to do?
Crazy isn’t it.
I guess this century might develop to be one of the best-documented so far, concerning what the people living in this time actually think and do rather than the leaders.
Probably blogs full with minor problems and in some time back future generations might ask: Why have they been so ignorant about the destruction of the environment? Why did they waste their time writing blogs?
Well for me I would like to say I love writing and it clears out my brain of all the toxic waste dumped there by society in the course of a day.
It is relieving just to tell anyone, but paper- or webspace now, is, of course, patient and most of the time doesn’t say or have anything against you- aeh, that’s more like the paper I’d say.
I wonder what it is like with the blog, how much interaction there is with people reading each other’s blogs.
Maybe blogs are interactive diaries?
Away from the blogs issue to another senseless question:
Flashmobs.
There was just the first one in Edinburgh and it was pretty shite.
See Edinburgh Flashcrowds for a media-obsessed self-centred organiser, giving interviews to the BBC and inviting all the media to the place and event for coverage. How spontaneous fun can that be as a performance for the media! Surely it can’t and it wasn’t.
Luckily the crowd he got was pretty minor such as about 8 people on Bristo Square, who were looking up somewhere and pointing at something.
The Glasgow flashmob sounds much more sympathetic, and the poor teenager in Dundee who was so enthusiastic about organising it and then got arrested as far as I was told.
I totally share Toms and other critics on the flashmob, see the threat on Urban75, but I share the appreciation of the flashmob similar political projects in Germany such as the RadioBallett in Hamburg, who won the Alternative Media Award, and also the “collective listening to the radio in public spaces” in times when the repressive interior minister of Hamburg tried to repress protests by not allowing big gatherings of crowds and trying to criminalize a community radio station for not sharing his political views on evicting collective housing projects in caravans.
Luckily this guy had to resign when there was some unclear handling of money involved, but don’t know anything particular.
Anyway, that is what was forwarded sometimes by email of one of the apparent organisers of the Edinburgh flashmob:
” As far as the Flash Mob goes, it’s planned for the 28th of this month, and you can get details here if you wanna show up! 🙂
Also, despite the fact that by their very nature Flash Mobs are apolitical and have little or no connection with anti-capitalism or anti-consumerism, I myself often sympathize with those sentiments. I used to be anti-capitalist, but later decided that capitalism isn’t -inherently- evil, even if the form of capitalism we currently labour under in the west -is- horrible.”
I think that says it all really, why it wasn’t worth going to the Edinburgh flashmob, and probably won’t be worth going in future.
They even decided to call it “flashcrowds” to make it sound nicer!
And to add that capitalism seems to me particularly evil in the global south. We- in the “west”- (certainly depending on the point of view as well as the place) can still be happy with a bit more privileged form, where most of us have access to clean drinking water, food, shelter, education, medical treatment – although the IMF and World Bank and free trade agreements try their best to abolish it all.
Also, their copyright symbol on their webpage says it all really.
Why they were wearing “Redhat” T-shirts still seemed unclear to me.
Total control freaks they seem to be.
So don’t copy the content of their website…. And try to give out fake instructions next time for the crowd to strip of naked in Marks and Spencer.
That would be one of the best things a pro-capitalist nonsense gathering could do for media coverage when “flashcrowding”, and by the way, it wasn’t “flashy” after all either as most of the organisers were keen to talk to the press after their organised publicity obsessed “performance”.