LifeDeluxe

MywannabeSpace

It seems official that Myspace has officially reached some sort of tipping point and transformed itself from people just hooking up with people, via a few big new music successes, to just being an enormous talent agency heaving with the next big thing. A piece in the Observer (which is attributed to the NYTimes ) by Jon Pareles, talks eloquently about this rise in 'self expression' and charts the well documented breakdown of the old models of distribution etc. He even mentions "recombinant art" so it must be on the money! He then goes on to say how hard it has now become to be noticed on the likes of MySapce: "The reality is that genius has a bigger junk pile to climb out of than ever, one that requires just as much as hustle and ingenuity as the old distribution model".

But, as if by magic, it looks as if MySpace have recognised this, and are going to team up with Marmalade magazine to create a magazine carved out of user generated stuff from MySpace. As reported in MediaGuardian "The aim is to tap into the 70-plus million regular users of MySpace to find talented up-and-coming creatives who use the social networking site to promote themselves through their online profiles"

I'm all for trying to extend the brand to include other platforms, and a magazine could work so well, but don't quite see how reflective of the MySpace vibe it will be if it is really just sifting through it as a distribution platform looking for "talented, self promoting upstarts" to show their work. I'm sure marmalade is not short of cutting edge reels and books.

Oh well, maybe I'm just jealous....

Coffee

For some reason I always remember Graham Bednash giving an informal chat at some gathering somewhere about 7 years ago. He raised a whole heap of ideas and thoughts, one of which was the rise of the coffee house as a place for people to not only meet up, but to do business. This was internet wave 1 when no one had office space (or pretended not to) and people met in Starbucks to invoke the God of venture capital. He referred to it as the 3rd place - somewhere in between work and home. I've probably remembered most of that wrong, but I do distintly remember feeling fairly unsophisticated because I had always thought of the pub as the 3rd place.

Anyway, partly because of the digital pool I have been swimming in recently, it seems like there has been a resurgence in all things coffee.

Russell Davies and a whole collection of people around the world seem to be meeting up to talk and discuss and connect, a clear bridge between the digital and analogue. The RSA are persevering with their coffeehouse challenge and the Guardian today runs a piece about how "The homogeneity of modern coffeehouses is stifling their traditional role as places of sedition". So it must be interesting.

The piece was written by the research curator for the Vienna Cafe Project (which I could find out nothing else about, but which was "launched this month by Birkbeck and the Royal College of Art) but I'm not sure I completely buy the whole "In the effort to create a space in which everyone can feel at home, no space remains for the transgressive" bit which ends up logically blaming the likes of Starbucks and Costa for the death of new thinking or radical politics in society etc etc.

Does a coffeehouse have to be 'real' and indie to stimulate debate? Starbucks sponsors the RSA's coffeehouse challenge, stumping up £10,000 to help ideas generated in discussion see the light of day. Which feels okay with me.

And I'm not sure where all those clever people I mentioned around the world choose to meet up (the last one in London was bar Italia in Soho) but I can't help thinking that the environment can only have so much impact on the discussion.

The article finishes: "Can culture continue to be created in cafes in the 21st century or will it simply be handed down in the form of chain-authorised music, compilations and reading matter? We need a fresh look at the cafe as a site for the creation of culture and thought as well as a social space in an increasingly dislocated world"

Maybe we should obsess less about corporate chains and more about the now possible outcomes of of meet+discuss+digitise+tag+distribute+share+comment = "creation of culture" and the opening up of conversations hitherto unheard. Etc

Make mine a mocha.

Shelters for the Souls

....is the name of an article in The Sunday Telegraph about Joel Sternfeld's new book Sweet Earth: Experimental Utopias in America (2006), which explores the sites of past and present 'idealized communities'. The book looks amazing, and places like Slab City seem impossibly strange and romantic, but it was just one observation in the piece that made me think: "the sense that emerges from the book is that the only thing that turns a gathering of individuals into a community is the discovery of something sacred.....The word 'community' has come to imply a profound place where individuals make sacrifices and where life becomes once again sacramental."

Maybe we use the word too lightly when we talk about all the places that people congregate online. Or maybe there is really something sacred in the myspace profile?