Make my joy complete by being of the same mind, maintaining the same love, united in spirit, intent on one purpose.
There are certain things in this world that leave me speechless: the incredible audacity & determination that people possess when put in front of one of those toy crane machines in a bowling alley or bar, the fact that the average person will have dreamed for 9 years of their life by the time they die, & the alarmingly increasing disinterest in literature that Americans have, just to name a few. Perhaps the most awesome feat to boggle my mind as of late, however, is the ability of the internet to stretch on towards infinity & carry the continuing lives of so many globally self-interested people with it.
I bring this up now partly because I’ve become very interested as of late in upping the anty of human connection & interaction in ways that simple e-mails or letters cannot do. In my efforts, I’ve been pushing for the idea of beginning a bake-sale-penpalship with anyone who might hold interest — what this entails, as I envision it, is mailing baked goods back & forth with letters &/or recipes along with the food (I suppose the problem is that the food needs to be non-perishable to survive in the mail, so options are very limited. Still, I will not be dissuaded). In keeping a little more with today’s theme, I’ve also been trying to sprout interest in sending more interactive e-mails that would work much like a blog in that links, music, & videos could be included. The UMW server is not good for this, but I use Gmail anyway, so I’m not bothered. One idea I have in this vein is that the writer of an e-mail listens to music while writing, then proceeds to attach those same songs (or other ones, even) to the e-mail for the person on the receiving end to listen to while reading the e-mail. The idea, I suppose, is supposed to be that when you write to someone, you are putting something of yourself more than just your words into your work, ideally something that will remind the reader of you & thus enhance the experience of letter writing in general. I generally pride myself on my letters, but I still usually feel that it can only go so far, & I’ve been trying to push it more & more.
To continue along with the topic of the internet, though, this interest of mine that has to do with the breadth of the Web is sparked even moreso than usual whenever I come across homemade (some might say “DIY,” though I tend to associate that term with a dated aesthetic & thus will try to stick to something less affronting for this purpose) artifacts online. One example of what I mean: there is a compilation released by the Evolution Control Committee & Illegal Art (those great Gods of plundering commerce) called Default’s Greatest Hits, which gathers together a rather large slew of “Napster nuggets.” The ECC website explains:
A lot of people use the Music Match software package to convert and archive their MP3 files. However, some people aren’t content to just sit back and rip their fave CDs. These people actually make their own MP3s, recording direct to MP3 from the computer’s mic input or line input. The resulting recordings aren’t always prime-time entertainment, but if you’ve ever wanted to hear how badly some people karaoke, strum their acoustic guitar, or can’t get their mic working right, this is the way.
You start by firing up Napster on your computer. Then search for this phrase:
MIC IN TRACK
The results (and there will be many) are the files people have recorded of themselves but haven’t given names yet (or maybe never will). A lot of the results are, well, crap, and you may have to listen to a few to find ones that are worthwhile… which makes your success ratio about the same as listening to the radio, right?
The CD that has been released (I don’t have my own copy, but a couple years back I sat in a friend’s room & listened to the whole thing & it was a complete hoot), then, is just a collection of other peoples’ personal mp3 files. Most of them are a trip. I offer up some examples, taken free from the ECC website:
(that last one’s my favorite — it’s titled by the ECC as “Typical Nirvana fan”)
This stuff is hyper-fascinating to me, not only because it represents the everyday & tediously boring like nothing else can, but because it’s the product of real Americans doing real dumb things with too much time on their hands. How big is the internet? Perhaps it’s too big, my friends, or perhaps it’s only as big as we are willing to dig into; space is relative, after all!
In relation to all this, I have a track on my iTunes that refuses to disappear (chiefly because I refuse to erase it). It is a song that my sister included on a mix CD she made for me a few years ago, the product of a Napster search for “Rilo Kiley.” This track she found instead is attributed to “! Riley” & had no original title. It’s the most mysterious file on my computer, & I can’t stop listening to it. There is probably an 8 year old girl somewhere who I will never meet who one day recorded a song into her computer & then forgot about it. & this is why I love the internet:
You’re a nut! That squirrel song is wild, haunting, and strange. It is as if she is singing to a squirrel she is looking at through her window. I like the way you are thinking about the internet here, and I almost agree with your e-mail connection idea, but e-mail seems like such a weird and outmoded way. It is certainly for those one-to-one connections, but at the same time do you read your e-mails like a letter. I imagine you’d still be better off actually sending a letter, and going all Steampunk.
I mean isn’t this idea of sending music and sharing a thought while reading exactly what you are doing here? There are differences for sure, but this is more like the Emily Dickinson “Letter to the world that never wrote to me.”
ECC are far out, I love the album and love the way they capture and use the seeming detritus of the web, and the richness of its excessiveness is something interesting I get from this post. The idea that it is so big, yet patterns like “Make In track” emerge that make it quite interesting, wonderful, and vexing all at once.
The way I see it, Jim, an e-mail is a bittersweet way of connecting with others. On one hand, it is a little less personal & a little more open to quick mistakes & shorthanded notes. On the other hand, though, it has the chance to create an immediate connection between two people (or more, which is another big advantage of the e-mail, I think. Sending an e-mail to two or three friends at once is only slightly more personal than sending one handwritten letter photocopied two or three times. The difference is you can copy & paste to slightly change an e-mail to become more personalized in seconds flat). I don’t think the e-mail is outmoded, necessarily, I just think its use is generally under-utilized & the extent to which an e-mail can be made more “moded” is not a field that is often explored. I tend to write long e-mails that drift in & out of tangents (with an incalculable amount of parentheses, of course) & describe daily stories & events, sometimes with verbatim dialogue. I think the average person, though, writes e-mails as a way of passing a note along at work or saying a quick hello. My point is that I think the e-mail has a lot more potential than people are willing to give it credit for, & as great as it is to receive a handwritten letter in a physical, curbside mailbox, the e-mail offers up all new territories for the writer & reader. A blog can be very useful in this regard as well, of course, & that’s why I like to keep this one semi-frequently updated, but sometimes you don’t want to write to everyone with a computer & their mother.
That being said, I do believe in the power of the hand-scrawled message, & I love keeping up with penpals connected through envelopes & stamps & recycled paper. The physical letter is always something special to receive, & there’s nothing like it, but if there’s wonderful one thing I think our Age of Convenience & Impatience has brought us, it’s got to be the ability to write quickly & without mistake & to stay connected better.
A quick example: I could write you a letter dated last night at 9pm that says, “Dear Jim: the Boston Celtics may have just won the NBA championship title by the time you receive this!” Or, I could write you an e-mail at 12am that says, “Jim: it looks like the Celtics are going to have to keep playing after tonight’s loss. Here’s a video from ESPN.com that shows a recap of the game in case you missed it!” Obviously, both styles are give & take, but I think there is so much more that can be done with the e-mail that no one bothers to explore! I am willing to take the plunge!
I especially like your idea of music with e-mails. Ideally, it would auto-play, or at least be embedded in the body of the e-mail (not an attachment).
This can even be taken to another level. What if the use of music in e=mails became so common that people did it almost without thinking? Then what kind of subconscious choices would we make? Angry at the person you’re e-mailing, but trying to be nice? The music might add an edge to what you’re saying in the text.
And why not introduce the element of traditional letter-writing into e-mails? If you have a tablet, you could handwrite part of the e-mail or–and this is my favorite possibility–add tiny hand-drawn pictures! Complaining about a stuffy, unhelpful professor? Draw a funny little sketch of him!
Another thing that would be interesting is tangential e-mails. As you said, there are many things that come into play when we write to people. What if each of these things (or as many as you can remember) are also included in the e-mail? If something you’re describing reminds you of a book, include links to the text. Or embed a YouTube video of a South American tree frog that reminds you of a person you’re talking about. (Or an emu. I would love to meet an emu-like person.) It might take a little extra work, but if we all started doing it, I think it would become creepily automatic.
You could start a whole new revolution in multimedia stream-of-consciousness e-mails! What are you waiting for?!
P.S.
EMU! http://api.ning.com/files/YOx8g9-baiXCiyWyDLXh-JenRqQBJDMYnoFJtdX0wFYUb*Sk2M92mitFqiilsXphox7B8W2AiPCX2Mf9GNN-AdFhJxoEuGzv/emu.jpg
Beyond the sci-fi aspect of mind-reading & chips embedded in the brain that would transmit soul-music into a computer, I agree with what you’re saying concerning embedding youtube videos & links into the text of an e-mail. This is actually exactly what I was getting at, though I’m not entirely sure it’s a “revolution.” My main concern is just in creating stronger connections between people separated by dozens or hundreds or thousands of miles in the most heartfelt way outside of bulky care packages (which I find amazing in their own right, of course. What college kid doesn’t?). If people can use the internet to communicate deeper understandings of one another beyond just typed words on a computer screen, it could make e-mail much more fun. It’s a personal choice though, I suppose, I’m not really proposing any radical new software or concepts haha. I wouldn’t even know the first thing about that