by hans peter meyer
Media that Matters. What happens when 50+ multi-faceted media creatives gather at Hollyhock on Cortes Island for 4-5 days?
IN THE BEGINNING: a mirror of the world we are all struggling with, the conference as a "firehose" of information and ideas threatening to wash away sense of time/place/order. This persists through the days we are together. There are only rare moments to reflect, to stand back from it all and get perspective. A breathing space.
Is there a conflict between storytellers' traditional desire to create narrative, and emerging media champions' delight in the seeming messiness and volume of information? How do we share meaning when there seems to be no syntax, nevermind narrative?
References to the "ADD" quality of culture being produced by emerging media.
SECOND, confusion meets eagerness to learn. We begin to tame the firehose effect.
As manipulators of information we give shape to the inchoate. We filter and screen. We create taxonomies. Lists. Reference points. Technologies to give focus. To point towards meaning. Old media meets new media in the same impetus to shape, to manipulate, to handle and share. Sometimes meaning only becomes apparent in the rearview mirror.
The ADD culture warriors wrestle with the same issues. Although some of us reference the changing brain, we're not yet willing to live entirely wild in the field of chaos. Paraphrasing
KK : I have no time for things and people that waste my attention; it's the most valuable thing I have. I think about
Bruce Sterling's novel,
Distraction.
Mike Littrell introduces several ideas that resonate over the next few days. One has to do with knowing our personal narrative, and the wisdom of knowing how and when it has reached or is reaching the end of it's usefulness. The most telling for me comes, ironically, from my least favourite of Hemingway's novels (Farewell to Arms): "The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong in the broken places." Here, I realize, is a juicy bit: it's when and where I've broken that I've tasted the juice of my life and been inspired to be bigger, more than I thought I was. Isn't this why I love story? Because it is how we try to connect the pieces, to feel the flow of juice in a sometimes arid, decidedly not-juicy world?
THIRD, much animated and application /action-oriented conversation (remember: face to face is still our most persuasive and authentic medium; we are humans, we love to talk and to listen and to hang out together and generate new things - ideas, projects, things to hold in our hands, things to hold in our minds and hearts).
Stories. The telling of stories of pain and suffering and laughter and inspiration and playfulness. Fragments that ask for a story. Stories about the nightmares most of us enjoy, the sheer glut of this life we live thrown back, empty. A child earnestly and excitedly doing what children do in my life: making me laugh, connecting me to another very, very juicy place. Not the place of breaking, but the place of forgetting. I keep coming back to this idea too: how much I learn from my children, from being given the opportunity to remember who and how I was at their age.
FINALLY, we dance and sing and laugh and get too little sleep and go back out into the world. And on the way I get to listen and talk with Sarah and Mike and learn a little more about how we come together.
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