Apologies for the hastily written and somewhat confusing post below this one, my dear dear friends. I’ve had concerned e-mails and everything! Bless your hearts!

My recent extended blog silence can mostly be attributed to the usual, fairly routine reasons. Firstly, I did feel somewhat out of sorts for most of last week. If I were the sort of person who was given to talking about mis-aligned energies, then I'd say that my energies were decidedly mis-aligned - not to say severely depleted by the rigours of being stuck with an exceptionally repetitive and mind-sapping work task. (Still ongoing, and in danger of wearing out my CTRL, C and V keys.)

I then proceeded to spend the Easter weekend focusing on matters which took me far away from the laptop - and indeed, as far away as possible from the deafening hum of the accursed de-humidifers. (The affected walls in the morning room are still only down to 80% humidity, so there's a way to go yet.) Thus did a brief bout of Blogger's Block morph into a recuperative spell of Blogger's Holiday.

Added to this, a right old tangle of distinctly jaded thoughts have been swirling round inside my head. These have arisen from various sources, but none of them have been of a particularly personal nature. Ordering them into some sort of coherent Statement of Jadedness Think Piece may well turn out to be a futile task - but let's have a bash, and see where it takes us.

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If you've been out and about in Blogland over the past week or so, then you may well have stumbled across the news of a recent court case, in which a UK blogger was found guilty of conducting an eleven-month campaign of harassment against another UK blogger. (I'm deliberately not linking directly, but the whole gob-smacking story can be accessed through the shortlist for last week's Post of the Week.) The harasser's weapons included a deluge of abusive and threatening e-mails, accompanied by a similar deluge of malicious and defamatory blog posts and blog comments. The allegations levelled by the harasser against her victim (and indeed against many other people over the past few years) are highly detailed and deeply wounding, clearly intended to cause severe damage to both personal and professional reputations. Since they have been repeated over a network of interlinking blogs, calculated to raise their visibility in search engines, these allegations now show up on the first page of Google searches for several of the victims in question. As such, they are clearly visible not just to the victims' friends, relatives and colleagues, but also to any potential employers or clients who might be conducting some elementary research. Meanwhile, having failed to show up for her court case, and despite bail conditions which expressly forbade her from using the Internet, the convicted harasser continues to repeat her charges on her main blog, continuously and obsessively, whilst on the run from the authorities.

Two aspects of the case have been particularly troubling me. Firstly, the harasser has never actually met her victim in person, but instead has built up her impression of the victim's character almost entirely by reading her blog posts and making her own subjective interpretations. The harasser now claims that her own blog forms her legal defence. Not her testimony, but her actual defence. It is as if, by committing her wild and unfounded allegations to a publicly available blog, her words are somehow granted some sort of additional legitimacy. The whole mindset is manifestly delusional, but one of its chief delusions is to substitute online relationships - which can only ever be partial - for fully fleshed relationships in the real world.

Secondly, there would appear to be no mechanism for removing the offending blogs, now that their author has been found guilty of harassment. The allegations live on, and nothing can be done to get rid of them. As the blogs are hosted on the free Blogspot service by Google/Blogger - a US company - Google/Blogger are bound only by US law, and not by British law. This is the standard reply which complainants can expect to receive:The only example that springs to mind of Blogger actually taking action over "objectionable content" concerns an extreme homophobic hate blog called Kill Batty Man, which attempted to incite its readers to murder gay men. Even then, the blog ran for a year before such action was taken, and it took a major outcry from major league A-listers before anything was done. (More details here.)

Meanwhile, a prominent US tech-blogger has recently gone public over a series of abusive and threatening comments which have caused her to fear for her own personal safety, and to cancel her public speaking engagements. In the fall-out from all of this - which has been immense - some people have accused her of hysterical publicity seeking, while others have set about drafting a high-minded "Code of Conduct" for bloggers. (It is this latter initiative which Unreliable Witness skewers so deliciously, thus saving me the effort of constructing a skewering of my own.)

Once again, most of these people have never actually met each other. All the abuse, all the second-guessing, all the amateur psychological profiling - it has all been constructed from reading blog posts, forming assumptions based on subjective interpretations, and gathering so much popular support for those assumptions that they begin to look as if they have real substance behind them.

It's precisely the same mindset that fuels the various bands of conspiracy theorists for whom the "social web" provides such a fertile breeding ground. Cherry-pick your material, garnish it with prejudice, spin it into the juicy narrative of your choice, and defend your position ruthlessly, without need for further question.

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OK, time to scale things down a good few notches, in order to illustrate a wider point.

A couple of weeks ago, I began to worry about the apparent disappearance of a normally prolific UK blogger: not someone whom I read regularly, but someone whom I "know" from my various excursions within Blogland, and who is quite a well-known figure within her own particular sphere. I needed to speak to her about something - but she wasn't returning e-mails, and her blog had fallen silent. I decided to Google around for clues.

Almost immediately, I discovered that this blogger had signed up for various "social networking" and "community building" sites, of the sort that are generally identified with the whole "Web 2.0" phenomenon. (Here's the Wikipedia entry for Web 2.0.) Many of these sites are based around the concept of registering for the service in question, selecting a name and a small identifying graphic (or "avatar"), filling in a simple descriptive profile (gender/location/interests), and building up a social network of "friends", who have also registered for the service.

This particular blogger certainly wasn't short of "friends", and yet none of them seemed to be remarking upon her disappearance. Well, why would they? After all - and I don't mean to castigate these people in any way, but this goes to the heart of the matter - they're not her friends.

Nevertheless, there was something both poignant and troubling about scrolling through all these public declarations of "friendship", which didn't seem to amount to much more than a hill of beans. For me, it gave the lie to the whole concept of Web 2.0 and "social software". Because friendship - true friendship - is based around a good deal more than assembling a reassuring little cluster of avatars on a web page - as if they were stamps, or realistic indicators of popularity.

True friendship is when your real life neighbours interrupt their Friday night dinner party to spend two hours helping you shift piles of soaking wet plaster from your collapsed ceiling, in their best clothes, with smiles on their faces. It's not saying "Check out this link!", or "Nice avatar!", or "Ooh, I like Coldplay too!"

(She was fine, by the way. An actual friend of hers e-mailed me, and put my mind at rest.)

OK, so you and I are sentient, emotionally intelligent human beings who can easily distinguish the virtual world from the real world. But when you're taking a quick break in the office, are you more likely to hook up with your online "friends", or to turn round and talk to the flesh-and-blood people at the row of desks behind you? Which is the default option? Who knows you best? With whom do you have the most in common? In such instances, would you rather be your real life self, or the idealised avatar-based approximation of yourself? And on those occasions when you do meet up with your fellow bloggers in real life, do you ever find yourself "acting out" your online personality, staying true to that avatar? How do you address each other, if one or the other of you writes under a pseudonym? Does it feel more appropriate to continue using the pseudonym, because switching to real names seems a little too forward? And what of those Myspace types, eagerly amassing hundreds of "friends", some of whom genuinely do seem to be confusing virtual and real life notions of social interaction?

With our shiny Web 2.0 "friendships", we can eradicate the awkwardness, the mess, the sweat, the lumps, the bumps and the peculiar dark corners, in favour of edited and idealised representations of ourselves. If we're not careful, these ersatz relationships can start to feel more appealing than the real thing. And if we're prone to certain ways of thinking, then these illusions can easily convert into delusions.

Reality check: over the course of the past five and a half years, many of the people whom I have met through blogging have graduated into Proper Real Life Version 1.0 Friends. And that's great. Seriously great. But couldn't we come up with more fitting words than "friend", "neighbour" and "community" to describe our Web 2.0 interactions? Or would such a shift fatally undermine the business models that are springing up in the wake of this latest attempt at a paradigm shift?

(Ooh, I think I feel a conspiracy theory coming on! Who's with me?)

Labels: blogs, community, opinion, web

Dearie dearie me, I really do seem to be losing the power of written expression altogether. Evidence: I spent over an hour and half yesterday evening, penning a mere 120 word blurb on one of my favourite singles of the year, for the forthcoming "Best Singles of 2006" round-up on Stylus. And that's not counting the time I spent doing the research, either.

So, yeah: the plan was to answer all ten of your questions over the weekend in a fairly quick-and-dirty, rapid-fire manner - but the aforementioned Failing Powers got in the way of doing this. This wasn't helped by the gargantuan nature of Question Number One, either - in which jo asked:

Has the proliferation of alternative sources for finding and hearing new music such as music blogs, YouTube, Myspace, etc., helped or hindered the populace in the quest to find new music?

Do you think these alternative sources are allowing smaller acts who might not have caught the attention of music scouts or writers previously to promote without the backing of giant label conglomerates - and if so, do you think this has led to a dearth or a surplus of quality music?

Is it simply nostalgia for previous decades that causes us to feel that music from *then* was, in general, better than whatever is *current* - or is it that we simply manage to blot out all the crap that was around *then*, and create a rosy post-image?

Blimey, jo! And, er, Naughty jo! Not only did I say "one question per person only", but I even said it in bold type, so that no-one could miss it!

OK, so let's try and answer this one without turning in a 5000 word dissertation on The General State Of Popular Music In 2006. Yeah, fat chance. Brevity has never been my forte.

I'm not sure that I can speak for the general populace, but YouTube and Myspace in particular have certainly made it easier than ever before for people like me to access new music with a minimum of effort. For instance: the last time that I posted a list of my favourite tunes, I was able to add helpful illustrative YouTube and/or Myspace links for all of them - and in 11 cases out of 20, I was able to supply both. This wouldn't have happened 12 months ago, and I most certainly welcome it.

These days, I regularly use both sites in order to decide which gigs and albums I should review, or whether it's worth turning up early to catch the support act. If I read of a new song or act on a website, or a message board, or in the print media, I can be listening to that song in seconds - and because the content is being streamed rather than downloaded to my hard drive, nobody seems to mind. This makes for a more reliable - and more ethically defensible - alternative to peer-to-peer file-sharing sites, which I only access in cases of dire need. (Compare and contrast with the trigger-happy days of Napster and Audiogalaxy.)

All of this has to be set against my declining interest in old media - both print and broadcast - as reliable sources of information. Radio One is a hyper-active, unlistenable racket; I'm still (just) too hip for Radio Two; and as I don't own a digital radio and can't stream live audio at work, 6 Music has yet to become a regular listen - even though it is clearly the station which most closely matches my needs. In fact - and in a highly unexpected reversal of roles - it's now K who relies on the radio for most of his new CD purchases, as he is a long-standing fan of Radio 3's Late Junction, and he frequently uses the "Listen Again" service in tandem with the archived playlists on the show's website.

Meanwhile, Top of the Pops and CD:UK have vanished, Popworld is as nothing without Simon Amstell at the helm, and I can never get it together to set the Sky box for all those late-late-night Channel 4 music shows. Which just leaves Jools Holland's Later, which will occasionally - very occasionally - throw something new in my direction.

As for the music press: Uncut and the NME are shadows of their former selves, Q and Mixmag are comics for people who don't really like music, Mojo is overly heavy on the retro, The Wire is impenetrably "difficult" for a shallow soul like me, Straight No Chaser is indiscriminately nice about everybody and everything, which makes it an untrustworthy guide... which leaves Plan B (excellent in its way, but mostly far too indie for my personal tastes), The Word (trendy vicar stuff for the most part, but I have long since learnt to live with my inner Mark Ellen), The Guardian on a Friday (but please don't get me started on the questionable merits of Alexis "Man at C&A" Petridis) and the Observer Music Magazine once a month (probably my favourite read of the lot, despite having its own fair share of horrors: that "Record Doctor" of theirs should be struck off the register forthwith, for instance). Oh, and there's always fRoots and Songlines - both excellent in their way, but somehow they have never become essential purchases.

All of this means that, thanks to the likes of the ILM message board, webzines like Stylus and MP3 blogs like the ever-reliable Fluxblog, the web is now by far and away my main source of information regarding new music - and I should imagine that applies to many thousands of others. Do I think that's a healthy, democratising, liberating shift of emphasis, which enables people to make a freer set of personal choices? Absolutely. Much as I regret the passing of the Top 40 as a mass-consensus barometer of popular taste, I'd rather have things this way round. Maybe that's partly why my tolerance for music radio has diminished; why should I endure five consecutive crap songs in order to discover one good song, when I could be assembling my own playlists instead?

Has all of this helped smaller acts to flourish? Absolutely. I cannot recall a time when live music in this country was in such a healthy state - or maybe it's just a local upswing, and I'm just lucky enough to have access to six excellent venues, catering for all sizes of audience, and all within 15 minutes walk from my front door.

Has this led to a dearth or a surplus of quality music? A moot point. It has been a particularly rubbish year for the singles and album charts, with the intelligent and innovative new pop and R&B of the first half of the decade increasingly giving way to identikit faux-rebellious "corporate indie" bands, dreary singer-songwriters, and a iredeemably fossiled slurry of creatively bankrupt commercial dance tunes. So, in order to get to the good stuff, you really do have to make a bit of an effort - but once you do (and really, it's not that great an effort) - there's as much good stuff out there as ever.

As for jo's "are we just giving in to rose-tinted nostalgia, or was music really better in the old days" question: it's problematic, as...

a) The popular music of our formative years will generally cut deeper than anything we will ever experience in adult life, for reasons which shouldn't need spelling out.

b) Old music tends to feel more "significant" than new music, as it accumulates depth and weight over time.

c) I genuinely do believe that the singles charts were objectively at their best between 1964 and 1984, with "golden ages" from 1964 to 1966, and again from 1979 to 1982. But that's just the singles charts. Once you look beyond the commercially popular, the seemingly "good" years and "crap" years even themselves out to a much greater degree.

Extended ramble over, or else we'll be here all night.

Labels: media, opinion, popmusic, questions, web