CLOUDY THOUGHTS

Dick Pountain /Idealog 355/ 05 Feb 2024 01:24

Internet culture was once expected to join the whole world together, and in some ways – for example email – it still comes closer than any previous technology. However in other ways it divides us up into radically different camps and silos, especially when it comes to publishing one’s own multimedia content. 

This thought occurred to me recently when I finally succumbed to curiosity by opening a Substack account. I’d been hearing about this service for several years, as used by many people whose work I read, so I decided to put up some of the material from my existing Blogger blogs and website. First impressions were of deep confusion, greater even than that I feel on Instagram. Substack combines a blog for publishing new short material with a website for long-form essays, an email distribution and publication system and a system for getting paid. I find its UI quite opaque right now, and it suddenly flashed on me how many places I now have my own ‘stuff’ online, most of which don’t pay anything at all.I generate content in the following media: text, like this column you’re reading, plus book reviews for other print publications; pictures, photographs and digital art; music, some computer generated, some played, some just curated playlists of other musicians’ work. I currently keep text online on Blogger, Medium, Substack, OpenDemocracy, The Political Quarterly and several smaller publications, and a book published in Amazon’s Kindle store. I have photographs online at Flickr, Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr and my own website. I have music on YouTube, SoundCloud, Bandcamp and my own website plus hundreds of playlists on Spotify and YouTube. That makes at least 20 different places with different addresses and logons, some with payment systems (which only generate any revenue if I spend to advertise). 

I maintain my own website, http://www.dickpountain.co.uk hosted for free on Google Sites and very plain in appearance and features, though I did recently port it to their New Sites standard. It contains a few short essays on computing, music and politics but largely exists as a hub from which to access all those 20+ other repositories. My SEO skills are fairly modest so people are probably more likely to arrive at one of those by Googling rather than via my site, and when they do arrive they’re unlikely to cough up any cash because I spend nothing on promotion. Making a living online has never figured among my life goals, but I do like people to see my work.

The one online medium I’d never tried was the podcast, partly because I don’t really like my flat, East Midlands speaking voice very much when recorded. However I did recently participate in one, via an extremely circuitous tour of the contemporary media landscape. In 1990 I drove to Prague with my brother-in-law Pip in his vintage 1937 Lagonda car, our purpose being to see Vaclav Havel installed as president and to witness Pip’s friend Berty – who’d had to flee the Russian invasion in 1968 – be given the keys to the city. Fast forward to 2017 when an old friend and colleague Mark Williams started a magazine called Classic Motoring Review and asked us both to write up our trip for him. Skip forward again to October 2019, Mark’s magazine has sadly folded, but I post our article from it to Facebook. Flashback: in 1983 Pip had founded the Scotch Malt Whisky Society to spread knowledge of the virtues of unfiltered, cask-strength single malts. Forward again to Oct 2023, Pip shows my Facebook post to the editor of the society’s magazine Unfiltered who decides to republish a full-colour version with an attached podcast of us reading it. 

Now Pip lives in Montrose, I live in London and the society is in Edinburgh so meeting to record was out of the question. I scrambled to test Android audio editing apps, found two that worked (Lexis Audio Editor and Bandlab), recorded my half and you can judge the result here https://unfiltered.smws.com/unfiltered-01-2024/smws-adventures-prague.While it was quite satisfying to add voice to my media types, it did prompt a rather morbid thought. The world’s in a febrile and unstable state right now (to put it mildly) so how long can one expect one’s cloud content to survive, say after a catastrophic cyber-attack like the one in the recent movie ‘Leave The World Behind’. That could wipe the lot. Once upon a time when an author died, people went through his or her papers, the books on their bookshelf, visited their publisher. All solid, material stuff – paper, cardboard, photo prints, paintings, film, tape. How’s that going to work in cloud land? Once Google goes down it’s all just so much scattered data. 

[ Dick Pountain needed a dram of Caol Ila after he finished this column]