firstfooting

January is a cold, hard place to look into the new decade from. Good luck everybody.

Mexico seems a long time and way away from the depths of the year.

What I’m mulling over here is what kind of new sense of place we are developing in a world of cheap travel, wi-fi and giant-sized carbon footprints.

Where do we belong when we can carry with us the store of photos, documents, music and communications that used to be what we went home for. We can keep a circle of friends around us wherever we are on earth.

We can fashion new identities and avatars for ourselves whenever we like, live in second, third and fourth lives, with a different name and persona in each, and then on the other hand Facebook has placed us in a cutesy global village where we lay out our holiday snaps and business contacts for all to see.

I believe we’ve hardly begun to explore the implications of all this on our sense of self/selves. Or rather, some think and write about this kind of stuff lots while others don’t even see it happening.

We can participate virtually in Iranian politics without leaving our seats, conduct affairs in Second Life with trolls and gods, network our way into hundreds of friendships with those we don’t know. I don’t think as a society we’re more liberated nor are we repressed, we’ve created space to be whoever we want to be without disturbing normality.

And being ever an optimist I reach out  for the conclusion that we’re creating a new spirit of community from all rhis, a potential for something very radical and positive to come into being via digital means, and that this open source spirit is at least as powerful as the dark side of weblife, alienated, bullying, voyeuristic, controlling.

My reality is walking into Crouch End to a café everyday and shopping for food. It’s also listening in and participating in a global debate about the book, I chat daily to a colleague in Australia,  I could do a pretty good job of living in Mexico from here, buying Tequila, reading Mexican papers and watching the TV, I could exist in that culture like a colleague whose always in the next room.

The present is good for storytelling but lives don’t have beginning middles and ends these days. Question for the poets: how to express the richness of engagement taking place in people tapping tapping tapping at their screens? Come here please and talk to me about it.