Railways, flash mobs and metadata

Responding, at a tangent, to Charlie and Bernadine’s posts, I wanted to say a few words on how the notion of place might be challenged by / reconfigured for the digital age. Appropriately, I am writing this on the 13:00 from London Euston to Manchester Picadilly. The train, that great, heaving technology of the recent past, seems a good place to start. The road trip (the road movie) is really the train journey, bastardized. The railway expanded horizons, offered escape – literal and literary – from home. Adventure. Intrigue and the exotic. Placelessness. Murder on the Orient Express. Dickens and the Staplehurst crash of 1865. Kerouac rail-hiking through America in On The Road.

I often write on trains, staring out the window as anonymous, unmapped countryside flies past. This, from a recent poem written somewhere between London and Kendal: ‘Whisper this to your mauve-faced neighbour: / the ash that rests in the crook of a knoll // is the edge of a managed copse / you cannot see, at speed, from a Pendolino.’ Rail travel – a kind of temporary death, confined in bullet-shaped coffins w/ overpriced buffet car – offers respite from the relentless immanence of geography, our relation to physical space. Railway sidings fill with foxes’ dens, graffiti, sprayed and daubed; the inscriptions of the marginal.

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, we learnt to think with the railway. In the twenty-first, we will think with the internet.

George Palmer from Apples & Snakes, who is sitting opposite me, has just told of discovering a poem in Poetry London and, via Google and then Good Reads, starting up a conversation with its author, an American writer from the Midwest. Global communication can, and should, be as small-scale as this. A process of telescoping space, building communities of shared interests beyond the limits of geography.

Initially the internet was feared as a dead space for “virtual” encounters. Inhuman. Dazed teenage coders locked in perpetual fantasy. But Web 2.0 has swept all that away, has shown how global communication and local engagement are not mutually exclusive; but can be mutually sustaining. The internet might be about talking to someone a thousand miles away, or organising a meeting in your local community. Digital technology is no longer the preserve of the expert – bottom-up, organic activity is possible through accessible software and the self-education of ‘digital natives’ (those who have grown up with the internet as second nature). Mobile technology and wifi has taken the digital era into the streets. The flash mob: urban terrain reconfigured. The boundaries of social etiquette withdrawn – at least temporarily.

One of the things I’m most excited about – in a vague kind of way so far – is geotagging, which Wikipedia describes as ‘the process of adding geographical identification metadata to various media such as photographs, video, websites, or RSS feeds.’ This seems to be the next stage of integrating digital content within the real world – whether landscape or cityscape. I think there are opportunities for artists, and perhaps particularly poets (as text is the primary driver of online content), to engage with this new technology to reach new audiences and find subtle ways of expressing their relationship with place.