I’ll start with this really stand-out quote from James Reaney’s blog that got a lot of ideas churning for me a while ago. I’m not sure whether Reaney or LFPress approve of me clipping so many words but this whole chunk deserves to be kept intact:
There are many excellent ways to recognize built heritage in London. (Unfortunately, that is not the same thing as London being a place that recognizes built heritage. Subject for another sermon). If you’re a building we (the collective we, the civic we, the good organization we, not the LHC we in the previous paragraph) will (sometimes) put a plaque on you & make sure the people who preserved you (or mourned you) or built you are recognized. And thanked. As they should be.
But: If you are a festival celebrating one of London’s many communities, is there a way to recognize you? If you have preserved the story of your community in London or made a DVD about it or re-created its ancient dance or theatrical traditions for the 2009 world, is there a way to recognize you?
If you have had a community feast to welcome griots or poets or musicians from your great tradition, what about that?
Anyway. If such fine, city-wide recognition programs exist, I am sadly ignorant of them. My bad, my embarrassment . . . I will recover, but only if you tell me where to find out more & so I can take back to my London Heritage Council colleagues an idea of what truth is out there.
If not. Well. Let’s see how to start one. It’s time to recognize these dimensions of heritage, too.
Go cultural diversity. Go recognition programs for all the ways & people that make London great.
My first thought was, isn’t “recognition” precisely what James Reaney does in his columns and blog posts. Do we really need programs for that — or would we be better off with a lot more James Reaneys?
The insight I got from this is actually what led to my main point in yesterday’s post: we’re not doing enough for hypertextual integrity in London.
It’s more feasible than most people think. I mean, I’ll admit, Reaney’s knowledge and passion for the city is rare — but everyone’s got some knowledge and passion to share. What about the other people on the Heritage Council? Where are their blogs? Where’s the Heritage Council’s blog?…
Where are all the music blogs? Where are the venue blogs? The APK has a blog of sorts but now London finds itself, unfortunately, without an APK… Aeolian Hall and Call the Office have websites of course but where are the archives and stories (notwithstanding the somewhat ineffective-for-this-purpose MySpace blog)? Where’s the history that has happened there – or I should say, where’s the future history? (London Music Club seems to have a past shows section but the site is down as of the time of writing.)
There’s a false assumption that blogs are these fleeting, in-the-moment things. That’s certainly how they are made, but in the process they also leave behind concise threads of enduring information, with permanent links.
If you want to see what I was writing about last year (I haven’t been doing this long) just click on the archives. Posts are organized by categories and tags to make it even easier to find what you might be looking for. If you want to find something I might have done on another platform (I flatter myself) search my FriendFeed.
And what about you? If you’ve been to a concert, took photos, recorded the show (more acceptable now than a decade ago), talked to the performers, had interesting experiences (interpret that however you like), where did you share them? Where is that information archived? Or are you planning on letting most of that die with you one day…
Here’s a recent example. If you missed the Indie Media Fair last weekend, I don’t know if there was much after-the-fact coverage by conventional media, but if you’re curious you can check out Kevin Van Lierop’s photos. I’d love it if a whole bunch of blog posts popped up in the first few pages of Google results (there are a bunch from past years) but unfortunately not enough people seem to have the mindset of how easy it is to document and share experiences of events like that (and the irony — or tragedy — of it is that it was a media fair and it seems like all of the media people who went to it are keeping it a secret).
I’m not saying everyone should start sharing videos of your child’s birth (or conception) on the internet, but if you’ve got something from a public event like Sunfest or Gus Macker or The Wick being torn down or whatever, the biggest barrier between it and the public is your own attitude.
Facebook has been changing people’s habits about what’s normal to share online, but I don’t like how you don’t really own the archive when you post something on there. Facebook controls who sees it and when.
Whereas if you’re managing your own blog, Flickr photostream, or YouTube channel like CityLightsBookshop (videos of happenings in London ranging from zombie walks to robot art shows and whatever this is; my favourite is street drumming), then other individuals and organizations can maybe actually organize content into something else that’s useful, informative, entertaining, and meaningful in bigger, better, and longer-lasting ways.
One problem that comes to mind is that there’s going to be a lot of stuff out there — too much, in a way — and nobody will be able to find anything.
But. What are cultural groups and heritage programs for? Aren’t there passionate organizers and curators around who’d take on that challenge, aggregating and editing all of the content that’s going to be generated into coherent narratives and collections? (Sort of like what I’m doing here — though this is more of a curated argument than a narrative.)
As for recognition, I think it’s important to carry on with things like the Jack Richardson Music Awards to definitively recognize specific accomplishments, but the most vital and natural way to recognize contributors to London’s culture is simply by doing this – what I’m writing, what you’re reading right now.
Every link in this piece is literally a vote for something I think should be more recognized. I’m not just referring you to these things and hoping you click to see what’s there; all of these links count towards what might be on top of the list the next time someone searches (for example, the next time someone searches for “London Indie Media Fair” Kevin’s photos might be higher than something from 2006 that’s up there now, or the next time someone searches for “City Lights Books” our London store might rise a little among all the results for bookstores in other cities…
And the more Londoners post and comment and link about things happening in this city, the more relevant we’ll be — not just to each other, but to the rest of the world as well. You can’t tell me we don’t have the budget for this.
[Update: Moments after publishing this I realized how stuck I am on plain old blogging and Google, and how badly I neglected the truly social platforms like Twitter. (See: I'm still pretty old-fashioned too, relative to the extent things have already progressed.) Hopefully people with more advanced knowledge and experience will show me up in the comments, or on their own blog, or some other platform.]
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