Backburner

Just testing, nothing really to see here

Remember that Songs of Praise with subtitles from a parallel universe video that was doing the rounds a while back? Of course you do. Well, here’s the charismatic alternative, once again from the warped mind of Adam Buxton:

I’ll never be able to sing that one straight again…

Sorry - the entry below wasn’t supposed to be 700+ words with a second part to come. What you really should be reading tonight instead is the Save Llantrisant Post Office blog (thanks Richard). Or if even that’s too much for you, have a look at something which, thankfully, defies categorisation.

It’s still, just about, the time for making predictions for the year ahead. The problem with predictions, especially in the tech world, is that they have a habit of coming back way before the year’s up and biting you on the behind. But on this one, I think I’m on safe-ish ground, though I wish I wasn’t.

My prediction for 2008? That the public web will be decimated, and we’ll only have ourselves to blame.

OK, maybe that needs a little unpacking.

What invariably delights newcomers to the internet is how public it all is. “What, you mean anyone in the world with a connection to a phone line can read whatever I want to type? That’s fantastic!” Yes, of course it’s fantastic. Go on, click that button. Don’t be afraid. “And my holiday snaps too?” Well only if you want to. But you know, that ‘Upload Photos’ button’s there if you ever need it. ‘Ooh, and videos of me making a complete arse of myself?’ Hmm, well, if you’re sure…

What usually terrifies newcomers to the internet is, also, how public it all is. Or to be more specific, the full implications of that realisation that anyone in the world with internet access can read whatever you type, or photograph, or video. And that anyone really does mean anyone.

Back in the day, long before web boards were common, one of the most public things you could do on the internet was to post your thoughts to a newsgroup. One of the documents guiding you in that contained this, which had my revolution ever come about, would have been nailed to every computer with internet access:

Please remember — you read netnews; so do as many as 3,000,000 other people. This group quite possibly includes your boss, your friend’s boss, your girl friend’s brother’s best friend and one of your father’s beer buddies. Information posted on the net can come back to haunt you or the person you are talking about.

Thirteen years on, that figure of three million makes the whole paragraph sound almost quaint, but even if the medium has mushroomed, the principle’s the same. It’s what burns the fingers of those bloggers (and other net users too I guess, but mostly bloggers) who think that they’re talking to an audience of their close confidantes. Which they are, mostly, but then a judicious Google search blows their cover, or they change their minds on who their confidantes actually are. Then they contact their site admins or their archive delete buttons in a panic, and pray that what they’ve done won’t cost them their friendships, their relationships, or their livelihoods. (It’s an old observation, but few if any people have been sacked for the simple act of blogging. The problem’s what they’re blogging about.)

There is, or at least there used to be, quite a subtle distinction here between the virtual and physical worlds. I could waste another five paragraphs trying to explain it here. But I’ve never seen such an effective explanation of that subtlety as this one from Danny O’Brien in 2003, which with apologies to him, I’ll try and butcher down to 125 words:

…In the real world, we have conversations in public, in private, and in secret. All three are quite separate. The public is what we say to a crowd; the private is what we chatter amongst ourselves, when free from the demands of the crowd; and the secret is what we keep from everyone but our confidant. Secrecy implies intrigue, implies you have something to hide. Being private doesn’t. You can have a private gathering, but it isn’t necessarily a secret…

…On the net, you have public, or you have secrets. The private intermediate sphere, with its careful buffering, is shattered. E-mails are forwarded verbatim. IRC [public chat] transcripts, with throwaway comments, are preserved forever. You talk to your friends online, you talk to the world…

Ah, but that was 2003, you might say, and we’ve got ‘private’ on the web now as well, haven’t we? You know, social networking and that, where you choose your friends and snub your enemies? Isn’t Facebook that elusive third way between public and secret that the web has been searching for?

Well, yes and no…

December 22nd: Jethro Tull get mentioned in Backburner. December 29th: Jethro Tull frontman Ian Anderson gets awarded MBE.

December 24th: Making the Most of the (mostly BBC) Micro gets mentioned in Backburner. December 29th: one of the designers of the BBC Micro gets a CBE.

Coincidences? Yes, probably. But just in case, give John Tams and 8-bit pioneer Sophie Wilson gongs next time round…

(even if you do type the entry up on the 24th and copy and paste it on the 25th). But it’s probably equally sad to be reading blogs on Christmas Day too.

Happy Christmas to you and yours. See you the other side of Saint Stephen.

Apart from The Peter Serafinowicz Show and late entrant, the endearingly bonkers Space Pirates, the BBC output that gave me the most pleasure this year was a TV programme all about email.

It was called At the End of the Line, and its opening shots showed a man who worked in San Francisco striding down a street in London. He wanted to keep in touch with his office. How was this possible, questioned the voiceover? Well, he simply connected his computer to his phone line, picked up his electronic mail, and acted on it.

So far, so pedestrian, but what made At the End of the Line such an astonishing watch was its transmission date: Monday 14th March, 1983. The computer in question was a pre-Macintosh Apple II, and it was attached to the phone via two sucky cups and a box described by the voiceover as a ‘modulator-demodulator’. It was all very slow. You could see the electronic mail appearing block by block on the screen. But it worked.

I first watched that programme’s series, Making the Most of the Micro, at the age of nine, when I was the proud owner of a Sinclair ZX81. (I’m still the proud owner of one, but it doesn’t see much use these days). The programme’s description of bulletin boards, worldwide libraries searchable from your home computer, and personal electronic mail must have seemed inevitable to me. Computers would all be connected together one day, wouldn’t they. Wouldn’t they?

Almost ten years to the day later, I managed to send my first inter-city email. It’s fair to say I never looked back from there. Fourteen more years down the line, I sat watching At the End of the Line again, for the first time in nearly a quarter of a century. Only this time, I was watching it via a link to a trial service on the BBC’s computers, on a connection running ten thousand times faster than the one shown in the programme. And taking all the computer wizardry for granted.

Predicting future technology’s a tough job. Futurologists such as Ian Pearson and Peter Cochrane are paid well because they appear to have very finely tuned crystal balls. If you want to join their success, just hit on the right, rich seam of technology and extrapolate it into the future: it sounds easy, as long as you know where to look for the right seam to start with.

And when future predictors get it wrong, we can at least laugh at them in hindsight. Take, for instance, this long-lost clip from the BBC Archive (ok, I know it’s a spoof but bear with the promised cheap YouTube link) of a group of people from 1981 trying to predict what music would sound like in the year 2000. I think Tony Rudd deserved a place in all our record collections…

According to well-informed astronomers, the winter solstice will happen in the northern hemisphere at 6.08am GMT on December 22nd. Hang on - that’s today. I guess that makes it Hastily Constituted Jethro Tull Day right here on Backburner.

So, have a happy Hastily Constituted Jethro Tull Day, everyone.

More cheap YouTube links tomorrow. Bet you can’t wait.

The Imagined Village is one of those ideas that sounds so good on paper, you suspect it’ll be a complete failure in practice. The concept: take musicians as diverse as Billy Bragg (good stuff), half of Waterson:Carthy (good stuff), Transglobal Underground (good st… hey, why isn’t Temple Head on YouTube?), Benjamin Zephaniah, and some bloke called Paul Weller. Get the Afro-Celt Sound System to glue them all together. Shake well in a rehearsal studio for a few weeks. Record album. Tour. And you end up with one English folk-rock supergroup. In theory.

So does it work? It shouldn’t, of course. Adding gifted solo artists to existing line-ups often ends in very bad musical collisions. It should be a sludgy, cumbersome mess.

Except, as you’ve probably guessed, it isn’t. As evidence, Cal enjoyed them so much I’m turning green at the gills. And as further evidence, here’s what they’ve managed to do to Hard Times of Old England:

click

The Countryside Alliance expects, I suppose,
My support, when they’re marching to bloody Blair’s nose,
But they said not a word when our Post Office closed…

What I really like about their reworking (seriously, have a look at it) of the traditional song is that it’s pretending to be a song about England, when in reality it isn’t just about that country. It’s a song that I’d file in the same category as Capercaillie’s Waiting for the Wheel to Turn, June Tabor’s rendering of Maggie Holland’s A Place Called England, and Steve Eaves’ Afrikaners y Gymru Newydd. It’s a song about a small nation battling against the double-edged sword of globalisation. And it’s all the more powerful for it.

More music tomorrow, probably…

Dear Those Swansea Residents who Live Near the Big Seasonal Ferris Wheel,

TRY CLOSING YOUR CURTAINS.

Love and snogs,
Rhys