Podcasting, Memorry, Playlists, and the Postmodern Self

It is a pleasant feeling probably to reach a point in the development of one's sensibility that one might go back and re-listen radio broadcasts that have accompanied one through past stages of everyday life. It is not only that we now have podcasts to go with the soundtrack of our life but also we have an access to them in a manner completely dissociated from their proper chronology. They usher us into a post-temporal dimension of media experience that puts every point of the time-line of their original occurrence into the same plane of immanence of digital mediation. Thus, digital formats become second order mediatizations of media content where the personal chronologies of listening and viewing become reshuffled way past a live sense of contact with time towards a whole new additional layer of picking and choosing, virtual flanerie, museumized consciousness. No doubt, it is the combination of particular hardware and software, media management practices and conditions of their mutual availability that confine this sensibility to some parts of the world. However, as these conditions and their local equivalents reach further beyond to become globally ubiquitous, one could speak of the deleglement des senses on a properly global scale.

Stray Thoughts on Cities, Development and Aesthetics

To think of it, global cities of culture were also sites where ideas for art and design were developed from creative sparks of ideas into more of mass followings that must have justified the place of these cities in the collective memory of next generations. This backward perspective nevertheless seeks to project itself into a comparative and a present dimension in order that a sense of how one might detect emerging urban hot soots of style can develop. The flurry of down-town development/redevelopment projects that one might discover upon zooming in on a given urban landscape leaves one wanting for terms in which their comparison can be achieved with reasonable conceptual economy. In absence of a leading kind of economic activity that might independently boost the fortunes of any given city, the urgency to reinvent not only economic make-up of a given city but also to manage the on-going crisis of the efforts to do so singles out urban style as a single workable strategy for encouraging positive sum cooperation strategies among the stakeholders in cities, surrounding regions and across the globe. As bases for economic common sense melt away buffeted by the uncertainties of the disorganized capitalism, it is the shared aesthetics that seems to provide the common ground for shared urban life.

Inspiration from How Cities and Regions Can Be Approached

It is this grip of exhilaration that writing on wonders and plights of city life throw me into that I want to elaborate on. Cities are important. No question about that. Parts of them are durable. Parts are ephemeral. However, it is this collective and individually shared intention to write about them that captivates me. Cities interpellate us. Cities challenge preconceived perceptions. Passions burst around some of them. Sleepy downtowns define others. One can go the range of theoretical vocabulary and methodological approaches in trying to approach what cities are. However, it is a way of writing about them that is vernacular and informed alike that shows the way towards the freedom with which one can approach cities in their multiple aspects. One aspect at a time, it becomes possible not so much to connect the dots around the issues that makes cities up but to get an expanded vision of what a single point of departure towards understanding of cities might be. If there is a methodology it seems to be ethnography that goes global. It is somewhere on the interface between the global and the local that the essence of what makes cities different from other terms of spatial reference seems to lie.

What Comes Richly Due After a Self-Searching While

I guess everybody has to confront one's demons one day or another. It's another matter altogether when the demonic content swells in a dream, like an old wound hurting with the pain thought to be confined to days long gone by. Whether we learn anything from our experience or not, there seems to be a coming to terms stage at which we question our identity, our image and our future. It all hangs somehow together in the space where we search for ourselves and others. Not sure if a present moment can be congealed into an amber-piece-like time-capsule, I make circles around what this very moment means to me when put into a string of sentences about myself and people I encounter. Chance encounters, strangers' joys and sorrows, afterthoughts overly long in coming add up to a post-reflective consciousness of what does it mean to deal with change on the scale of everyday life. Things coming and things going build probably ephemeral museums of remembrance in our and other people's minds that like surreal castles hovering in the air of avant-garde paintings become, depending on circumstances, either individual or collective legacies.