Everybody Needs Succour (But Only Some Of Us Can Spell It)

Succour

I’ve been working on a speech that I have to make next week, and of course, anything I can do which distracts me from my task is infinitely appealing. So, I am cruising through MySpace, remarking upon the way it has brought me back into expressive internet contact with a whole tranche of my younger friends, for whom blogging is a scary place full of verbalists who love a lit-spat… and laughing at the way every musician band and artist in the entire world now believes that MySpace will be the cure of all their financial ills – and thinking that the Arctic Monkeys have a lot to answer for.

MySpace shows that the “overnight success” myth has never been more alive – which is sad, since behind all such stories there are untold tales of struggle, rejection and disappointment. And anyway, that isn’t the point about these “social networking” sites – the commercial successes which stem from MySpace are the exceptions, and it’s only journalists and money men who get excited by them. I however am a much more typical internet user, still a punter despite my inside knowledge (for what that’s worth) and I regularly get excited (especially when I am meant to be doing something else) by things like slide.com (see above) Spainful Films, and Pig Boy Movie.

Since Google bought Blogger, Murdoch bought MySpace, and YouTube did a deal with Warner Music, the slender chance of the lone creative genius (or small band of creative geniuses) making commercial headway by using these simple, cheap promotion and distribution tools has diminished even further. Fashion dictates that things which are now trendy will soon be a signifier of the boring and out-dated (“you mean, you still use an iPod?”) – and the next new big thing will be elsewhere, just because it has to be in order to satisfy the endless ravenous appetite for new stuff, new opportunities, news.

What we need, I have come to realise, is a twice-daily bulletin called the Olds which tells us that things which used to be there are still there. As more and more of what we now take for granted disappears – a million species wiped out on land, at sea, the vanishing of clean water, food, living space – the Olds will become just as compelling a program to watch as the News, and every bit as disturbing.