Waiting for the connection

On the train, suddenly there was no internet connection anymore. Now that printed newspapers and books are slowly disappearing - looking around, 3 out of 4 people are tapping and scrolling on their phones for hours - and maybe it's nostalgia but still there is a charm in writing on paper and also reading a real magazine or so: currently reading a collection of articles by a French philosopher about our ecological attitudes (Manieres d'etre vivant: Enquêtes sur la vie à travers nous), a weekend magazine from a Flemish newspaper dedicated to vegetarian festivity dishes but with a manual on how to make Polish pierogi. But soon the laptop takes over, without connection: the recent articles by my colleagues at University about musicology, movement and sound, and one which was only sent the day before: 'Exploring the Decision-Making Process behind illicit Drug Use at Music Festivals'. Then the net is accessible again and immediately one gets a load of messages, someone shared music, and of course some jokes and news links. Returning to the net is innocent: the immediacy of massive information, right or wrong, makes one forget that only 40 years ago, we had to go to libraries and bookshops to find answers to our questions. It took days and weeks, sometimes longer to find the real answer to simple questions. It took me a couple of months to find out how to calculate MIDI checksums for certain synth/sound modules. Now you can do it in a couple of minutes' time. Are we living with realtime pamphlets?

Scary flyers

Just the other day in the news, drones are dropping flyers over war areas. Indoctrination, to create fear, to destabilize. They are only dropping prints where there is no news, no other media anymore. Because there is no electricity anymore.

Shared Flyers

hypertext multimedia www html servers social media

smaller omnipotent ubiquitous devices media today --> end of websites as media, but tools for communication, also proliferation of social media.. for instance Dušan sends a picture of the protests against Fico via Signal, then I look it up online in news agencies and find out the western media are all very silent about it..

so are the social media the feuilles volantes of today: democratized, shared, uncontrolled, etc

fake Flyers

while we care about the general truth and fake news, people are making the news, information through direct communication?

Writers Block

too many flyers the continuous control of being out of control