Archive for November 4th, 2005

  • Uppsala

    Hälsningar från Uppsala.

    MSN display picture name of this week: Smetty Holgersson.

  • Cave Painters were bloggers

    I just started to read “Blog! How the Newest Media Revolution is Changing Politics, Business and Culture” by David Kline and Dan Burstein. Check David’s blog for more information about this book. Some chapters are even available for download.

    Dan Burnstein wrote the introduction and starts this book with an interesting thought: cave painters were some sort of bloggers. If you want to taste a very nice website on cave painting first, you should check my favorite: The cave of Chauvet-Pont-d’arc.

    “I discovered that in a number of places, the period of decoration of the cave walls went on for several generations, or even, in some cases, for several hundred or thousands of years. The paintings were often first inspired by the physical forms in the caves and were a kind of commentary on those forms. Then later painters and storytellers made subsequent commentaries about what they saw on the walls and what they had experienced in their lives. Having no written alphabetic language, they used the mysterious visual languages of the figurative and abstract, multicolored paintings and carved engravings, to describe their ideas and beliefs about the hunt, the spirit of bison, mammoths, deer, and various other animals, shamanism, the sacred feminine, initiation rites, sickness, mortality, the afterlife, the earth”

    “.much of this art emerged as part and parcel of a long and highly compelling conversation: One member of the tribe initiating another, one generation speaking to the next, one group of humans inspired by and reacting to the ideas of those who came before. The conversation continues and is stored and archived for future access. The group memorializes and institutionalizes knowledge and learns as a result.” (quotes from the introduction).

    I think this is a really nice way of thinking about blogging. Our ancestors definitely felt the need tot start conversations. A few 1000 years later we rediscover the importance of conversations and reinvent it in a modern way through social software (here in the form of blogging).This means blogging won’t go away. Only HOW we have this conversations, might change and evolve.

    I’m quite sure blogging fits me better then painting. I would have received lots of comments on my paintings if I had been a cave painter. How would my ancestors have commented with our current “?” or “huh?” or “what the F**K?”. Maybe they would have just erased my paintings. Happy to be a contemporary blogger.