[Steve Bucknell]

Thanks Gregory, that’s an interesting thread. I feel much the same way as Andrew Frisardi when I look at most poems which attempt to include technological change and social media. They seem, in Andrew’s words “rationalised and contrived”, or, as a poem he cites seems: ”taken from the most superficial ego-consciousness of the poet. Amusing in its own way, and that’s about it.”

Tim Love writes: “Trying to be timeless, to write for posterity, is understandable, but not at the expense of insulating oneself from the present and the things we all share.”

Andrew, referencing a quote by Edwin Muir, writes that “For me, that bit about essential human identity becoming “indistinct” in the constant flux of technological change is key.”

It’s about the way our essential selves are being moulded, hobbled, or enhanced by the storm of technological change that surrounds us. As Tim Love wrote, the various technologies “let us more easily be alone without being lonely”. Perhaps Wordsworth’s “Daffodils”, transposed to online interactions best captures the zeitgeist. Or, as Maryann Corbett wrote in Myspace Invader : “What strangeness will engulf our lives…”

I don’t think the electronic and digital realm we are now beginning to live in will become “outdated”, it will only grow more pervasive. Will it change the way a love poem is written? The last post on the previous “Roadkill on the Information Highway” writes of “giant nude girls” and “Never trust the web”(Jerome Betts). I can only dream of what the sleep of reason might produce.

Apologies to all Spherians I may have quoted out of context here!