Information grooves: August 05, 1996 issue of New Thinking

August 05, 1996 New Thinking:
Information grooves

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August 05, 1996

Information grooves

By Gerry McGovern

Hip Hop knocks me out.

Many of us think about the digital age. We try to figure out what makes it tick. Then, along comes young people from poor, Black neighborhoods and make it tick, beat and groove.

They live it.

You have a body of music developed over many years. It exists in many units called songs. They looked at those songs and said, ‘Hey, if I took a bit from this song and a bit from that song, and if I mix them together just right, I get a new song!’

They looked at double-deck turntables and said, ‘Hey, these aren’t just for listening. You can make music with these too!’ They listened to the scratch as they turned the vinyl back to the right groove, and said, ‘Hey that’s not a noise, that’s sound!’

Rarely has necessity been such a mother of an inventor.

Hip Hop And Techno prove effortlessly that in a new age old technologies can find new functions, that what was previously regarded as noise can become signal, and that the things that old technologies created can become raw materials for new creations.

So, if this possibility applies to music, why can’t it apply to information, film, animation, graphical, CAD (Computer Aided Design) grooves?

The Internet is this giant network with almost limitless space at each node. However, to fill that space with useful content is a major task if you’re thinking of creating brand new information. But then, what is brand new information?

We rarely create ‘brand new’ information. Rather, creating information is a building block or jigsaw approach. A book is the assemblage of such blocks. It gathers ideas, quotes and information from other books, articles, interviews, conversations, thinking.

These blocks are then molded by the experience and skill of the writer, but even experience and skill are based on the building blocks of learning and life.

Some information grooves are so good they become classics. For example, ‘The medium is the message,’ ‘The Global Village,’ etc. These grooves can ultimately become clichés, as they are used repeatedly and drained of their impact to communicate with clarity. (In rap, some James Brown grooves are in danger of becoming clichés.)

The Internet is an information DJ’s paradise. Website linking and email newsletters, such as Edupage, are examples of info DJs at work. What is linking? Linking is a way you extend the value of your website by choosing quality websites to link to. Edupage scans the world’s newspapers in order to pick out the choicest technology information grooves of the day.

Both approaches create new and valuable information by combining or ‘remixing’ already existing information. In the same way that rap came out of the ghettos to dominate Eighties and Nineties music, the present Internet environment offers the opportunity for innovative information DJs to create successful careers, while the ‘majors’ are fiddling about with big production budgets and little real idea of what makes this new medium tick, beat and groove, and how to make these grooves work.

Gerry McGovern

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The present Internet environment offers the opportunity for innovative information DJs to create successful careers.