Webflow - In A Can

Posted on November 19, 2006
Filed Under Channels and Content |

I was puzzling over night about James Corbeett’s idea that Lost and blogs have a similar narrative feel: good blogs anyway. This morning the Sunday Times had a long piece about Lost and they emphasised the fact that Lost presents continuing mysteries and inexplicable but seemingly connected situations, a bit like six and a half degrees of separation, not quite on message.

Their argument is that the very prospect of a real connection is what drives viewers back. Mystery and the hope of discovery. I’ve just asked my wife for the first two series for Christmas.

Why I find it fascinating is I am absolutely sure that webflow is creating different needs in us - or rather accentuating our need to know but destroying our need to remember.

Computing and the capacity to search vast amounts of memory are affecting how we think, remember and recall.

Historically. memory has been completely integral to how we fashion experiences in drama and art.

I know this discussion is a bit unblog like but it’s something that I’ve been looking at for years. Humans use memory and art to “memorialise” experience. Memorial is a way of setting out the moral parameters, the values we admire and ought to remember.

In modern computer enabled socieities we’re abandoning memorial. I think that’s because we no longer need to remember. Search engines do that for us.

Memorial is becoming something of an embarrassment. So you ask how do we continue to do what humans have always done - elevate certain experiences so that they become vaguely enobled and serve as models for the contemporary moral structure?

And what do series like Lost mean, series which rely on the webflow to suggest that memories are linked and significant? I wonder if they’re a sign that the audience is not engaging in any serious form of memorial building in the way they did with traditionally structured dramas. They’re not elevating any set of values other than the value represented by flow and connection. And what they do is create a new set of emotions based on the potential for frequent discovery.

Too academic for this time on a Sunday morning.

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