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This might be my year-end summary

I know I should be writing a year-end summary, even though I'm put off by all the top ten lists and summaries of others. It's just what people expect. A good start might be a poem in the New Yorker that came today, Blue Song by Tennessee Williams. I never met Tennessee Williams but I knew his sister in law Joyce, Dakin's Wife, who was born in my hometown and hung out with my parents. She was very pleasant... it was hard to imagine her in a Tennessee Williams play. Here's the poem:

I am tired.
I am tired of speech and of action.
If you should meet me upon the
street do not question me for
I can tell you only my name
and the name of the town I was
born in – but that is enough.
It does not matter whether tomorrow
arrives anymore. If there is
only this night and after it is
morning it will not matter now.
I am tired. I am tired of speech
and of action. In the heart of me
you will find a tiny handful of
dust. Take it and blow it out
upon the wind. Let the wind have
it and it will find its way home.

I suppose by including that poem here, I signal that I'm depressed. I suppose it's normal when you get older to start losing your enthusiasm, to wonder what it's all about, to feel a little tired and a little depressed. That's really okay.

The poem has a literary feel to it and reminds me how I once thought that I would be a successful writer. I never dreamed that I would spend so much time writing and giving it away, as I do here at Weblogsky. Then again, I was pretty innocent about life's financial demands back then. This was before I understood business and thought people could just do things.

That's a long digression – I should get to my summary. I thought at various times that I would be a writer or a film director or an attorney; each phase was driven by high hopes. Ultimately I've become an Internet professional, which means I have a career no one could envision when I was in college. I was an English major and I wanted to write – somehow I think that ideally suited me to become an Internet pro. I was fond of publishing, wanted to learn all about it. I worked for years with typographers learning about their craft, and the process of printing books. That was good preparation for web publishing, though I have to admit the web is a bit of a letdown, design-wise, after you've studied how to make books. The web doesn't let you much control over the appearance of your publication.

My year end summary is about the web. 2006 was a transitional year, it seems to me. The Internet and the web seemed to sink into the fabric of our reality more than once before, but this year it really seemed to become Important. This was the year of convergence. All media is data now, and it can be transported from one device to another with relatively little effort. The web is replacing everything. It replaces television, radio, records, newspapers, magazines, books... all those things are still around, but they've leaked onto the web, and the web is where they really exist, despite the legacy of paper and analog media devices.

Every year I give advice and help to the South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive Conference, part of the larger set of conferences that include music and film. Interactive was like the bastard child, small and sort of ignored by the others, until 2006. Last March it was a different conference, larger, more professional, more of a scene. More THE scene, I should say, because music and film are leaking or converging, becoming part of the interactive world. I think that was a key story in 2006, and I'm surprised that others aren't mentioning it, though Time Magazine did try to kill it with an acknowledgement ("label it, and you dispense with it.")

Another big 2006 story: people finally accepted that global warming is a very real phenomenon. Some people didn't, but most people did begin to see the problem and want to do something about it. Green thinking is more common. I think much of this can be traced to the work Bruce Sterling started in 2000 with the Viridian Design Movement. He had the right instinct: at the time environmentalism was not a compelling interest, it was boring, and too much of it was doom and gloom. Realizing that global warming was seriouis enough that it had to get into our heads and stay there, he proposed a design movement, because design movements really can transform consciousness. I helped a little by building and maintaining the Viridian Design web site, so I was in a position to gauge the movement's effect. You could see Viridian thinking grow and spread, so that people who had no idea who Bruce Sterling was and had never heard the word Viridian were influenced by it, if indirectly. We waited too long to do much about it, we're probably really screwed, but at least we're a little more conscious about it.

2006 was, in fact, a year that I tried to be more conscious of a lot of things. It was the year I realized I had grown up – you don't realize it til your life is 2/3 over. It was a year I started reading more and listening to more music, listening closely. It was the year I could finally acknowledge that I'm not a nice person (but no one else is, either, not really). It was the year that Tom Ferguson and Larry Lockard died, and each death in its own way forced me to confront something profoundly wrong in the way I'd been living. Confront and admit it, though I don't know that I changed anything. It's still good to be aware.

It was the year I realized how totally committed to the Internet I've become. I just live and breathe it. I'm not even sure why anymore, it just fits. I get how it works, and I spend my time helping other people leverage its power. I stayed with it even when there was no money in it; that's how I know I love this work. Like a good musician or mechanic, I've got it in my bones now, I have muscle memory about the Internet. I walk around in it and I don't get lost. 2006 is the year I realized I'd made my choice, though it's a choice I made fifteen years ago. I realized that the future is all present now, and this is what I'm doing.

Was Tennessee Williams really depressed when he wrote that poem? Or was he just doing what he did best?

jon posted this at 9:33 PM
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