Underneath the Paving Stones... The Blog!

The Situationists employed an army of cute non-sequitors in their near-overthrow of the French government in May of 1968. One of the more memorable of these -- "Under the paving stones, the beach!" -- was a nod to the almighty power of the imagination for transforming every day life (the Society of the Spectacle, as they called it) into something more passionate, liberating, and, well, downright sexy. Given that many of the Situs were writers themselves, one wonders what fun they'd use the blogosphere for today. Combine that with their profound sense of place, exemplified by the process of psychogeography (their own spontaneous form of walking meditation, as it were), and today's practice of metroblogging, and you have... something.

Now, with Yahoo! on the verge of granting bloggers equal status with journalists, the practice of blogging itself is beginning to fall to the reality principle which dominates much of the mainstream media (save The Onion and a few other oddball print rags), and blogs are becoming, well, boring, meaning just as institutionalized, conventional, and fact-oriented as your average AP story on Chinese rocket launches. Blogs, in an official sense at least, have become mere reflectors (albeit skewed) of reality, rather than authors of it.

Yet, with the dream of free municipal wireless nearing actualization every day, it will not be long before the textures of Internet and meatspace begin to intersect in ways we never thought possible a decade ago. The Internet will become an author of the everyday, physical world, as powerful as city streets and lighting fixtures, and bloggers, long the holders of cyber-emancipation, are in position to hold a major influence over this envelopement.

Therefore, we propose a new form of metroblog, a regionally-focused organ of creation, where everyday realities are not only reflected and reported on to those sitting smack dab in the middle of them (i.e. the average laptop owner sipping a coffee in the local commons during his lunch break), but synthesized, remixed, mutated, and conjured in an orgy of postconventional perspectives, the Globe-Amoeba's view of its dynamic innards. Drop me a line if you're interested (a handful of you have already expressed interest), and stay tuned....

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