Well maybe the frontier days of the internet are over, it's all mainstream
now, parcelled off into tidy spaces. Or maybe no one has any more to say
than they ever had and the responsiblity of filling all these virtual
spaces has driven everyone back into their rooms, a chat down the corner
shop, a conversation in the pub, a cosy corner of a chat room somewhere (PM
me, they must be saying). That's the real insanity on the internet, the
public chat rooms.
My experience of working on the margins of the educational system is that
when someone says they're going to mainstream you like they're doing you a
favour it means you're going to disappear. Two images come to mind, of a
fertile margin, ecologically diverse, inhabited out of choice and of a
wasted, barren shoreline, where htings wash up, rot and get neglected. The
maisntream of course can always flood and your cosy margin disappears under
water. And you can get carried away. This is getting good isn't it.
Is poetry etc any of these? It has more 'traffic' than most mail bases, the
only one i had to put on digest, so lots of people seem to like it. Is the
internet a type of margin or has it infiltrated everywhere? Some would say
that the centre/margin concept is old hat and everything is now equal
within a pluralist meshwork. Pity, i've always enjoyed margins and
marginilia, but we have to keep up with the times.
I have to go and teach now. Postmodernism. Up the shallow end.
ian
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