Two years ago I discovered podcasting entirely by accident. I was stuck at home with a cold and I couldn't sleep. To pass the time I decided to try to catch up on NPR programs I missed that week. I knew NPR was making some of their programs available online and I thought this was the perfect opportunity to investigate this new service. While curled up in bed with my laptop, I wandered around the iTunes Music Store. Browsing led me to a few programs that looked really unusual. They weren't produced by an organization but by individuals. I started listening. Hours went by and I was hooked. I subscribed and listened to as many as possible that evening, fascinated by what I heard - a bunch of queers talking about all kinds of things. I loved it.
I'm not a lonely person. It's fair to say I often have too many social engagements per week - far too many for a grad student to have. The community in Champaign-Urbana is filled with brilliant, amazing people so the drinks and suppers tend to go on forever around here. I also have lots of friends who live elsewhere and the magic of cell phones, email, IM and so forth make them all very close. Nevertheless, something about listening to all these recordings of people was a mesmerizing experience. It was like meeting a whole new set of friends. While the relationship is very one-sided, it doesn't matter to me, I want to hear more. What an amazing thing, real queer people talking. I have tons of queer folk in my life but this is different. I was deeply stuck by their ideas, voices, creativity, perspectives and also by their ingenuity. This group of people who, as a social minority never had a voice throughout history saw a nest of technologies available and put them to use, sending there voices out into the world. This time they weren't speaking though underground literature but though more main steam channels, coming up in iTunes and Juice along with content generated by large organizations.
Sleeping peacefully wasn't an option that night. I was excited by the content I found but I was worried. What was the future of this material? Where would the recordings of all these amazing voices end up? That was where the fantasy started for me. What if I could try to figure out a way to take advantage of all the amazing resources (human and technical infrastructure) available at UIUC Library - to help preserve all this fantastic content?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment