Onward!!

Google opened Street View for Finland today. While the Finnish press is going on about the privacy implications that have been rehashed with every new launch of the service in a new country, as well as asking readers to find “sensational” or “funny” scenes captured by the camera vehicles, I’ve been spending time feeling painfully homesick for the place.

The company has photographed large swathes of the country in springtime and early summer, and I think that’s significant. Seeing delicate birch leaves framing slivers of brilliant blue water on a sunny day just makes me ache for an ice cream cone and a walk down the seaside. In a way it’s creating a mental image that never quite existed, a desire for an amalgamation of all the perfect days I’ve spent there. Still, I’d take an imperfect one too, if I could fast-forward time a few months to, say, early June and get a flight ticket to boot.

Interestingly, the places that have strong memories attached but I haven’t visited for a long time gave me the biggest kicks. Thus, seeing my childhood house was no big deal, as I was there only a month or so ago. Seeing my ex-girlfriend’s place, though, triggered a longing for her mother’s cooking, the shelves of the local library (what the hell?) and the smell of raindrops hitting the dirt track I used to walk next to the train tracks to the nearby station. Oh, and barbecues at the allotment, shopping for a sneaky and (barely-afforded) six-pack of beer for an evening with friends, and a thousand other memories I never hope to lose.

Pirkka Aunola writes about experiencing a similar feeling, and notes the power that completely unposed, “neutral” scenes can have. I can agree 100%.

Going away for two weeks with no internet access and scarcely any phone contact made me think about the interconnectedness of these times. Who among us blog-reading (and -writing) folk doesn’t have a list of RSS feeds continually ticking new information to our screens? Who isn’t on social networking sites getting live updates on what our friends are up to?

What happens when you go away and leave that to go to Zimbabwe for two weeks? Email piles up, and not just boring work things. Invitations to parties, events and concerts, message chains among friends still in town and links to pictures of amusing animals pile up unread. But is there something more significant that one misses when away like that? Why do I feel uncomfortable about the prospect of marking a lot of emails and feed items “read” or deleting the lot? I feel equally uncomfortable thinking about reading them all and “catching up”. How much of it matters in the end?

Well, radio silence once again, from now until the end of the month. The sound of the rain outside is cold and miserable. It’s hard to even imagine +30 and sunshine, and rain that is warm and pleasant when it does fall.

Yesterday during a lull at work I was thinking back to my first year of university in London, when I met a guy who worked for Trafigura as a trader. Quite independently of that, later on, I wondered how useful the undoubted thousands of documents on Wikileaks were to the wider world, and whether there are journalists who as part of their duties monitor what is posted.

Then, today, both these things combine in the news, with the Guardian reporting that it has been gagged from reporting on a Parliamentary question (which to my ignorant common sense should surely be public) and that said question possibly deals with the Trafigura case and the gagging order was imposed by the notorious Carter-Ruck solicitors.

Over five years ago, in late April if I recall right, I stumbled across a thread on an internet forum telling of a new user-run internet radio stream set up by some of the posters. I chose a moniker and a password and registered on their site, and haven’t looked back since. Over time the little radio station has matured from the anarchic free-for-all of the beginning to a fully-fledged community -  with its admitted ups and downs, sometimes arbitrary rulemaking, and absolutely pointless inside jokes, but most of all with a genuine sense of friendship and camaraderie with fellow users. The under-the-radar nature of the system necessitated by the operating model only enhanced the sense of sharing in something special. That service ends on August 14th, and that’s why I’m writing this eulogy.

I can credit the station with, even at the risk of cliché, vastly expanding my musical horizons. Not only have other users knowledgeably written up notes about bands, added music that other users would listen to and run DJ sets with commentary between songs I’d never heard before, the structure of the station has meant that longer-term users would have to come to grips with genres they never thought they’d like.

Looking down the playlist these days has me in waves of nostalgia, both for songs I’ve heard on the station but because the other users are by and large my age and share similar life experiences, leading them to add music that I recognise from my youth or childhood, provoking emotions which I suspect they feel too. Why else would 80s cartoon themes have superbly high user ratings, or video game title music be some of the mainstay material on the station? But it’s not just the music that set this station apart during years which saw the rise of the likes of Spotify. A unique part, owing to the irreverence of the forums it was spawned from, was the ability to vote and comment on what was playing. It took some getting used to seeing 30 people pan a song you liked and had added to the playlist but it became part of the charm. Besides, you could do it to them when they played something horrible. It meant listening to music wasn’t a solitary experience, but very much a shared one.

We’ve weaved a collective social web from individual experiences felt separately. The station chatroom is full of people discussing the end, from the songs they remember their experiences by to what they would like the last song played to be. It really feels like a gathering of the like-minded, witnessing the coming to an end of something we’ve created. Sure, the actual underlying code is by a handful of people, but everything else is communal. As I’m writing this a few days from the end, users long since gone are resurfacing for a last hello and reminisce. It’s strange, knowing that the end of something that has been a big part of your life is coming to an end. For me, the little station, physically a computer in a Swedish university student’s flat, was much more than the physical embodiment. It was a true community, and I’m not afraid of admitting my part in it. I’ve met people for gigs through talking with them online, and have this feeling that I could find some couch space in a variety of American states should the need arise. We’ve even sent Christmas presents to each other (with the humorous tagline of ‘where the postage is worth more than the content’).

The active userbase and listener count has been steadily dwindling in the past year or so. As the current administration knew of the ultimate demise of the station, they closed membership registrations, and publicising something operating on the fringes of current legal acceptability was always a thorny issue. But the hardcore users are still around, and like I said people are coming back for a last hurrah. I for one am leaving with a vastly-expanded knowledge of music, both popular and esoteric, and an appreciation of the experimental, strange and different.

Five years on the internet is a very long time. Nothing about the radio station I am writing about was meant to last that long. But somehow it kept going, and would still keep going were it not for this voluntary shutdown.

It’d be much more sad if it truly were the end. However, some intrepid users are taking the concept and running with it, creating a new station to replace the old. The work will begin anew, and things will be different, but the music won’t stop.