Subject: The Electric Eclectic: Introductory Essay

Well, it's finally here.  The multimedia future.  We've heard so much about it that we're all numb.  But beyond all the hype, beyond all the artificial excitement whipped up to a fever pitch by the same cultural giants who brought us the Brady Bunch, what, if anything, are we about to gain?
1.  Now people all over this wobblin' globe are scramblin' for a taste
Of high tech multimedia info overload, they're afraid it'll go to waste
Well I work every day with these damn machines
and I still don't know their place
But I know it's a picture or a poem or a song 
that'll really put a smile on my face

Chorus:  I wanna live electrically eclectically, no limits on my mind
Hear every voice respectfully, from folks of every kind
This world has such a lot to see, I wanna taste it all
A melodious cacophany, 'cross the globe and across the hall
It's easy for intellectuals to predict the wonderful things we might lose with the onset of a new technology, but they're generally wrong.  TV, for example, hasn't really meant the death of writing.  Good writing is by no means a lost art today, though it is often misplaced in the loveless flood of artless text that flows daily through our printed and electronic media.  I, for one, am inclined to assume that multimedia computers and networks will no more mean the death of good writing than electronic music has meant the death of folk music.  New media can enrich us and multiply our options without destroying the old.  Let the curmudgeons have their say, I say, but be not intimidated.  The future belongs to those who make it.
2.  It's a customizable multimedia metamagazine
A peculiar periodical, like none you've ever seen
Well I'm not quite sure all the things it is, but I hope you'll help me learn
About literature in a brand new future when there's megabits to burn

Chours:  I wanna live electrically eclectically, shine my cybernetic light
Each FTP repository is a garden of delight
Ten million and more on the Internet, but it only takes a few
To fill the holes within our souls, maybe me and maybe you
I have no doubt that we'll see oceans of multimedia junk.   The bread and butter of multimedia magazines will no doubt be sex, sports, fashion, and commerce.  But amid the noise and clutter, in the interstices between Virtual Valerie and auto-scanning twelve baseball games at once, we can start to build a new literacy.  

Now, we could soberly pretend that we're reinventing literacy because it's necessary if the life of the mind is to survive the technology of the Millenium.  But I believe that Shakespeare wrote his plays, and we still watch them, largely for the sheer enjoyment of all concerned.  Life is a dance, and though intellectuals are often self-consciously clumsy and analytical about it, they're often the ones who master the most complicated and interesting steps.  
3.  So if you yearn within your soul to write or paint or sing
Why await your liberation?  Come join and do your thing!
The world of words will be transformed by what computers bring
You can bare your soul, you can rock & roll, let your datagrams take wing!

Chorus:  Come live electrically eclectically, build a new world here today,
You can chase it or embrace it, but don't let it slip away!
There's joy and hope and ecstasy just waiting for us all
A melodious cacophany, 'cross the globe   and across the hall!

I've started the Electric Eclectic as an experiment in Millenial culture.  The truth is, we don't really have a clue what computer technology means for culture, but it's time to start figuring it out.  As described elsewhere, the Electric Eclectic is an open-ended structure for customizable virtual magazines, on any topics of interest to the readers and writers.  We can pursue our interests into infinitely narrower specialities, or let them branch broadly and search for synergistic interactions.  For my part, though I've made my career in computer software research, I've always loved to write essays and songs, so I'm going to try to figure out how words, music, and technology might merge together in the literature of tomorrow.  I know my first attempts are clumsy, but someone has to start somewhere, so I'm taking my stand here and now, with the Electric Eclectic.  

We're privileged to be alive in the first moments of the new literacy.  I'm not sure exactly what's going to happen, but I can feel in my bones that,
[Sung] Like the stillness in the wind, before the hurricane begins.....
 (1), the multimedia hurricane is about to hit the edifice of human culture head-on.

This essay is my first attempt.  It's crude, I know, and yes, we're going to have to do something about the sound quality.  MIME still lacks a standard hi-fi audio subtype, though folks are working on it, and it doesn't help any that I'm singing directly into the audio device on my Sparcbook, via a cheap but delightfully tiny Sony microphone:
And I'm sure those of you who are reading this with a nicely integrated MIME tool are more likely to see it as "literature" than those of you who are receiving separate phone calls for each audio clip.  But leaving all that aside, the process of composing this essay was fascinating, utterly unlike the essays and songs I've written in the past.  I did actually start out with most of a song, and with the intent of writing an essay to accompany it.  Soon I found myself writing the essay around the song, rather than next to it, and altering the song to suit the essay.  The next thing I knew I was not only singing an occasional Dylan line, but shamelessly stealing his melodies and setting my own words to them:
Now come all you hackers with songs in your heart
And document writers who moonlight in art
We'll build a new medium but not one apart
From the old world that we're rearranging
It's an endless endeavor
and today's when we start
For the times they are a-changing.
(2)

Future generations will likely view our era as one in which new technology allowed us to redefine our most basic notions of literature and culture.  The responsibility of artists and intellectuals, in this pivotal epoch, is to ensure that a rich diversity of pre-digital thought and culture not only survives in archival form, but actually thrives in the new order of things.  We can let it all die, we can preserve it as museum pieces, or we can transform it in the myriad ways afforded by this exciting new medium.

For now, at least, the Electric Eclectic is an all-volunteer project in the great traditions of Internet and folk culture alike.  It will take lots of writers, musicians, artists, editors, hackers, and multitalented people of all kinds to give this bird its wings.  Won't you consider joining me on this great adventure?
----------------
Written and performed by Nathaniel Borenstein except:
	(1) Words & Music by Bob Dylan
	(2) Music by Bob Dylan