I guess what I was trying to say in some of my most recent posts about folk music has to do with information being transmitted from person to person. Something like folklore meets epidemiology meets the oral tradition. Something about when you hear some bit of information: news, a joke, a song, from a certain person (a human source), it’s going to have a different impact and maybe a different meaning than what it would have had if you had “caught that meme” from another person.

I have a tendency to overcomplicate things I’m thinking heavily about though, so let me try to pare this down. Imagine you’re in a “traditional” culture. I guess, by that I would probably mean you learn the songs and stories of your ancestors directly from them, or from other people contained within the mythos of your culture. Not only are you just going to learn the actual songs or stories, but you’re going to learn them within the context of the culture from which and for which they were created. By interacting with the teacher directly, you’re going to pick up things like speech patterns, inflections, physical expressions, lifestyles, value systems, and a whole host of other environmental factors. You’re going to perceive the teacher a living link and role model to that system of knowledge which you’re learning and embedded in.

Compare that to learning something from a book. An author can pour a certain amount of their context as a person into the making of a book or other media artifact, but nowhere near as much as you would likely get from them in person. Now transition that onto the internet where a search engine basically strips out and returns lists of phrases as a results page, and this strange list is now the stand-in for what once was a human teacher from whom you could learn more than just the words on the page.

I guess one thing I’m trying to do with all my various on and offline projects is to sort of go back and present the whole package, to try and embody in all aspects of life the songs and stories which I’ve learned and which I’ve passed onto others. I don’t think the internet takes away from person-to-person transmission or eclipses it somehow. I do think they can work together in unison and have the various technologies of human communication work together and enhance one another. That’s sort of what I’m after.