the timboucher experience

I heard this summer that its bad luck to whistle in theatres. The person who told me this knew a bit about sailing and said that “back in the day” many sailors worked as stage hands when they weren’t on boats. This makes sense both because of things like rigging, working in crews and a certain lifestyle and work schedule which both demand. Anyway, apparently on sailing vessels of yore, whistle commands were often used to raise and lower sails, etc.

Was just looking at some social media SEO links via Otis Funkmeyer, and got to thinking: wouldn’t whistling be a cool way to communicate commands to your computer? I’m specifically thinking of stuff like infostreaming, two way feedback systems, input-outputs of all the data I receive and all the data I broadcast back out.

My system of navigating the web lately goes something like this: I look things up mainly in Google for subject-specific searches, or keyword strings. Sometimes I’ll use Cuil for a more associative search flavor from another perspective. I will then snip out quotations from sources I find, or even post links to the search terms themselves in my Tumblr account. One infostream. Then I run various Twitter accounts ephemerally passing back and forth through various broadcast identities, sometimes re-broadcasting information trails I picked up or links and things which I know would titillate other people I’m connected to via that service. Still other things get re-broadcast here on TimBoucher.com, usually with much longer commentary and more original writing and free form reference point chainingss and associations. Still other things I am now trying to work into my infostreaming system: leaving occasional voicemail messages at Hollow Earth Radio about web information trend data as weather reports.

Imagine if instead of sifting through all these different interfaces and web services and cross-posting links to high heaven, I could just whistle or produce a tone or maybe make a physical gesture to sort and organize all the elements of data which are streaming back and forth from my perceptual center. Whistling seems like a natural fit here in my mental exploration of this because it is a direct link to frequency modulation. A “twitter” or “tweet” would be a certain sound, followed by a low whistle which would repackage and modulate the data cluster I’m currently in proximity in some totally other fashion…

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