Recently I sent out a letter to the regional yahoogroups suggesting that we shut them down. The purpose of the groups was to make it easier for people interested in signposting to get together, share pictures, thoughts, strategies and placement sites and facilitate the process in general. It is, after all, a well-known tenet of the left that getting together and organizing into groups is not only the preferred method of political action, but practically the only one. When it comes to freewayblogging, however, I’ve found that one or two people working together are far more effective in terms of actual signposting than larger groups, and I believe the numbers are bearing this out. Last year, the thousand or so members of the regional groups produced pictures of some 1100 signs, the overwhelming majority of which were generated by about a dozen people. This year, with close to 1700 members, the sign count is somewhat higher, but still borne on the backs of the same dozen or so hardy signposters.
My theory was that without the groups, people interested in signposting would be faced directly with the choice of either doing it or not. If they needed to get together with others for support, they could find them. The presence of the groups, however, allows potential freewaybloggers to simply sign up and wait for something to happen, which seems to be the case as it stands now.
Touchingly, the consensus of the feedback was to keep the groups open as a forum to share ideas, e-mail forwards, etc. regardless of whether or not any signposting takes place, so I’ll abide by that decision.
Ne Me Quitte Pas
by Jaques Brel
I first heard this song one night in a park in Phoenix, drinking wine with my hitchhiking partners and the ex-girlfriend I’d hitched across the desert to see. Albert, the Frenchman I’d been hitching with, played it for us on his guitar, practically sealing a reconciliation that lasted for almost a decade – one of the great loves of my life.
I recommend listening to this song at night, the later the better. Listen to it in the morning and it’ll fuck up your whole day.
FB - 1774
USA - 1327
4 comments:
I do and will always love you.
Coffee is for Closers
How do you gauge whether or not your signs are making a difference?
That's simple. I look at a piece of fencing before I put a sign up and evaluate its semiotic content as such, then I look at it after I've put a sign up and then reevaluate it. Each and every time I've found that the fence has a substantially higher semiotic content after a sign's been placed there than before. Try it, you'll see.
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