I had high hopes for the BOOM festival, especially after pouring over the website. I arrived at the festival intrigued by the idea that 30,000 people can live together sustainably for one week. I left the festival feeling a bit deflated. I had a great time, but the sustainable living didn’t quite pan out.
BOOM has a decade-long history as a music festival and has been moving towards recreating itself as a sustainable festival year by year during this time. It has also moved beyond being just a music festival. The focus this year was on harmony, consciousness raising and education, and it probably goes without saying, some consciousness altering. I think, despite all the efforts of the organisers, its history as a psy-trance festival overshadowed its efforts at reincarnating itself as part of the broader sustainability movement.
The website highlights some of their sustainability initiatives like the composting toilets, recycling vegetable oil to run the generators, and collecting waste water. 
The entire week was premised on the idea of creating a sustainable village, a temporary city that could be erected and then removed without leaving a mark on the environment. This is the ideal picture the website paints. What actually happened was that people got too fucked up to use the toilets correctly, left their litter all over the grounds, and let chemical soaps leach into the soil when they bathed at the water taps.
This brings me to the point of this post: the chasm between the ideal and the actual, and the ways online and offline efforts relate to each other to bridge this chasm. My research focuses on blogging about sustainability, and looks at the relationship between text and the world. That’s very vague, I know. But my experience with the BOOM website, and then the festival itself raises questions about the ways text operates differently on websites and blogs.
I’m thinking specifically of a few posts on No Impact Man’s blog. He blogged about a less than ideal encounter he recently had with a New York Senator. No Impact Man was biking and the Senator was driving. You can imagine where this story is heading: car nearly squashes biker, biker informs car of his life flashing before his eyes, driver gives biker the finger and a few curt words as a parting gift.
No Impact Man writes an open letter to the Senator and posts it on his blog, asking the readers to call the Senator’s office to request a meeting with No Impact Man to discuss safer streets for cyclists. The campaign is a success. It only takes the Senator one day to agree to a meeting, and his office has to call No Impact Man to request that the phone calls are curtailed.
Three days later, No Impact Man has discovered that many of the people who rang the Senator’s office were nasty to the secretary. His post is inquisitive and remarks on the effects peoples’ words have on the world.
Today, No Impact Man has posted a question: why did the story about the Senator resonate so strongly with people that it made them take action. According to him, the post went viral: “Twenty thousand visitors read the post that day, many sites reposted it, and over 100 blogs linked to it. Most importantly, 100s of people from across the country and even the world phoned Senator Klein’s office to support my request for a meeting.”
No Impact Man’s text, his initial blog post, told a simple story that got enveloped by a larger tale, one that (at current count) spans across four blog posts and hundreds of comments by readers. His question in the most recent post, Why?, echoes my questions about blogging. What is it about the texts that appear on blogs that resonates with people and keeps them reading, and what do they take with them into their daily lives?
The fundamentals of blogging, which I am just beginning to appreciate, are implicated in this. It is the participatory level, and the ability to be present in the same virtual space at different times which distinguish blogging from other forms of text creation. But it is also the combination of a specific technology, the internet, with this specific form of text creation that makes it so compelling and effective. And yet, this method of creating text and presenting it to the doesn’t have the same effect from a website. BOOM’s focus on sustainability didn’t translate into sustainable festival-goers. No Impact Man’s blog post did translate into a meeting with the NY Senator.
While websites and blogs exist in a virtual space, they refer to events that take place in the actual world. For websites like BOOM the gap between this virtual space and the actual world (I should say that I’m using these terms as a shorthand, not that I believe these are two entirely separate spheres of existence) seems to mirror the gap between the ideal and the actual. The opposite seems true for blogs like No Impact Man. It manages to bring notions of the ideal (safe NYC streets for cyclists) and the actual (near death experiences) together in a space that interpenetrates the virtual and actual worlds.
The gap between the ideal and the actual is a disjuncture that everyone experiences, and anthropology has a long history of discussing it, especially in terms of conducting fieldwork. I guess this post is just the first step in getting my head around what this disjuncture means in terms of my fieldwork.
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