Re-using and Re-imagining Media

A friend in my tutorial group lost her blog. She created one, published posts, then 'lost' it. Somewhere out there is a once-loved blog, floating abandoned through time and space.

Recently I was in Sydney, and I visited the antique/vintage/sometimes rubbishy markets at Rozelle. These markets are in the grounds of an old, beautiful school. Every weekend the schoolyard is filled with hap-hazard, random market sellers flogging hap-hazard, random things. One of the regular stalls specializes in pre-owned books, pre-owned photographs and pre-owned postcards. The picture above is one such post-card that I purchased (for the slightly ridiculous price of three dollars). I'm not entirely sure why I bought it (it has a pretty picture on it; I'm a little obsessed with ballerinas; it's evocative of history and romance and the 'oldendays'), but I was thinking about how random it is that I now own a postcard sent from 'Harley' to a 'Mrs Edwin Jorgenensen', who lived in Quebec in 1920.

It reminds me of how you are told in your first lecture of 'media and society' how media is always being re-imagined and used in unexpected ways, eg the newspaper that is so important today will be wrapping your fish and chips tomorrow (if you go to a dodgy store, which Jason Sternberg must, because he gave us that example!) or lining your bird cage to catch the poo. Someone out there wrote a post-card, for whatever reasons, and now I have it because it's... pretty and old. Lots of people must be collecting old post-cards, because the man I bought it from seemed to do a roaring trade (and the friend who lost her blog it is, who commented on this post and ruined her own anonymity (!) says she also collects used post-cards), so obviously there's a bunch of us re-using and re-imagining these things, re-purposing creative works for our own purposes.

It makes me wonder how today's 'new' media is going to be re-interpreted in the future. We can't exactly wrap the dog's birthday present in an old email like we might with yesterday's Courier Mail, so what will happen?

Maybe, eighty-six years from now, someone will find my friend's blog. And read it. And wonder and ponder.