A Bloggy Vision: Jugend In The 21st Century
For a vision on what I would like the Bloggy Network to become in future years, I have looked into my own family’s past for inspiration. My great-grandfather, Georg Hirth, ran a magazine in Munich, Germany, in the late 19th Century/early 20th Century. Jugend Magazine was all about “expression” in the most liberal of senses- giving young artists and writers an avenue to publish their work in an environment that was apolitical and nurturing to the “new style“. And thus “Jugenstil” became “Art Nouveau“. Bearing in mind a dark shadow cast by the background of two terrible World Wars and the shame that was bestowed on Germany by Nazism (whose advocates burnt the very artwork Jugend was helping to create), it is remarkable that the spirit of Jugend Magazine still permeates into our culture today. There is no better example of this than seeing how Kley, Walt Disney’s greatest artistic influence, was a Jugend artist who would not be known today- had it not been for Hirth.
It is unfortunate that the legacy of Jugend Magazine has been damaged further by false word association, in that the German term “Jugend“, meaning “Youth” became remembered post WW2 as a Nazi reference, as in “Hitler’s Youth“. My family were forced to leave Germany in the 1930s and so today we have none of Hirth’s substantial art collection in a physical sense, although I’m slowly but surely buying up all the old issues of Jugend that I can find online.
From research, I know that Hirth was already fascinated in the technological developments of his day and was communicating with the likes of Edison, Graham Bell and Emile Berliner re: the invention of the gramaphone. He wrote on subjects like conserving forests and I have in my home a picture of the Hirth household in color- years before Kodachrome film was invented. I genuinely believe that Hirth, a man not scared to embrace the unknown, would seize on blogosphere’s potential for spreading authentic, creative energy around the globe to friend and foe alike.
If we can in any way emulate what Hirth did (& I know we’re far from achieving it..) by creating a sounding board for talented, aspiring writers- we will have done a great deal. To read more about Hirth or the Jugend Magazine, you can visit our website-: TheJugend.com.
“giving young artists and writers an avenue to publish their work in an environment that was apolitical and nurturing”
This is a fantastic vision. It should actually be a mantra for all those who want to see a productive internet. If you stop and think about it, the net does give us wonderful opportunities for innovation and artistic flourishing.
I’d love to see networks (blog or otherwise) emerge on the net whose primary motivation was to nurture quality over pure revenue. Imagine online TV networks emerging that pursued high-quality comedies like Seinfeld rather than easy money reality shows like Big Brother?
When money is the primary driving force for production, we see a movement towards “easy money.” That’s what we’ve got on network television these days (aside from some good shows like House on Fox).
It would be quite encouraging to see the high profile emergence of “incubators of quality” on the net.
Quimby said this on September 7, 2006 5:26 pm
Cheers for this, Quimby. The parallels you draw are absolutely correct, as in art – writing/blogging – TV, and can also be said for many other areas of modern culture. The “Big Brother” deal is sort of Warholesque in its irony and surely the market’s appetite for more intelligent discourse will come around? Or am I spitting into the wind?
Mosey said this on September 8, 2006 5:23 am