MIT website giving voice to the masses

If the voices of the blogosphere could speak, they’d sound like Radio Vox Populi, a “social community” based at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The project, originally launched as part of a media art installation by MIT grad student Cameron Marlow, fills an Internet radio station (www.radiovoxpopuli.org) with weblog snippets read by a text-to-voice computer program, 24 hours a day.

Harvesting thousands of updated blog entries daily, the site samples the low-profile hemisphere of the online diary world. That’s because Marlow wants to remedy what he calls the disconnect in the mainstream media between the perception and reality of what blogs are.

“There are about 15 to 20 weblogs that get the most media attention,” he notes, because they belong to those who already have power and influence. “But most average blogs are talking about life. It’s a social pastime to connect to a few other individuals.”

Many of Radio Vox’s broadcasts seem to tap into streams of consciousness across the Web. Segments, separated by bursts of static, are brief, and a few minutes of listening might yield musings on a bad haircut, the songs that recur in an insomniac’s night, the vagaries of romance and the Iraq war. Such juxtapositions create an odd but intriguing skein of cultural poetry.

Links at the website send the curious to the blogs themselves. Recent bloggers include: “Kaitlin,” who posted about shopping with her mom at the Gap in Jacksonville, Fla., on the first day of spring break and “Raven_wing,” who wrote out lyrics to Jimi Hendrix’s “Little Wing” -- attributing them to the Irish band the Corrs.

No one said that the voice of the people had to be accurate.

-- Christine N. Ziemba