Welcome back on board! I am very happy that you decided to fly again with us today. Our departing point is SUX (Sioux City Airport), from where Harriet greeted us this morning.
Today, her post Airport codes explained in 300 seconds drives us back to one of her older (August 8th, 2010) "Souvenir Sunday" posts about SUX Souvenirs from Sioux Gateway Airport. The incentive for this flash-back is a presentation about "Airport City Codes" that a blog follower put together for an event and was kind enough to send it to Harriet. Please look at the small screen in front of you and enjoy this quick and useful presentation.
It is interesting, almost magical to me how these blue underlined words or sentences can move you from one place of the online space to another without even realizing it. For me, links are the reason why you never know what is the destination of your online flight. You create your journey on your own as you go (or should I say read?) along. As the Greek poet Cavafy says in his poem Ithaka, what is most important is the journey, not the destination. Harriet's link drove me to to her older post about offbeat souvenirs from Sioux City Airport and who knows where I will go afterward. The mobility that links bring make reading much more exciting. Links give you a freedom that books cannot offer you.
The blog post that Harriet refers us to is one of her "Souvenir Sunday" blog posts, which talk about offbeat, quite cheap souvenirs that someone can find in airports. The "Souvenir Sunday" and the "Museum Monday" posts that Harriet writes every Sunday and Monday respectively, remind me in a way of the character that newspaper columns have. You know, if you follow Harriet's blog, that every Monday you will read a post about a museum and every Sunday a post about souvenirs. These posts create the same security and anticipation that your favorite journalist's newspaper column does. Harriet doesn't just post on a daily basis. She is also consistent about her themes on certain days. Even her tone, substantial but not too formal, reminds me of the way a journalist would write about traveling. After all she also writes columns in newspapers.
As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan has pointed out, new media cause anxiety, and sometimes people take the new media and put it in the place of the old media in order to feel more comfortable. Perhaps, the resemblance that Harriet's post themes have to newspaper columns, is just her way to confront the new media of blogging.
As I am being notified it is almost time for our landing. Once again I hope you enjoyed the flight and I will be more than happy to see you again in our next flight.
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