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ttention! We are all onboard Spaceship BMX and we all have a hand on the joystick. Please acknowledge this and act as a harmonious crew working toward a greater, ever changing, good. We have the potential to travel to places so much more diverse and fun than of those on our current trajectory – all we need to do is work together.
Back then BMX media shaped BMXers, now the opposite is true – now BMXers shape BMX media. Thanks to some nerds with computers you bunch of reprobates have been handed the reins. In a massive redistribution of power, information now flows in all directions by the zettabyte and your opinion now has an influence on the future like never before.
In any system negative feedback always leads to stability and positive feedback always leads to change. Personally, I would like to see BMX in a constant state of non-linear change, it would make my job much more exciting and reinstate BMX as a nurturing ground for fun and creative freedom; and it is with that attainable, utopian state in mind that these here words are written.
In today’s twenty-inch-wheeled society the march of the Internet has made so much ground that its reach and subsequent influence is all but inescapable. Now, with the World Wide Web’s subscription base near universal, it’s got to the point where we can realistically consider BMX as a network, with every individual rider a component in a system, each sending and receiving information across a global stage.
In today’s world of BMX, progress follows a linear path. Sure, breakthroughs do come along, but more often than not any change is very predictable, and this is an unfortunate shame. It’s now 2012 and the standard of bike riding has never been so high, but also, thanks to computers, the standard of bike riding has never been so heavily regulated either. This overly-ambitious blizzard of words contains some shockingly crude generalisations and is about how, like most things on planet earth, BMX can be boiled down to the flow of information, and about how every rider engaged in BMX can help change the sport for the better. Whether you really believe you have the power to change BMX, have ever thrown a peace sign or have ever worn a tin foil hat, either way it’ll be food for thought to chow down on before you next comment on the way someone rides his bike. I truly believe we can do better than rehashed crankarm grinds, hop over tooth bonks and adding more barspins. Presently, the BMX world we talk of is composed of 70% pseudo street riders (read: young dudes who ride skateparks with pegs and no brakes) with the remaining 30% being a medley of street, park, dirt and old skool guys. The current popularity of pseudo street riding comes down to its unrivalled accessibility and ease of picking up the basics and, with this winning combination, and with these riders sending and receiving the majority of BMX information online, things are set to be this way for a while. Ten years ago the average rider primarily experienced BMX through the act of riding his bike with his friends, he’d take influence from his mates and his direct surroundings and, if he was lucky, from a very narrow and sporadic stream of information in the form of videos and magazines. At that time BMX media was almost entirely influenced by a focused group of pioneering pro riders, most of whom were highly individualistic and had creativity in abundance. The sport was then underdeveloped, there was lots of fresh ground still unbroken, and the environment was ripe for encouraging individualism and free-thinking. Unless you were either hugely talented or some kind of humorous BMX celebrity, you were very much a passive observer of the BMX media. Information was slow and it only really flowed in one direction, influence came down from the top. However, nowadays things are very different indeed...
This is obviously a computer’s eye view of BMX, and usually it would be wrong to reduce the bewildering complexity of such a social structure to a simple system, but so often these days we experience BMX through computers – so intertwined are our online and off-line worlds – it can’t help but be justified and relevant to consider the world of bike riding in such a cybernetic fashion. Cybernetics isn’t about RoboCop or online fishing games, it is about control and communication in the animal and the machine (read: the bike rider and the computer), it’s an approach for exploring regulatory systems, their structures, constraints and possibilities. Back in issue seven, in an interview with Adam22, the owner of BMX’s biggest website, Benson explored the ‘anonymous comment’ and the reasons why the majority of them on BMX message boards were negative. The article concluded that the nature of the comment hinged on that anonymity, that when people are hiding behind a fake name – removed from the fear of reprisal – they are more likely to gob off and say something overtly negative like nigger or peado or fuck-breath-head. In that dialogue Adam also went on to sheepishly admit that the nature of the then primarily negative comments section was not progressive for BMX, and he made out that to remove it would take away the fun (read: reduce his traffic). I want to expand on that article and use this simplified, systemised view of BMX to consider the effects that online comments have on BMX. Forced to adapt to the changing landscape of online media, as of last month TCU changed their comments section to a system linked to Facebook and, just as predicted in Benson’s article, by removing the anonymity and introducing fear of reprisal (read: potential real life punches to the face), the messages have cleaned up, with the large majority now being both positive and constructive. When considered from a cybernetic point of view, this switch in polarity is the single best piece of news for change and progression in BMX since the invention of the stunt peg. As we established above, we can now consider every rider who engages with BMX online as nodes in a machine, acting and reacting to flows of information. The primary way in which information flows around our system is through transmission of content and the subsequent feedback to it (read: posting bike riding and then talking
Think Before You Put Fingers To Keys
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