About tranquileye

Online in one form or another since 1994, tranquileye is the personal Web of John Harris Stevenson, a researcher, tech strategist, and community broadcaster. As with many personal sites, tranquileye tries to do too much: professional self-promotion, academic resource, and various sorts of experimentation. The traquileye blog has been broadcasting on and off since 1999, inspired in large part by Heather Anne Halpert's now defunct lemonyellow.com. As has its author, the Web site has sometimes faced problems of identity and purpose.

About John Harris Stevenson

John Harris Stevenson currently works to steward tech innovation at the International Development Research Centre and develop grass-roots media. At IDRC he manages projects in Internet communications, online collaboration, and knowledge sharing. John has been innovating on the Internet since 1994, for many years as a strategist for IDRC's Web sites and as creative Web producer for many successful Webs, including for the film Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner. A graduate of the University of King's College Foundation Year Programme, he holds a Bachelors in theatre directing from Dalhousie University, an MA from Concordia University in Media Studies, and is currently a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Toronto's wonderful Knowledge Media Design Centre. John has been involved in community media for more than twenty years, working at CKDU-FM Halifax, CFRU-FM Guelph, and as president of Canada's community radio association. As if he wasn't busy enough, John has been working for more than a year to establish a community radio development fund for Canada.

Why tranquileye?

I've had a Web site forever, but not a domain name forever. In fact, I stuck with my site at The WELL way past the point of reason. And I wasn't too surprised when I went to register a domain of my own that stevenson.com and johnstevenson.net were taken. Unlike such "A-list" digerati as Powazek and Zeldman, I have a vanilla last name, and there are a ton of John Stevensons in the world. And johnstevenson.org didn't seem worth taking, since there was only one of me, and not an org.

So, as I sometimes do, I turned to the favourite band of my youth to find something evocative. "Tranquil Eye" is Jen's favourite Cocteau Twins song, found on their 1996 EP/CD Violaine (red). It has also been covered by Faye Wong. The Twins were likely inspired by a line from one of high school favourites, German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra:

When Zarathustra was thirty years old, he left his home and the lake of his home, and went into the mountains. There he enjoyed his spirit and solitude, and for ten years did not weary of it. But at last his heart changed,--and rising one morning with the rosy dawn, he went before the sun, and spake thus unto it: ... Bless me, then, thou tranquil eye, that canst behold even the greatest happiness without envy!

Or from Norton's translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, in his final and very honest statement to the king, Sir Gawain says:

Why should I tarry?
(And smiled with tranquil eye)
In destinies sad or merry
true man can but try

Ultimately "tranquil eye" is description of the one eye of mine (either one, actually) that could not look forward; it was not lazy or turned out, but simply tranquil, and perhaps exotropian.