Blog - Meanland: Reading in an age of change

Digital, you keep using that word

2012-05-18T00:00:00Z

This is how I feel every time I say the word ‘digital’. Given I’ve been saying it for a long time now, it’s starting to become a problem.

Last year, on the wall in Little Lonsdale Street where I have a post office box, Australia Post added parcel collection boxes. It used to be the only time you could pick up mail was in the morning before 9.30am. Now, instead of getting a parcel pick-up notice, you receive an electronic key attached to a big red rectangular piece of plastic with the box number on it. Yesterday I got a key for such a box. But when I pressed the round key against the lock it groaned electronically and flashed red. I tried twice more before giving up and going to the post office. The Australia Post staff member who helped me offered that the battery may have been flat and that, actually, they were only trialling the boxes anyway.

What this technology was preventing me from collecting (the things that were actually inside the box) were two literary journals I subscribe to: the latest issues of Southerly and Island. If technology was going to thwart anything, I’d expect it to be a literary journal. Fittingly enough the current issue of Island is ‘Digitalism’ dedicated to the ‘digital’. It has a collection of essays tackling self-publishing, literary participation and the Australian book publishing industry. Southerly has, as always, two tables of contents: one for print articles and one for their online articles ‘The long paddock’. The poems, stories, essays, reviews and interviews in ‘The long paddock’ weren’t actually printed in that issue of Southerly – so does that make them digital in nature?

In a review of the Electronic Literature Collection V2, Tim Wright questioned the term ‘electronic’ on a similar basis: ‘Understood broadly it could include any piece of literature making use of an electronic technology – e.g. Microsoft Word – somewhere along the line. What literature today isn’t electronic? might be the more productive question to start with.’

The problem as I see it with ‘digital’, and to some extent ‘electronic’ (as in ebook), is that they are applied so generally that they are rendered almost useless. For all intents and purposes, particularly in this period of greater non-print publishing, many texts are not printed.

At least, the titles and authors of the poems in Southerly’s ‘The long paddock’ appear in the journal’s contents page. If we examine the life-cycle of a poem in a journal such as Cordite, where Wright’s review was published, the poem might never even approach a piece of paper. The poem can be constructed with word-processing software, uploaded or attached to an email and then entered into the online system, such as WordPress. Proofing and publication may also be conducted online.

These ideas about ‘digital’ also appeared in a post by Emily Stewart on Cordite’s Guncotton blog regarding the digital publishing of poetry.

When we take a sideways step and look at digital poetry outside of its book ‘container’, we see not only that it is flourishing, but that it has been growing and evolving for long enough to have formed established genealogies of networks and readerships. Cordite’s been going strong online for over ten years.

Is publishing online all that is needed to make something digital? Or if not just that, does adding hyperlinks make an online piece digital?

Print books have had some degree of unidirectional linking, through footnotes and bibliographies, for quite some time. But these linkings occasionally fail when translated into an ebook. For instance, Jay David Bolter’s Writing space: Computers, Hypertext and the remediation of print contains internal text linking, as indicated by markers: ‘the marker (= > p. 23) following a sentence indicates that the reader can find a related discussion on page 23’. Yet, the ebook version I own doesn’t take advantage of the medium to make those actual links.

It follows that perhaps we need more than hyperlinks to define something as digital. So what about comments? Can a text be described as digital if comments are enabled?

In actual fact, we can work with computers and the online space in many different ways. We can use them to publish poetry, essays, and short stories that would otherwise appear in print, and as a method of distribution – a practice that started with DIY publishing. We can also use them to communicate, publicise and market what we publish. Rather than merely replicating what we do in the print space online, we need to find out what makes the online, computational and networked space unique. How truly ‘electronic’ or ‘digital’ can a text be if we only employed the computer to optimise production and delivery? Roberto Simanowski argues, in his essay ‘What Is and Toward What End Do We Read Digital Literature?’, that by its very definition ‘digital literature must be more than just literature otherwise it is only literature in digital media’.

So what should be called digital literature? Digital literature as defined by Simanowski applies to most of the works in the Electronic Literature Collection V1 and V2, which are all worth reading. These works hinge on the computational aspects of their media to produce meaning and to express a literary experience.

Unfortunately, markets and companies have a lot of control over the direction a word takes, like labelling the non-print versions of books digital. Alternative adjectives include ‘enhanced’. In ‘Book sales have fallen off a cliff: What next for the Australian publishing industry’, in the Digitalism issue of Island, Tim Coronel notes ‘ebooks don’t have to just replicate the structure and forms of their print counterparts: “enhanced” ebooks can incorporate multimedia elements; collaborate and multimedia elements are possible, with multiple authors and/or reader participation in steering the direction/s of the story’.

Is it helpful to call both ‘enhanced’ ebooks and reformatted print books ebooks? Ebook doesn’t indicate anything about the content or form, nor much about their delivery or technical compatibilities (Amazon or EPUB, DRM or non-DRM for instance).

The term ‘digital born’ is now becoming an alternative to digital. It suggests both a work created on a computer, and for display and interaction on a computer – and precludes printing. But this means it excludes programmable works that are generated with computers but are easily printed, such as the work of Gnoetry daily.

I don’t know how the usage of ‘digital’ will evolve, but I think what we need is more specificity. The question is what would that specificity be? Perhaps I’ll adopt the terminology of practitioner and theorist John Cayley, who explains that he writes in networked and programmable media [http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/electropoetics/literal]. And from now on I’ll be trying to avoid the word digital.

A Dark Alien Invasion Sherlock Holmes Thriller (Parts 1 & 2)

2012-05-11T00:00:00Z

Part One

Have you ever read a story where you wished you could actually be inside it? See the landscape for yourself, see how the light falls, how the air smells, how the noise overwhelms you, and see exactly how tall that building was that Spiderman just scaled. It’s not that we don’t trust the author and their powers of description, it’s just we want to be there not just read about it, and ultimately we want to tell our own stories of what it was like.

I’ve been obsessing over the idea for a while. Just how could you do it? Then I heard Simon Groth from if:book Australia talk about an app that was under development. The story came in locked segments and, if you wanted to unlock the next bit of the story, you had to be in the place where it happens. Say for example the next bit of the story happened in a train station. You don’t have to be at the exact station in the story (e.g. Grand Central Train Station in NYC) to unlock the next bit, you just have to be in a train station somewhere. As long as there’s a Thomas the Tank Engine near you, you can merrily read away. It was reasoned that being in the right atmosphere made it feel more real.

While that is one of the most awesome ideas to come out of this digital era, I did not have a million dollars to spend developing an app. In fact, if I had a million dollars I would assuredly have quit my job and be writing in a villa in Italy right about now. So my next question was, how could a normal person do this? Then I realised I wouldn’t just want to move from place to place following the story of another character. I wanted to call the shots. I wanted the options. I wanted to choose my own adventure!

After six months of pondering, Adelaide: Choose Your Own Adventure was born. The project involved the world’s first (yes, I Googled it) Choose Your Own Adventure (CYOA) event. Rather than reading the CYOA in printed book form, the project placed QR codes around Adelaide city that you could scan with your smart phone. The code links you to the next part of the adventure where you can choose from several options to continue the story. Each new part of the story took place in the location of the QR code, showcasing Adelaide city landmarks in a whole new way. The adventure started from a single point in Rundle Mall during Adelaide Writers’ Week then branched off into three separate stories by three authors: A comic alien invasion of Victoria Square (Emily Craven), a Sherlock Holmes-style mystery in the East End (Henry Nicholls), and a dark thriller where the city facades came to life around you (Ben Mylius). The first QR code poster of the adventure is below (To scan it download a QR app for free from your Apple or Android app stores):

What truly fascinates me about the variety of projects in this new age is exactly how they came about. What ideas bubbled up to make it all come together? Because the more you know about other people’s creative process, the more ammunition you have to throw of your own shackles of impossibility and create something really interesting. Here was my thought process for a CYOA:

PROCESS 1
Ignite curiosity.
How cool would it be if I was actually in the story? No, not like a picture book. Actually there!

PROCESS 2
Attend an e-book seminar, do your own research, attend a three day internet marketing seminar that has nothing to do with publishing or books… at all, start a blog about ebooks/author marketing/connecting writers-readers.

After if:book’s wonderful ebook publishing seminars with Mark Coker from Smashwords, I set about learning all I could about everything digital. My father was setting up an online training business for hairdressers at the time and he dragged me along to an internet marketing seminar. It was one of the most fascinating seminars of my life. Focusing mainly on making money online, the tools that were being used by the big players were all common sense techniques that could be applied to selling anything, including books. As a way to sort it out in my head I started a blog, running it over 31 days with a new concept from the seminars being explored each day. I also signed up for the mailing lists of several experts and companies.

PROCESS 3
Read the emails you signed up for.
It was the email on how to use QR codes that set me off. A QR code is a 2D barcode, generally square in shape that can be read by barcode apps on smart phones. You may have seen them on various promotional posters, on the side of Pepsi cans or on ads in the subway. When someone scans the barcode with their phone it takes them to a website. They are mainly used by marketers to promote a company. But they have so much more potential. For this project, the website contains the stories for each step of the Adventure. They are a fantastic little invention and easy to use on so many creative levels. But, in my mind, the best thing with a QR code is the story can be a long as you like because it doesn’t have to be printed. If you are really daring you can merge it with YouTube videos and music, which you would never have been able to print on a mere poster.

PROCESS 4
Mix up your reading.
I remember choose your own adventures from when I was a kid. I’m pretty sure I still have a Star Wars one tucked away in a closet somewhere. It was a little too serious for my taste and I always died within the hour. How much fun can you have when you are dead? Last year I thought I’d switch from novels to short story reading for a while. One of my favourite authors, Garth Nix, had a collection called Across the Wall, and low and behold there was a choose your own adventure called Down to the Scum Quarter. It is hilarious, and if you die, you die with tears of laughter. As fate would have it, I was tackling QR codes at the same time. And the rest, as they would say, is a dark alien invasion Sherlock Holmes thriller.

Part Two

Writing a choose your own adventure, not as easy you my might think. After the success of Adelaide:Choose Your Own Adventure, Emily is super keen to write the next adventure, so if you want your city to become its own story, get in touch.

Too Much Free Press?

2012-04-30T00:00:00Z

Speculating on the changes that the Digital Age will wreak on our culture seems to be an international pastime these days. Jonathan Franzen, celebrated novelist and American Writer du jour, keeps popping up in the news, loudly proclaiming the various deleterious effects that Twitter/Facebook/eBooks will have on Democracy/The Future/Our Children. (I wrote about some of his remarks earlier for Meanjin)

I find this kind of prognosticating extremely frustrating, grounded, as it usually is, in misunderstanding of the nature of new technologies on the part of white men too old to adapt to them. Franzen just doesn’t seem to get Facebook, or Twitter, and that’s okay. Aaron Sorkin doesn’t get Facebook either, and he wrote a movie about it.

Annoying as I find this gainsaying, I am unable to stop myself from indulging in it as well. I am incapable of convincing myself of why I think Franzen is wrong, without also thinking about the various ways in which he and thinkers like him are maybe a little bit right. Lately I’ve been chewing on a particular idea of how our culture might be affected by the Digital Age. I’ve been thinking about how not just the nature of new publishing technologies, but the sheer number of new platforms, like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Tumblr, and all the various blogging websites, could impact on how the political discourse of our society is conducted.

We take it for granted that Western culture is grounded in the free spread of information. It’s not for nothing that the invention of movable type with the Gutenberg Press, and the consequent explosion in literacy levels, is credited with being a foundation stone in Western democracy. Our society is surely premised on the public being conscious and aware of the issues that affect their state, and is thus premised on the ability of the publishing industry, and publishing technology, to distribute that information. Hence the great rhetorical emphasis placed by politicians, pundits, and activists on freedom of the press.

But I wonder now whether the traditional operations of Western democracy are founded on there being an equilibrium in the levels of information being distributed. Or, in other words, is there such a thing as too much free press? Is it possible to have a citizenship overstimulated by information, saturated to excess by a panoply of voices, opinions, and publications of varying levels of respectability and value?

The newspaper industry is probably the most obvious face of this issue today. David Simon, creator of HBO’s The Wire and an ex-reporter for the Baltimore Sun, has suggested that the death of newspapers also means the death of a certain kind of reporting, a loss in the quality of publicly distributed information.. High-end reporting, as he puts it, is a profession requiring extensive time commitment and expertise on the part of well-trained practitioners; a kind of reporting, that is, which will be lost in the age of bloggers, citizen journalists, and news stories broken via Twitter or YouTube. As he says, “The day I run into a Huffington Post reporter at a Baltimore zoning board hearing is the day I will no longer be worried about journalism.”

Huffington Post, the new titan of American news websites, is indeed the lightning rod for everything that is different, or wrong, about contemporary journalism. It is notable for two things. The first is that much of its content is generated not by experienced, well-paid journalists, but by unpaid citizen bloggers or celebrities. So instead of getting Bob Woodward on the issues of the day, you get Alec Baldwin. The second is that its profitability as a business is not tied to the quality of its journalism, but to its mastery of Search Engine Optimisation. By publishing huge amounts of pieces, often with trivial content but containing key words or issues, the Post ensures that it remains high on the list of Google’s search results, and therefore that its page views and corresponding ad revenue remain high as well.

In this respect the Huffington Post is emblematic of the worst fears about how the internet will change media and communication. Quantity of information over quality, and the value of information itself replaced by the value of content; trivial, empty, and useful only for its own self-perpetuation.

(Nevertheless, the Huffington Post does get kind of a bad rap. While newspapers are busy laying people off, the Post has been hiring hundreds of journalists on staff, and, in fact, has just won a Pulitzer Prize.)

The obvious political consequences of the changing distribution of information have already been seen worldwide, in the Arab Spring, Iran’s Green Revolution, and in the Occupy Wall Street and Tea Party movements in the West. All of these protests are attributable, in some sense, to the way that new media platforms like Facebook and Twitter have afforded new possibilities for the transmission of information between disparate groups, and the building of new social networks and connections. All these movements illustrate, in one way or another, that the proliferation of new publishing platforms can bring about a change in the character of political discourse within a society, and, in some cases, a change in the political makeup of the society itself.

It is the combination of these two factors, the change in the standard and character of information being distributed, and the change in the nature of the networks in which it is distributed, that interests me. Together, I wonder if they herald a fundamental shift in the way our society exists in discourse with itself.

Western commentators were often eager to proclaim that the Arab Spring was proof positive that freedom of press breeds an increase in democracy, but we may be overlooking the effect that these new freedoms are also inflicting on our own democracies. Take, for instance, the way that the Tea Party was able to thoroughly dominate the political discourse during the 2006 midterm elections in the US, and so contribute to the way that country’s political dialogue is veering inexorably to the right.

Western democracy, rightly or not, seems to exist on a binary system, with two major parties for left and right, and various subsidiary parties on either side. This is, to a certain extent, reinforced and perpetuated by the distribution of information through media publications, with newspapers and their parent corporations often characterised by their association with a particular side; think of Rupert Murdoch’s supposedly right-wing Newscorp, or The Huffington Post’s own left-wing slant.

On the one hand, more publishing platforms could mean more variety in political opinion, more voice for previously marginalised positions. But when this is combined with a new paradigm of information that prizes content and quantity over insight, I see a possibility for political deadlock: a society confusing itself, and in the process degrading the semblance of consensus upon which democratic action is founded, and letting specialised interests imbalance the discussion.

There may be nothing new about any of this. After all, publishing platforms have always been available to the determined; even if it was merely vanity press, or a locally distributed ‘zine or pamphlet. And its probably a fallacy to declare that the state of contemporary discourse is any more vacuous than it has ever been; hindsight tends to blind the eye. (It would certainly be a mistake to assume that newspaper reporting two-hundred years ago was in any way superior in expertise and intent than it is today.) But the internet could be the tool that metastasizes the situation, and exposes the fault-lines that have lain beneath our culture all along.

I was a Teenage Zombie

2012-04-24T00:00:00Z

As a child of the ’80s my interests coincided with the highpoints of the decade’s nerdiness: Dungeons & Dragons, Choose Your Own Adventures and text adventure games. In text adventure games, most famously Zork, the player would interact with the game by typing out commands like ‘north’ (or just ‘n’) to go north, ‘examine’ objects, ‘look’ to view their environment, ‘give’ and sometimes ‘kill’. Occasionally this led to disagreements with the computer where rather than comply it would return with ‘I don’t know that word’ or ‘Too many noun clauses’. Many of my nights were spent typing my way through mazes or puzzles. At school in year 7, there was a room full of green monochrome-screened computers on which we’d wander around searching archaeological ruins (the exact title of the game has disappeared, along with the teachers’ names).

The games were marketed as both text adventure games and interactive fiction, though Nick Montfort argues in his excellent history and analysis of interactive fiction Twisty Little Passages that text adventure games are a subset of interactive fiction (IF), because not all IF are adventure games.

The first text adventure game was Adventure, initially written in the mid ’70s by Will Crowther and then modified by Don Woods on the Standford SAIL computer. At the high point of the commercial success of IF, Douglas Adams was adapting his The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and future US poet laureate Robert Pinsky wrote the ‘electronic novel’ Mindwheel for Synapse Software. When I started high school the golden age of commercial adventure games was coming to a close. The biggest company that produced the games, Infocom, was bought by Activision in the middle of that decade and finally shut down in 1989.

But so influential have the classic text adventure games been, particularly Zork, they are a staple of geek culture:

Though the end of the commercial phase meant the death of financially viable interactive fiction, the form is still alive and well today thanks to the work of dedicated fans, some of whom programmed out of ’80s computer magazines, books like Delton T. Horn’s Golden Flutes and Great Escapes: How to Write Your Own Adventure Games, or other construction programs.

Reading IF

In the conclusion of Twisty Little Passages, Montfort wrote something that has stuck with me: ‘Interactive fiction is hardly out to displace or replace the book in some simplistic way, and arguments assuming that it is will soon be seen as obsolete. What is more troubling is that many people who are capable computer users and who also enjoy literature have never imagined that something like interactive fiction could be part of their literary and computing life.’

There have been fantastic games made in its independent period, but IF still has the problem that if you’re new to it you can be put off by the way the work interacts. A good primer (essential if you haven’t played/read IF before) is A Beginner’s Guide to Interactive Fiction.

It is also now much easier to find and play/read IF than it used to be. Parchment, a web interactive fiction interpreter, allows some formats of IF to be played/read online. The Boston IF interest group, Peoples’ Republic of Interactive Fiction, hosts some classic independent IF (including a reconstruction of the original Adventure). There is the interesting conversational game Emily Short’s Galatea and Andrew Plotkin’s disconcerting Shade. Although IF is no longer commercially viable, Plotkin’s reputation helped him to fund an IF project on Kickstarter well above his target goal.

If you’re intrigued, you can play recent games that have won the annual interactive fiction competition, IFComp. But you’ll need an interpreter; luckily, ifwiki has a list of interpreters by platform .

Writing IF

This year Codeacademy started Code Year, which encourages people to learn to code for themselves. As a programmer, I’d recommend everyone learn to program. Knowing how to do so gives you a vocabulary that lets you think differently about what you can achieve with computers. In some ways, we live in a strange period of history where our language differs from the language we directly use to communicate with technology. However, no matter how verbose and complex programming codes might be, they are still basically more akin to the human than the machine.

In Inform 7 the syntax used to write IF is a natural language syntax. Graham Nelson created it to test with that very quality in mind, testing the hypothesis: ‘that the natural language in which to write interactive fiction is natural language’. As a programming language this is an excellent writing form for both creation and expression. An example from Aaron Reed’s Creating Interactive Fiction with Inform 7 has a ‘complete and valid Inform 7 program [that] plays on the old text adventure cliches’:

The Hole Below is a dark room.
The description is “Cavernous gloom.”
    The lamp is in Seoul.
    Before going in Hole,
instead say “You will meet a grue soon.”

If you’d like to learn online rather than from a book, the Inform 7 website has a list of tutorials . And if you’ve a couple of hours to kill, Jason Scott, a technology historian and documentary filmmaker, has a fascinating documentary on IF, Get Lamp.

The diversity represented in broader fiction have their counterparts in IF. It’s likely that anything you’ve written for print could be expressed in IF, so perhaps it’s time to start playing/reading/interacting/writing/programming.

When the Web is the World

2012-04-13T00:00:00Z

When people ask me to speak or write about the future of books, invariably what they want to know about are things like ebooks, digital publishing, book apps, transmedia. These are not the future of books. They are the present of books. To consider the future of books, we must imagine the future of media. We must imagine the future of the web. And for that we must lift the veil and step into the post-digital.

HYPERCONNECTEDNESS

In Greg Bear’s seminal science fiction story Blood Music, biotechnologist Virgil has developed ‘noocytes’, simple biological computers based on his lymphocytes. His employer is nervous about the dangers of his research and so orders Virgil to destroy his work. Virgil injects himself with the noocytes in order to smuggle them out of the laboratory and continue his work elsewhere. But inside Virgil, these biological machines quickly multiply and evolve. They form a self-aware network, a nanoscale civilization that transforms Virgil and others as well. The noocytes are useful. They can fix myopia and high blood pressure. They can create useful mutations that enhance human abilities. But they are also utterly uncaring of the sovereignty of each human being they have colonized, and end up assimiliating the entire biosphere of North America into a single networked organism 7000km wide.

Unlike the noocytes, the internet hasn’t yet managed to fix my short-sightedness. But it can be thought of as a kind of single networked entity, and one that is quickly colonizing our physical lives.

Last year, Guardian reporter Oliver Burkeman observed this at SXSWi 2011 and said ‘the internet is over’. I prefer the term post-digital, an existence in which the boundary between our physical lives and our digital lives is becoming transparent and permeable and will, quite soon, I think disappear altogether. In a post-digital world we will experience ubiquitous computing and hyper-connectedness.

We can already see this emerging around us as the internet moves to mobile devices, tablets and smartphones that we carry around in our pockets. But even in a society with a high penetration of smartphones, as Australia is, the internet is still inside the device. It’s separated from our physical existence. We think of “going online” and “using the internet” as almost like another country that we visit. But in another decade or two, this may look more like wearable technology and bio-implants, where the internet is more of us.

A POST-DIGITAL WORLD HAS NO EDGES

Our concept of books and book retail is defined by its boundaries. A book is a bounded thing, whether as a print artefact, an app or an electronic file. It is discrete, transferrable, finite.

However, just like the colonization of Virgil by the noocytes, when the web is the world there are no edges. Anything can be a node on the network: a human, an advertising billboard, a train, a tree. When the web is the world, a link between any two nodes on the network can be some type of transaction: a commercial sale, a social exchange, a transfer of knowledge. When the web is the world, there are no edges placing boundaries around time, physical space or memory.

Within this context, a bookstore can be a physical bricks-and-mortar location on a busy high street that has existed for fifty years, but a bookstore can also be a dinner party, or a conversation between two co-workers or an aeroplane mid-flight. Physical location places no limitation at all on our ability to find, access, pay for, talk about, share content. This confounds not just booksellers, but also publishers who have built their business models on trading publishing rights for various geographic regions and formats.

In the post-digital world, even the individual book’s boundedness blurs and dissipates at the edges. When books and reading are networked, then words can connect with each other. In his keynote address at O’Reilly Tools of Change in 2009, Peter Brantley of the Internet Archive said:

“…an environment of participatory engagement is emerging across books. Digital words can be described by other words, joined across books, linked with data.”

PUBLISHING AS A SERVICE

If the idea of ‘boundedness’ loses relevance, what happens to the traditional structures that hold up publishing?

For one thing, we may discover that opening our books to the network creates infinitely more possibilities for the discovery, sale and sharing of them. Just as the noocytes set about improving, scaffolding, linking and strengthening cells inside Virgil, readers and fans are capable of doing the same for our networked literature.

Canadian author William Gibson saw this in action when he published his novel Spook Country:

“…every text today has a kind of spectral quasi-hypertext surrounding it. …When I published Pattern Recognition within a few months there was someone who started a Web site. People were compiling Googled references to every term and every place in the book. It has photographs of just about every locale in the book — a massive site that was compiled by volunteer effort. But it took a couple of years to come together. With Spook Country the same thing was up on the Web before the book was published.”

New startups like Small Demons seek ways to commercialise this kind of service.

In the unbounded networked reality of books, the most valuable service a publisher can provide is not to make whole books available to the world, but to create new and interesting relationships between things on the network: between words and other words, between books and other books, and between readers.

But none of this has to happen exclusively in the strange foreign country of the internet, an other-place where we “go online”. When the web is the world, these relationships exist seamlessly and indistinguishably between digital and physical things too. A non-fiction text that is discussed by a class of secondary school students in a shared physical space (the classroom) and shared time (third period – Modern History) may be annotated by other readers, now and in the future, here and elsewhere, who contribute to the very same discussion. In such an environment, the value from the publisher is not in providing the original text, but in creating services, tools and platforms that make it easier for this distributed, networked, asynchronous conversation to flow.

Other structures of traditional publishing also melt and shift in a networked world. If books are not containered ‘things’ – be they physical or digital – our existing understanding of concepts like stock, retail, returns, distribution, rights, licences and even authorship are all challenged.

The smart publishers today talk about the format-neutral workflow. They have realized that creating a thing, to be converted into another thing, is an inefficient way to serve up content to a very large number of people who wish to exercise their personal choice over how, when and in what format they experience books.

But as the web becomes the world, the publishing of the future needs not only to be container-neutral, but containerless. Not a manufacturer of the telephone or even the wireless signal, but the 1930s radio operator constantly plugging and replugging wires to put people in contact with one another. The post-digital concierge who creates meaningful experiences by connecting us with ourselves.

Animal, Vegetable, Mineral, Book

2012-04-05T00:00:00Z

A friend and I have been working on a project. After a couple of years hard labour we’re at the polishing and proposal stage, ready to start hawking it about. The problem is, we’re having trouble working out what to say. It’s proving difficult to create the mystical sentence that is one part haiku, three parts tweet and two parts advertising.

If you’re involved in publishing, you’re probably rolling your eyes right now at another precious author too lazy or inept to knuckle down and work on the business of selling their product. ‘If you can’t tell me about it in two sentences or less, how can I sell it to the punters?’ is one publisher’s mantra. Apparently, Know Your Product isn’t just a Saints’ song – it’s one of the basic rules of advertising.

While I can appreciate the logic of needing a good sound or twitter-bite, they can be hard to produce when what you’ve created doesn’t fall easily into any of the usual categories. Like the intersex person forced to choose between the male or female tick boxes on a form, our hands keep wandering back and forth, hoping for a different box to appear. Poetry, fiction, non-fiction, memoir… yes, yes, no, kind of, sort of, all of the above … and don’t let’s get started on genre …

It’s not that my friend and I were trying to do anything particularly groundbreaking – in fact, if we’ve bent the rules (whatever the rules are), it’s by just a small amount. We’re not mixing media, not creating an ‘unbook’ nor trying to redefine publishing in some new way. It would be easier if we were. If we could label what we’re doing as ‘transmedia’ or even ‘transgressive’ it would be easier to talk about. Conversations about new media, new publishing models and the future of the book are happening all over the place, including, of course, here at Meanland. People are experimenting, finding new ways to use new technologies and old, developing new theories of creativity and rediscovering others, be it handmade books or computer generated texts.

As Cristy Dena said in her post Do you go both ways?, ‘Transmedia means you work in any damn medium you want.’ But sometimes it feels as if big transgressions are easier to explain and accept than minor ones.

There are lots of things my friend and I aren’t doing. We’re not, like Brigita Ozolins creating installations out of books. We’re not using software such as Narrative Science to generate text. We’re not building online audiences in the way that Lisa Dempster describes (at least not for this project). All we’ve done is make a few minor tweaks to the established form, and yet rather than being able to present the work as it is and let it speak for itself, we’re under pressure to explain our process.

The work in question began as a sort of challenge, or writing game. It was only when it got bigger and we liked what we’d done, that we decided it was something we wanted to share. Perhaps if we’d been thinking about the work having an audience from the start it would have developed in a different (but not necessarily better) direction.

In the end it doesn’t really matter. We aren’t the first or last of Cinderella’s ugly sisters who’ve been encouraged to chop off the big toe of our work to make it fit someone else’s image of dainty beauty. We had fun doing it, we enjoyed the journey, so if being unable to classify the work limits the number or people who read it, then so be it.

A lot of creative activity comes out of play, but if the human brain is wired for play, it’s also wired for order. One of the ways we demonstrate this is our need to categorise things, to make them fit the relevant boxes. Humans continually invoke the game of ‘Animal, Vegetable, Mineral,’ forever searching for a definitive taxonomy.

Deviations from the acknowledged norm only have to be very slight to raise eyebrows. I have a couple of friends with mild intellectual disabilities and whenever we’re out in public spaces it always amazes me how small the markers of difference are that make strangers stare at us. An awkward gait, too little or two much eye contact, unusual clothing choices, a louder, or slower than average voice… it takes so little.

So I’m making a plea now for a celebration of the small creative deviations as well as the large, and for the encouragement of creative works that stem as much from play as theory. They’re my toys, my games, my words, my images. I’ll share them with you provided you understand I reserve the right to scatter them about and never have to put them back into a box.

Developing Online Audiences

2012-03-30T00:00:00Z

Lisa Dempster, Director of the Emerging Writers' Festival, joins Meanland online (and at great expense) from the Abu Dhabi International Book Fair with some great advice on how an arts organisation might best become an online digital hub for the community it serves.

Very briefly, below, are the five key points Lisa covers in her discussion. But if you’d rather hear and see Lisa talk than read a list go right ahead and hit that big ol' play button on her video.

Lisa’s Five Key Points:

Bring your audience together
Encourage and facilitate discussion
Get to know your audience and introduce them to each other
Create meaningful events where your audience can participate as experts
Digital engagement doesn’t just happen online

Developing online audiences, Lisa Dempster from Emerging Writers' Festival on Vimeo.

New processes, old conversations.

2012-03-23T00:00:00Z

New processes, old conversations. ‘Agile’ was the buzzword at the O’Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing (TOC) conference in New York this February. (While there, I also ate a fantastic catfish po’boy at the Delta Grill in Hell’s Kitchen, but that’s for another blog entirely!)

So what is ‘agile’? Borrowed from 1970s software developers and espoused by Kristen McLean, agile methodology transforms publishing processes in several major ways, for example: • Iterative releases (which start small, then repeat and build) of minimum viable publishing products means that publishers can start with manageable modules of content, and build them in connection with readers, rather than relying on a business model that requires investing years on the gamble of a book (especially by debut authors). We are already seeing this with blogs becoming books. • Paying as much attention to forward data (such as where an author’s friends/followers are concentrated) as to follow data (like sales) increases publishers’ trend prediction accuracy. If they are not already, publishers will routinely check their marketing strategies match each author’s centres of popularity. • Flexible, multi-skilled production teams allow publishers to combine expertise from digital, marketing, and editorial departments—as well as working with authors—to effectively plan and craft content for emerging markets. Sound decisions around what platform and device an author’s content works best on (e.g. book as app) will rely on having all the information on the table.

At TOC and also the small event held the day before, Book^2Camp, another dominant conversation was the ongoing discussion (and hand-wringing) about the value and power of publisher brand. Changes in the book supply chain mean that publishers are now driven to develop direct relationships with readers, rather than with their traditional ‘customers’, booksellers. In response to this challenge, there has been much debate about publisher brand and community building, leading to a race to capture readership loyalty online through publisher-led sites such as Authonomy and Book Country.

These conversations—agile methodology and publisher brand—have emerged as separate responses to what are perceived as different challenges for publishing: adaptations in workflow versus ways to support and drive sales. But I believe these two conversations are in fact the same conversation. By embracing effective changes to workflow, publishers will also find meaningful ways of building relationships with readers based on a detailed understanding of the contexts in which potential customers engage with content.

Agile fiction? For works of non-fiction, agile is a no-brainer. Blogs, articles, social media, crowd-sourcing, subscriptions: there are many different modules of non-fiction content that can be developed and released into the public sphere to create engagement, feedback, and income, before and around committing to a book-length project. US educational publisher Kaplan has been an early adopter of agile, and is reporting healthy results in both sales and productivity. Harvard Community Press leverages online conversations for agile content development in their successful cookbook line. The Onion’s Digital Director Baratunde Thurston’s debut book How To Be Black models crowdsourcing, collaboration, and iteration in developing great non-fiction content and audience connection—Baratunde constantly tweaked the direction of his book based on conversations with his editor, his blog and Twitter followers, and his fellow comedians.

The big question seems to be: can fiction content be agile, too? McLean leans towards no, while others such as Todd Sattersten argue it is, or can be.

Readers of fiction usually do not want to read a great book in the rough: they want the polished, finished product. And writers of fiction usually do not want readers peeping over their digital shoulder as they write. Author and digital crusader Max Barry, after a day writing in view of a real-life public at Melbourne Writers Festival, says it felt like ‘the opposite of what you’re supposed to do, which is something about forgetting the rest of the world exists. It’s hard to be creative and self-conscious’.

There is also a concern that community engagement in the development of fiction content will turn every project into a crowd-sourced mishmash reflecting the lowest common denominator. Snakes on a Plane, anyone?

However, two strands of thought provide potential avenues for the agile development and distribution of fiction content.

As has been observed, there are lessons to be learned from that great author and innovator, Charles Dickens. Dickens serialised. There is some evidence that he incorporated reader feedback into the direction of his stories. He identified that the American market was pirating his work, and toured extensively to support local booksellers who gave him an income stream.

Subscription-based short fiction is a great option for the working writer in the current market—to write this blog post, I am stealing time from my frantic novella-writing schedule to enter the Griffith Review: The Novella Project, and I have just had a novelette published in The Review of Australian Fiction.

New tools allow readers to discover, explore, and extend fiction content beyond the bindings. It has become the professional duty of every author to maintain an authentic and inviting presence in social media, but there are now ways of slicing and dicing content, rather than persona, to connect with readers. Pappus from Serendipite Studios allows authors to easily render shareable microblogs based on comments and discussions around buyable versions of their completed works. The Small Demons Storyverse allows fans to find and amplify content based on personal tastes/obsessions.

Access to the user data from such sites would provide powerful trend prediction tools for any fiction publisher planning their list.

Community development The romance market demonstrates how the iteration of fiction underpins success in online publishing models. The groundbreaking Carina Press uncovers and builds profitable niche markets such as male/male romance (by women for women) as readers explore and converge on new content. The Writer’s Coffee Shop has lifted the profile of fan fic through the recent success of Fifty Shades, developed in the context of reader votes and feedback.

Heroes and Heartbreakers online community is fostered through innovative real-time responses to social media conversations, filtered through a well-developed genre lens. But manager Liz Edelstein shocked the Tools of Change audience this year when she stated that Macmillan’s ‘end goal is to get as many quality email addresses as possible’. Apart from the ethical concerns this raises, brand-driven community building that relies on the commodification of identity smacks of ‘push marketing’ in an environment where pull is king.

Even micro-calibrated e-newsletters languish unopened while potential customers are busy sharing their likes on Pinterest Books Worth Reading boards and earning Kobo reader badges. Context data produced from interactions around all stages of reader engagement is a rich and largely untapped source for both trend analysis and pull marketing.

Agile methodologies and community development go hand in hand. Building readership means looking past the creation of yet another brand-led ‘community’. Instead, it is vital the whole publishing team—from creatives to techs to editors to publicists—work collaboratively to source, develop, and sell content, based on a rich and emergent understanding of potential readerships.

As Bookigee’s MacLean is fond of saying, ‘The culture of reading is not in trouble, but our current business model is.’ Agile methodologies for developing and releasing content provide authentic, creative solutions for authors and publishers to secure audience share in an evolving market.

Do You Go Both Ways?

2012-03-16T00:00:00Z

Transmedia doesn’t mean what you think it does. You may have heard of this term “transmedia,” it is one of the buzzwords that has spread through the literature, film, TV, and gaming industries in the last few years. I have. I have lived and breathed it for years, even before it was called transmedia. I’ve given hundreds of talks around the world about what it apparently is and could be. I wrote the first PhD on Transmedia Practice, where I argued it cannot be defined by an end point – projects that involve the continuation of a narrative across more than two media for instance – and instead it represents a change in the way people create.

I therefore concentrated my education efforts on the “how to,” sharing what is needed to write and design transmedia projects. What comes into play with this too is the difficulty in working across different departments within a company, and across companies. Companies that have carved their place in the world by specialising in one artform or industry. You’re a novelist, and there are publishers, or you’re a dancer, who works in a dance company. Each of these industries has their own production processes, jargon, artistic and commercial goals, relationship with their audience, as well as politics.

And so I spoke about this new kind of practitioner, one that creates projects that involve a combination of artistic media: books with websites, TV shows and online games, films and live events. While there have always been stories (and games) that have travelled across media through the process of adaptation, remixing, and any number of the transtextuality types that Gérard Genette identified in the 1980s, what I found is flourishing now is that these combinations are seen as works in themselves. An artform out of multiple artforms. Indeed, as you can see in the picture below, a few years ago there were many terms attempting to capture these multi-artform works.

Source: Dena, C. “The New Writing Universe,” design by the Lycette Bros. Part of Fingleton, T. Dena, C. & Wilson, J. 2008, The writer’s guide to making a digital living: choose your own adventure, Sydney, Australia Council for the Arts [http://www.australiacouncil.gov.au/writersguide]

But importantly, I found it is a different kind of practice, one that theorists Gunther Kress and Theo Van Leeuwen eloquently described in their 2001 book on “multimodality”: “The practitioner in this new domain now has to take a multiplicity of decisions, in relation to a multiplicity of modes and areas of representation which were previously the domain of discrete professions and their practices” (page 47). It isn’t one person writing the novel, and another the film or TV show. Instead, we have writers, designers, producers, and directors working on the entire production(s), treating it as one whole work. Or do we?

More and more I’m finding the biggest friction point preventing these practices achieving anything of worth isn’t technology, technique, process, infrastructure, or even economics. It is whether creatives are genuinely interested in more than one artform. It is a particular attitude, a transmedia mentality, that I rarely see. But I’m not alone. In his foreword to the 2001 edited collection of essays in Multimedia: From Wagner to Virtual Reality, science-fiction writer William Gibson notes that:

Multimedia, in my view, is not an invention but an ongoing discovery of how the mind and the universes it imagines (or vice versa, depending) fit together and interact. Multimedia is where we have always been going. Geeks and artboys, emerging together from the caves of Altamira, have long been about this great work. This book is one start toward a different sort of history, a history cognizant of an impulse that seems to me always to have been with us. (page xiv)

The same arguments have been put forward about artist practices related to transmedia. Theorist and critic Gene Youngblood explains that intermedia “has more to do with attitude than technology” (Youngblood 1970, 43), and artist Dick Higgins argues that “intermediality” was not distinct to the 1960s, but has “always been a possibility wherever the desire to fuse two or more existing media exists” (Higgins 2004 [1965], 18). But while this attitude, this desire, is evident throughout time, I now believe it will always be a fringe practice. Why?

Transmedia doesn’t really mean you create stories and games that are expanded across media. No. Transmedia means you work in any damn medium you want. It means your work is not defined by a medium. It means you can be a painter one day, a novelist another, and a game designer on the next. But this is heresy in creative industries, and difficult to do. A common retort to such notions is the familiar “jack of all trades, master of none”. Artistic worth is bundled up with proficiency, after hours and hours, weeks and years of finger-numbing toil. You can only be good when you keep at the one thing. What if your creativity is playing with all that inspires you, anywhere? Apparently those kinds of people go nowhere.

But the biggest problem isn’t the abilities of those exploring the fine palette that is life, but in the production cultures surrounding them. People need to know where you fit, what you do. You have to “position” yourself, frame yourself according to agreed criteria. I am a novelist who writes science-fiction. Okay, we’ll hire you to do exactly that. But I also…! Talk to the hand. By working outside of conventional economic structures, you of course risk not being a part of economic structures. But this hasn’t stopped artists before, so why is it more so with transmedia? I don’t know. I don’t know why creatives are so monological. I do know that people think living within the lines will give them a gold star. And I do know that exploring your creative practice in any area you damn well please means your body of work becomes you. You become the common factor that binds the works together, you being the ultimate work of art. A work of art that is playful.

Beautiful statistics

2011-12-22T00:00:00Z

With a glut of 4,568 emails, many of which are links emailed from my twitter account for deeper reading, I try to focus on the task at hand. After six months you’d think I’d have lost the fascination. But what I’m learning is too great to ignore. After eight years as a stay-at-home mum, I’m hungering for conversations reminiscent of those had in London when I worked for a woman who played a leading role in shifting attitudes on disability. On Twitter are shares I have not before been privy to in such abundance. The buzz comes from journalists, writers, scientists, visual artists, digital natives and others sharing literature, publishing, innovations, climate change, equality and more. It’s huge. I am gorging.

Again it happens. I come up against unfamiliar jargon or a barrage of complex stats or history I’m yet to understand. I mumble something about sleep deprivation before muttering: ‘if only I could gather this stuff up – even better, have someone do it for me – in a way that helps me understand quickly and remember.’

A few visits later to websites of a couple of global curators, and it seems the thing to pull information together to make understanding a breeze, with superb bursts of colour or line drawings or typography or even emblems of some kind or another, is the Infographic.

Or as it was once called: the information graphic. Not that we’ve stopped using the old term. It’s just that our language now has words short enough to fit, along with a link and hashtag, into a tweet of 140 characters. In June 2011, the word Infographic was added to the Oxford Dictionary, along with ‘unfollow’, ‘overshare’, and ‘ZOMG’. As of the dictionary’s twelfth edition (August 2011), ‘retweet’ donned a tuxedo and finally went to the grammatical ball. Truth is, I prefer the Urban Dictionary as a guide on modern word usage, but I come from a mongrel Tuscan/Sicilian breed and am known to indulge in variants of language to shock the most amiable of grammarians. WTF? Glad to say, it’s in both dictionaries.

The way I see it, a good Infographic curates stats into what is beautiful and easily understood. Here are useful charts, data journalist and information designer David McCandless writes in the foreward of his charcoal A5 size hardback, ‘to help us navigate’. His book is a testament to a new beauty that abounds. Colours are reflective of ‘Interesting’ hues flagged on pages 34–35, with elderberry, shiitake, tarragon and kelp, as well as snorkel blue, roccoco red, moss and hollyhock.

The chart has come a long way from early cave drawings and ancient maps to the late eighteenth-century atlas, early twentieth-century tube map and now Infographics with added animation and interaction. David McCandless cites statistician and sculptor Edward Tufte as a major influence on the latest crop of beautiful information.

Shared globally in late 2010, the best animated Infographic I’ve seen to date is Hans Rosling’s 200 countries in 200 years. A medical doctor, academic and statistician, Rosling is, writes Kim Zettler for Wired, ‘the only academic who can make dry statistics dance like musical theatre stars while revealing startling facts about the world and debunking preconceptions’. When Rosling began to lecture on global health many years ago, he wanted an effective way to impart data to already bright students about his area of expertise. Interactive visual representations, he finds, show how ‘non-boring’ statistics can be.

If you are yet to see 120,000 stats plotted in a breathtaking interconnect of 200 countries’ health and wealth over the last two hundred years, prepare for an absorbing 4.42 minutes. Rosling provides us with the big picture, for example, of how regions of the world are faring on wealth, after which he gives us greater contextualised data aggregation. He breaks the regions down into individual countries and then introduces health and its correlation to wealth. The clip is part of a BBC4 documentary series called The Joy of Stats.

I’m wondering with Rosling why more holders of well-researched data, including universities, the United Nations and National Statistics Bureaus, are yet to harness this medium in communicating complex knowledge to students and the general public. This year, there have been two that I know of: the ABS’ Spotlight to generate a personal profile that compares you to the rest of the population and NPR’s Visualising How a Population Grows to 7 Billion.

Eirik Solheim’s vimeo One year in 2 minutes is worth watching for its striking beauty. The visualisation uses time lapse to illuminate changes in Norwegian seasons, including snow, bare branches, differing shading and light, as well as the fullness of trees before leaves go from green to brown.

Each of the examples above makes use of ‘pictorial superiority effect’. Neurologically, if information is presented to you orally, you’ll retain about 10% after 72 hours. Add a picture and ‘recall soars to 65%’, says Alex Lundry in Chart Wars.

Infographics can also play tricks. Information can be manipulated to serve a company’s purpose or create misconceptions. Some are little more than words placed in boxes. Others are woefully designed. Worst of all is the Infographic that highlights too little information for the sake of easy comprehension to the detriment of important fine print.

But as this simple Infographic shows,

much can be imparted with a good visual and effective stats.

Australian content agency, Curated Content, predicts that 2012 will be the year for visual content. With the rise of microblogging and photo sharing through the beautiful website platform Tumblr and the past year’s increase of a greater respect for typography, space and colour on the web overall, this will certainly occur on many levels, including further innovation and proliferation of the Infographic.

Until 2012, this consensus cloud on ‘Books Everyone Should Read’ makes for holiday reading ideas. Enjoy.

Editors, trolls and lovers

2011-12-22T00:00:00Z

Gwen Harwood’s sentiment about editors – eloquently expressed in an acrostic, has become Australian folklore. While some authors would agree with Gwen, for others it’s not as simple. Nor is it always obvious in this blogging, tweeting, forever-online world, who our ultimate editor might be.

In many areas the editor-author partnership remains unchanged. Editors and publishers work with authors the way they always have: commissioning, editing and publishing work. At the other end of the spectrum is self-publishing including web pages, blogs, twitter etc, produced without editorial intervention. Between these is a hybrid model – in which some areas of a journal, for example, will be edited, but blog posts or opinion pieces remain unedited. Then there’s the editorial process where no apparent human intervention occurs; instead machine-made decisions are based on complex algorithms referencing past choices and the preferences of the majority.

Editing and being edited is like a love affair. Sometimes it’s great, sometimes not. When it works you can find yourself shouting, ‘Yes! Yes! Yes! Or, like Jack Nicholson’s character responding to Helen Hunt in As Good As It Gets, an editor can make an author ‘want to be a better man’ (or woman). As with love affairs, there’s the ongoing search for the ‘one who really gets you’, or for the transformative relationship which will ‘take you away from all this’.

Perhaps this is the reason so many authors become romantically involved with their publishers and editors. Or maybe it’s just that authors don’t always get out much.

A good – or indeed bad – editor can fundamentally change a writer’s work. Some partnerships are legendary: Ezra Pound and TS Eliot, Gordon Lish’s slicing and dicing of Raymond Carver, Max Perkins and F Scott Fitzgerald.

When the author-editor connection breaks down, it can have all the characteristics of a failed relationship, including name-calling, sulks, rage, backstabbing and legendary feuds. Sylvia Plath fans will never forgive Ted Hughes’s alleged suppression of Plath’s work, and similar claims have been made about Percy Bysshe Shelley’s intervention in Mary Shelley’s work.

Economic realities mean that publishers are less likely to have the time to invest in the long-term nurturing/interventionist editorial relationships. Cory Doctorow outlined some of the recent changes in publishing in a Guardian article, and, as Gary Kamiya pointed out some years ago, many traditional editorial roles are being outsourced or forgotten.

But where does this leave us in the unmediated part of the online world? What happens when the audience becomes the gatekeeper? A lot of the online world is as much mediated by editors as the traditional print world. Editors commission work, read unsolicited material, choose what they want, edit it and make the final call as to how it is presented.

On the other hand, the ease with which anyone can self-publish by creating web pages, blogs, etc, means that there’s lots of material for which the audience is the only editor. In some ways, a relationship that used to be private and personal now becomes public. We’ve replaced an intimate editorial relationship with one or two people with an open relationship with many. Like an ongoing version of some reality television show – it’s the crowd that gets to decide. And as we all know, the crowd is not always wise or kind.

Exposing yourself to the unfettered reaction of the mob, instead of the (hopefully) measured, thoughtful response of an editor, is like diving into the mosh pit. Sometimes the crowd lifts you high, carrying you along on their shoulders, at other times you’re trampled beneath the crush. Most often there’s a kind of ‘meh’ of non-response, and, as Zora Sanders reminded us in a recent Meanjin post – there are trolls out there whose main agenda is to hurt and maim.

Readers today have the expectation of participation, of a dialogue, a democratic response to the author. So whether they are consumed by joy or a kind of write-rage, they expect to comment. How this ‘editorialising’ impacts the writer is as individual as any relationship. Some people are empowered by thoughtful, engaging comments, others are dragged under by violent destructive responses.

Commenting online seems to have replaced some other forms of public editing. While Apostrophe man and woman still stalk the mean streets (sometimes in the guise of one of my sisters), other forms of street editorial (also known as graffiti) seem to have fallen away. While graffiti as art is flourishing, there seems to be less direct comment. Perhaps the fury to respond which used to drive people to pick up a paint can is now directed to tweeting, emailing and online commenting. I keep expecting some of the 99% to reply to the Big Clubs’ pro gambling ‘who voted’ billboards with BUGA UP style ripostes, but I haven’t seen it yet. It looks like no one can be buggered. They may be actively tweeting and blogging instead, but they’re talking to a different audience.

The centrality of editors in setting and reflecting cultural agendas over the years can’t be underestimated. The impact on Australian culture of literary journals and publishing houses with strong, determined editors, from Louisa Lawson and the Dawn, through the Bulletin’s JF Archibald and Alfred Stephens, down through the long stayers like Meanjin, Overland and Southerly, is immense.

But how will this play out when it’s not a human editor who is choosing which works to include and discard, but a machine?

Search engines and social media already edit what you see in response to the choices of the crowd and your previous preferences. (See Eli Pariser’sTED talk for an overview.) Many web pages, particularly news sites, are constructed by pulling in a mash-up of ‘popular’ items into a page, and instead of human editors determining what they’ll publish, editing is replaced by filtering and decisions are made by a computer gatekeeper.

The Google corporation is working hard on creating a ‘synthesis of knowledge’ in which instead of getting a series of webpages in response to a query, we’ll get a Google-crafted ‘synthesis’ of all the responses (probably edited to reflect our known preferences and prejudices).

The logical extension of this is a future version of my favourite literary journal where none of the bits my online editor thinks I don’t want to see appear – all the hard bits, the things that challenge me, the people I don’t agree with, anything new and exciting, are removed – kind of like listening to your favourite radio shock-jock. Or it might be that a ‘knowledge editor’ synthesises the disparate bits of the journal into one small easy-to-digest document.

But why stop there? Why not, like the 60 second classics, exponentially reduce the journal to its essence like a sauce simmering on the stove, until all that remains is one well-crafted tweet or haiku?

Anyone want to give it a go?

For and against a digital avant-garde

2011-12-22T00:00:00Z

One of the more prevalent perceptions propagated by the dominant ideologies of the last few decades has been the belief in the death of the avant-garde. Ever since the ex-Leftist French philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard decided to announce the arrival of a ‘postmodern condition’ by denouncing radical Marxist politics as well as artistic iconoclasm as outdated ‘grand narratives’, we have been more or less expected to view any attempt at challenging the status quo by either revolutionaries or radical artists as ineffectual and passé. But can the internet, the postmodernist tool par excellence, be used subversively as a means for creating confronting, cutting edge art? Can there be such a thing as a digital avant-garde?

I’d like to begin this blog by citing the great Welsh thinker Raymond Williams’s definition of the original avant-garde – that is, the ‘fully oppositional type’ of modernist artists who were active, mostly in Europe, in late nineteenth and early-mid twentieth centuries – from his essay, ‘The Politics of the Avant-Garde’:

The avant-garde, aggressive from the beginning, saw itself as the breakthrough to the future: its members were not bearers of a progress already repetitiously defined, but the militants of a creativity which would revive and liberate humanity.

The extent to which Dadaists, Futurists, Surrealists and other avant-gardists of the period to which Williams is referring succeeded in ‘reviving and liberating humanity’ is, of course, rather debatable; and as Williams points out later in the same essay, many of the techniques and experiments of these artists were coopted by mainstream capitalist cultures in areas of mass entertainment, popular culture, advertising, and so on. But the confrontational militancy of many early avant-garde artists’ works – whether the ‘slap in the face of public taste’ delivered by Vladimir Mayakovsky’s Communist Futurist poetry, or the shock of Mina Loy’s sexually explicit feminist, anti-romantic Love Songs, or the graphic violence and bizarre perversions of Un Chien Andalou – remains, after all these decades, potent and undeniable.

The purpose of this blog is to briefly address the possibility or otherwise of the emergence of an avant-garde in the digital milieu. I’d like to focus on the recent US poetic collective Flarf, which has been dubbed ‘an experimental poetry movement’ by Shell Fischer in a 2009 article. According to Fischer, the Flarf poets ‘prowl the Internet using random word searches, e-mail the bizarre results to one another, then distil the newly found phrases into poems that are often as disturbing as they are hilarious’. The resulting work has been described by one favourable commentator as ‘subversive’ and by another as a poetry that ‘often takes the form of social critique’, but also criticised by poet Dan Hoy in Jacket magazine for its creators’ ‘wilful dependency on corporate tools to do the searching, selecting, and contextualizing of poetic material, with no intra-textual suspicion or extra-textual analysis of the tool itself or what this means for the ‘product’ that’s being made’.

I’d like to suggest reading a Flarf poem as a way to evaluate viewing the artistic experiment as either a properly ‘subversive’ and ‘critical’ avant-garde movement or a shallow consumerist fad which, in Hoy’s words, sees ‘Google as a utilitarian tool without also acknowledging its [corporate, capitalist] ideological architecture’. A good selection of poems by a number of writers who identify themselves as Flarf poets can be found in issue 30 of Jacket magazine, and I’d like to take a closer look at Michael Magee’s ‘Fascist Fairytales 36’ as it appears in this selection.

The poem, written as an obviously bogus theatre script divided into three ‘Acts’, is an unabashedly fragmented and incoherent dialogue between the characters of Margaret Thatcher and the Sphinx. With absurd and provocative statements such as ‘Perfect competition is like virginity: it triggered a further doubling of crude oil’, ‘The nun agrees but asks for anal sex so she might keep her virginity’ and ‘Fearing a nuclear holocaust Margaret Thatcher integrates them into an enjoyable romance’, this poem indeed brings to mind the avant-gardist literature of early twentieth century.

But does it also advocate a radical, emancipatory politics, or does it instead view power and hegemony with a routine (postmodernist) irony and satire à la an episode of South Park? Magee’s poem is clearly a political piece as it references, among other things, the 1980s UK Miners’ Strike and the 1996 Comprehensive Ban Treaty. But I find that its political engagement goes beyond simply citing political issues by actually challenging dominant capitalist ideology. In my reading of this poem, its heady, chaotic conflation of sexual, political, economical, scientific and cultural concepts not only playfully reflects the absurdities of contemporary life but, more importantly, it names and exposes our deleterious willingness to believe in these absurdities.

Consider, for example, these lines from the second section of the poem:

A great percentage of prostitutes boast entire lingerie wardrobes in pink, act of rebellion. The pituitary glands of dead Meat and Livestock may be kept secret.

THATCHER: Bottoms Up, Threshers and Victoria!

Here the presentation of sexual exploitation and consumerism – ‘prostitutes [who] boast entire lingerie wardrobes’ – as radical action is not a clever tragicomical send-up but, as shown in the following line, an indirect naming of the obscene ‘secret’ of capitalist economy. ‘The pituitary glands’ – that is, the crucial part of the brain that generates hormones – of corporations such as Meat and Livestock do not generate supposedly healthy competition or a rational pursuit of happiness, but instead produce irrational fantasies which manipulate us into seeing exploitation and consumption as enticing ‘acts of rebellion’. The grotesquely candid Thatcher of Magee’s poem – to be contrasted with the odiously sanitised portrayal of ‘the Iron Lady’ in a forthcoming Hollywood movie – is rattled by the truth of this revelation, and shouts out the names of the independent British alcohol retailers that entered into administration partly due to her ruinous, free market policies.

The success of an avant-garde work of art cannot be assessed in terms of the work’s ability to singlehandedly foment social and political change – no cultural product, no matter how widely available or publicised, is capable of doing that – but such a work’s value should be seen in its willingness to participate in an experimental artistic movement with the aim of contributing to a break with mainstream culture and ruling class ideology. As such, I believe the Flarf poem that I have very briefly discussed in this blog can be seen as a properly radical work.

I will stop short of describing the entire Flarf oeuvre in this way because many poems associated with the movement are in my view, if I may be forgiven a pun, fluff, i.e. rather superficial linguistic playfulness with little to no discernable political or antagonistic notion. But a similar point could be made about any artistic movement. Based on digitally produced poems such as Michael Magee’s ‘Fascist Fairytales 36’, I believe the internet has the potential to enable and host a genuinely avant-gardist formation.

Copyright or wrong?

2011-12-22T00:00:00Z

According to a recent article by Good magazine about 10 percent of American university students plagiarise from Wikipedia. Others, about 8 percent, copy from Yahoo Answers and Slideshare. These figures are based on a recent study released by Turnitin, a software program that academics use to check for plagiarism – you enter a piece of text into the program and it searches the net for a pre-existing version of that text. If the report is to be believed then, plagiarism is on the rise: 55 percent of US College presidents think so anyway.

I don’t have any figures for Australia, but conversations I have had with colleagues on this issue lead me to think it might be on the rise here too, although perhaps not to the extent that it is over there.¹

Why is this happening? Well of course, and as usual, it’s the fault of the bloody internet, ebooks, Google, Wikipedia and all the other digital information technologies. They make it very easy for students to cut and paste material. They don’t even have to retype it anymore. All they have to do is cobble their information together in a word.doc, click select all and make sure all their stolen clippings are in the same font. Some of them, though, forget to do even that much, bless ‘em.

Prior to the introduction of these digital nasties students had to go to the library, browse catalogues and bibliographies, actually borrow books, read them without the help of a FIND search field and then retype or write the sections they thought relevant to their work. Having to actually locate, touch and work with the physical object that is printed text helped reinforce the idea that each book was the work of some individual(s), belonged to that someone in a moral and economic sense and had to be acknowledged as such.

Now all they have to do is sit at the feet of the great screen god who, with just a few simple prompts, delivers all the information they’ll ever need, and more, direct to their desktops. There are no more individual books; all the information now comes from the one source – the often authorless, largely anonymous internet. Is it any wonder many of them they don’t understand plagiarism, copyright or moral rights?

Secondly, although we find ourselves at the beginning of the digital age, an age that is rapidly remaking study life at the student level, universities as organisations are still living in the print age. They build buildings to accommodate students who don’t want to come to campus, they schedule classes at such odd times that those students who wish to attend can’t, because they have to work, to pay for their tuition (thanks for that one Hawkey!). In other words they’re living in the past. To be fair, it’s hard for such monolithic institutions to do otherwise, but the disconnect between student behaviour and faculty expectations, in terms of this issue, is there. University notions of copyright, plagiarism and attribution, belonging as they do to the age of print, struggle to function in the digital realm or in the minds of (if Turnitin is to be believed) an increasing number of students.

The whole notion that someone can own a piece of knowledge and should be recognised and rewarded as owner every time anyone else mentions that work is a construction of the print age, the economic system that engendered the Romantic idea of the author as sole creator of a work. It is a notion designed to protect property and income, as much as to protect artistic integrity.

Print’s very form made plagiarising difficult, analogue music and film formats made the unauthorised borrowing of those properties problematic too. Digitised versions of any content, however, are easy to take; they have no physical form, and it doesn’t actually feel like stealing. All you’re doing is pressing a few keys. It’s not like anybody’s getting hurt …

Prior to print, in the world of the manuscript and oral storytelling, students would sit at the feet of the master who would dictate his thoughts and ideas to them. They were expected to do what we call plagiarising. Knowledge then was considered to be created communally, rather than by one single person.² Students would then use these dictated works as the basis for discussion, debate and the creation of yet more knowledge. That all changed once print introduced the buck to the world of knowledge.

This issue of copyright and plagiarism isn’t yet but will become a bigger debate than the print vs. eBook sideshow, because it is about pure economics: if nobody cares about who has written a book then the cult of the author is under threat. If the author has no currency then the economic unit that the author produces – the book – is similarly threatened. The news media industry has been struggling for years to cope with the fact that news as a commodity has very little value anymore, thanks to its being so widely distributed for free on the internet. Will we see book-based knowledge, ideas of authorship and intellectual property enjoy the same nightmare? What can we do to prevent this?

I wish I could answer that question!

At this early stage, perhaps all we can do is raise the issue that the current model, based as it is on how to control such works in print or in analogue format, is not working well enough anymore. Organically, and unconsciously perhaps, our students are creating new protocols and new understandings of these issues. Do we stand before them, Canute-like, ordering them to stop, or do we too look for a new approach to these issues?

I’m not suggesting we return to pre-print understandings of intellectual property and copyright, but perhaps we could learn something from an era in which what was said was more important that who said it.

1. Am I wrong? Is it worse or not so bad here? I’d be keen to know.
2. See this article from Teleread and the link to the thesis it’s based on for a much deeper discussion of the woes of copyright in the digital age.

The obscure object of e-reading desire

2011-12-22T00:00:00Z

I’m delighted that less sycophantic views of the career of the late Apple CEO Steve Jobs are being voiced – here on Overland, and also in the Guardian – and it’s comforting to know that I’m not the only one bewildered by the businessman’s glorification as a ‘visionary’ and a ‘creative genius’. While it may be uncouth to speak ill of the dead, I would like to begin this blog by citing journalist Tanya Gold’s view of Jobs’ consumer gadgets as objects which, far from revolutionising the world, have simply made it easier for people to ‘routinely ignore each other in public’. The now common pathological indulgence in the virtual stimuli provided ad infinitum via iPhones has made us less connected to our physical environments and has, according to Gold, made it possible for us to ‘communicate [our] indifference better’. If so, could it be said that e-book readers such as iPads, despite their appearance of making books and writing more accessible, have in fact made us more indifferent toward books and have turned us into worse readers?

In his superbly prophetic 1997 book The Plague of Fantasies, the Slovenian Marxist philosopher Slavoj Žižek observes that the much hyped ‘interactivity’ of cyberspace is accompanied by ‘its shadowy and much more uncanny supplement/double, the notion of “interpassivity”’. According to Žižek, our belief that ‘with the new electronic media, the passive consumption of a text or a work of art is over’ is supported by the crucial fantasy of the electronic medium itself transcending the position of the object and becoming a subject that actively ‘takes from me, deprives of me, my own passive reaction of satisfaction ... so it is the object itself that “enjoys the show”’. In other words, for us to become interactive participants in the electronic universe, an electronic object (a computer screen, the internet, etc) is subjectified – or, if one must, humanised – so that it can absorb and sublate the passivity of our traditional role as mere spectators. The electronic equipment, in short, takes on a life of its own.

I believe a similar interpassivity could result in the e-reader becoming a subject capable of depriving people of the pleasure of reading. Here, to paraphrase Jacques Lacan’s notion à la Žižek, the electronic gadget may become the subject supposed to read. The thing’s owner, compelled by the fantasy of limitless electronic interactivity offered by the object, is likely to transfer her desire for passive satisfaction (that is, the simple pleasure of reading) onto the inanimate thing that is now no longer just an electronic device but an infinitely erudite subject which, in the words of one e-reader enthusiast, ‘allows you to carry a library in your pocket’; the e-reader becomes, in the true sense of the word, the reader. The iPad, the Kindle and the like, by virtue of being entrusted with so many very cheap (and in many cases, free) ebooks and other digital publications, come to take up, contain and hence enjoy these electronic texts, and therefore the gadget’s owner himself is relieved/deprived of the chore/pleasure of dealing with – i.e. reading – the texts. And it follows that this freedom/deprivation would make the owner of an e-reader read fewer books.

It is very difficult to find reliable statistical proof to confirm or negate a correlation between a rise in e-reader consumption and a decline in reading among e-reader users. Surveys conducted into the effects of e-readers on reading habits are mostly rapturous about the supposedly beneficial effects of these devices as these surveys are almost all conducted by the very companies that manufacture e-readers. When such data is collected by putatively impartial researchers, the analyses and interpretations of results are often always pro-business, i.e. favourable to the agendas of electronics manufacturing giants and publishing companies determined to maximise profits by eliminating the cost of printing and distribution.

According to a United Business Media report, for example, the results of a recent poll in the United States supposedly prove that ‘those who have e-Readers, in fact, read more’. This statement is one among many extremely problematic hypotheses in this report. The e-reader owners surveyed had most probably been avid book readers prior to purchasing their e-readers – hence their purchasing an e-reader in the first place – and they would have read more than non e-reader users with or without the electronic equipment. The answers to the only question asked of the participants in this poll concerning ‘change in reading habits’ does not at all confirm e-readers as reading enhancement devices: 62 per cent of the e-reader users surveyed believed that the gadget had not compelled them to read more than before; and of these, 19 per cent answered that they read less than before or not as readily as before.

None of this will dissuade Amazon, Sony and, of course, Apple from inundating bookshops, electronics stores and, increasingly, supermarkets and even pharmacies with their e-readers. These corporations have already gambled more money than a person like me could possibly care to imagine on a future in which what is referred to – rather tragicomically – as p-books (yes, ‘paper books’) become a thing of the past. That the very devices necessary for reading non-‘p-books’ may result in people reading less and our societies becoming less literate, less sophisticated and less civilised is not a concern for celebrity CEOs of these companies. This is one among many reasons why I’m not mourning Steve Jobs’ death.

The internet: friend or foe to the small magazine?

2011-10-06T00:00:00Z

The spectre of the internet has been haunting Australian literary journals for well over a decade. But a few recent events seem to have transformed this spectral haunting into a brutal hunt. According to The Mercury newspaper, Tasmanian Premier Lara Giddings has decided to terminate funding for one of the country’s main print literary journals Island due to her belief in a ‘“trend” towards online rather than hard-copy publications’. Earlier this year saw the last print issue of another crucial Australian literary magazine HEAT, as, in the words of the magazine’s Deputy Editor Fiona Wright, the print medium or the ‘book form’ is ‘increasingly unviable’. Last but not least, there has been serious speculation about the iconic literary journal Meanjin ‘being forced’ according to Peter Craven, ‘to go online in a way that will effectively kill it’.

Before concluding that the internet is about to have the same pernicious impact on literary journalism as it has had on newspapers and mainstream journalism, however, we must consider the cases in which a small print magazine has negotiated with and even benefited from the digital milieu. Overland, the journal hosting the very blog on which this post is appearing, is an example of how a print magazine can use the internet to attract new readers, new contributors and even – to the best of my understanding – new subscribers. Another example is Southerly’s innovative development of an online supplement (called the Long Paddock) which features new online-only content in concert with each new print issue’s specific theme. Such hybrid approaches have rendered the internet a medium through which literary journals may not only survive but also thrive and – in the disastrous event of losing funding – have the prospect of enjoying a (relatively cheap) virtual afterlife.

The above presentation of two opposing theses has not been an attempt at even-handedness, an attempt which is, more often than not, an excuse for indecisiveness. With digital technology – as with anything else in life – one must make a decision and stand by that decision, whatever the cost. The task in this case, however, is not to simply choose between one journal’s espousal and another’s dismissal of the might of the internet. Such a choice is properly unnecessary, since a level of synthesis between these supposed opposites is already the norm. Almost all literary journals, even those with no online content (such as Westerly), have websites and online tables of contents, can be purchased online, etc. Furthermore, any purely technological consideration of the concrete modes and methods of publication in this context ignores the fact that people don’t read a small literary magazine to satisfy tangible needs, in the same way that they may have need for weather reports, obituary columns, business news and so on. An assessment of the impact of the internet on small magazines should begin – and perhaps also end – with the demands and drives that create the thing called literary journal. We must, in other words, consider why literary journals exist in the first place, before ruminating on whether their existence is aided or harmed by the internet.

Such a consideration would, of course, be beyond the scope of this blog. Suffice it to say that one could see the literary journal as an elitist object possessing what Walter Benjamin has termed ‘aura’. Peter Craven’s abovementioned piece about the fate of Meanjin, for example, describes the journal as something that one may look upon with ‘a sense of wonder’, as a properly fetishistic signifier of ‘the literary and intellectual history of this nation’. As Benjamin would further have it, such an ossified function of the work of art can be disrupted through mass participation enabled by mass production and electronic means; an approach which may be seen in the conception and development of Cordite Poetry Review, a literary journal which began life as a broadsheet in 1997 before becoming an exclusively online magazine in 2001.

Before any further discussion of Cordite, I must declare an interest by stating that I am currently one of the journal’s editors. But I have had no part in the decisions made apropos of the magazine’s medium. In the words of its founding editors Peter Minter and Adrian Wiggins, the initial choice of publishing the journal in ‘a tabloid format’ was driven by the desire to increase readership and maximise the size and quantity of contributions by reducing production cost. Three years later, Wiggins decided to move the journal online, writing in the editorial for issue 6:

The decision to abandon print was not made lightly. The advantages of the internet are clear: it’s cheaper, and as more and more Australians go online, the arguments for its accessibility become stronger. Print is very costly, and even with the sales and subscriptions from our dedicated readers, we have never made enough money to cover our production costs. Moving to the net will allow us to spend more money on our contributors, and to have a better chance of surviving in the long run. Visit our site and see for yourself.

Ten years on and having recently released its 35th issue, Cordite has succeeded in not only surviving as such but also attracting ongoing financial support from the Australia Council for the Arts, publishing innumerable poems, poetry reviews, interviews, feature articles and, more recently, spoken word audio clips. This success is not necessarily a testimony to the superiority of the digital over print technology – or solely an indication of the work of Cordite’s indefatigable managing editor David Prater – but the result of the rapport between the specific attributes of an online medium and the core principles of the magazine’s founders, i.e. increasing the numbers of contributions and readers, reducing costs, etc. In other words, had this journal been created with a more exclusivist agenda, it may very well have ‘disappear[ed] into the evanescence of the internet’, as Craven has gloomily observed of what may happen to Meanjin should it too become an online publication.

There may be, finally, no agreement regarding the nature of the effects of the internet on small magazines because there is no consensus regarding the raison d’être of a small magazine. Most would agree that literary journals are crucial to a vibrant literary culture, including the editors of the staunchly anti-online, anarchist print journal Unusual Work who believe ‘small magazines are the lifeblood of a great literature’; but there exists proper disagreement as to what makes a literature great in a given society.

Cross-posted from Overland.

Travels with my iPad

2011-10-06T00:00:00Z

I can’t imagine leaving home without a book.

I’ve been travelling overseas recently. A good part of travelling and preparing to travel has always been about the book. Of course there are the novels and travel guides read before leaving, but more important are the books to take on the trip.

For me, it’s always a series of books; the travel guide, the book I leave home with, the book bought at the airport or train station, the book bought in the place I go to, and the serendipitous book exchanged with a fellow traveller. On a long trip I’m generally lugging somewhere between two and five books – a sizable slice of my baggage allowance.

You’d think I’d be a perfect candidate for downloading all the books into one slimline eReader or tablet. But I couldn’t do it. The title of this blogpost is a lie. In my recent travel, I remained determinedly old school.

That’s not to say I won’t succumb and take my tablet sometime soon, but before I join the other travellers clustered like maypole dancers around the power outlets at every airport, I wanted to think about what changes when eReaders replace books as a travel accessory.

One of the prime virtues of books when travelling is their disposability. If they get lost or stolen or left behind it isn’t a problem. You can swap them with strangers or give them to people you meet. You can rip the pages out as you go along to lighten your load, write in the margins, and in extremity use them for toilet paper.

Books never need charging and given enough time will eventually compost back into the earth.

eReaders have their own virtues – principally the ability to carry an entire library of books, the benefit of a light in dark spaces, and dynamic updates to travel books. But the disposable nature of books brings some social and economic impacts which will change when they’re replaced by the less disposable eReader.

When I travel, I know I’ll be leaving books along the way, so I choose carefully. I’ll confess to a touch of missionary zeal. Last time, I left home with Cate Kennedy and Margo Lanagan in my backpack. I try to choose Australians, and authors I love. I like to think of them making their way around the world, swapped from hand to hand and shared with people who might never find them otherwise.

Travellers have been leaving books behind like a trail of sticky breadcrumbs for decades. There’s a second-hand book shop in every tourist town – usually run by some seedy-looking expat who will never make it home again. Every backpacker hostel has its library of grubby paperbacks – a little international exchange of ideas. True, they’re often dominated by a preponderance of sword and sorcery epics, pseudo-spirituality and whatever the best seller of the moment is – Dan Brown or Stieg Larsson in seven different languages. They represent for good or ill, the wisdom or stupidity of the travelling crowd, but amongst the familiar there’s always the chance of finding a book you would never have otherwise seen.

A book in your hand or in a strangers hand, gives you an excuse to discuss literature with the locals or other travellers, to learn from their favourites and the books they trade something about other places, other people.

In some countries, the discarded book represents significant social and economic value to the local people. They’re something to sell on the streets or in the market to the next traveller. They’re studied to help learn enough of a foreign language to get a job in hospitality or as a tour guide, or to sell something else. So what will happen as the traveller’s books move from cheap, disposable paper to the eReader?

Will books with Che Guevara on the cover remain forever on book stands in Cuban marketplaces bleaching ever whiter in the sunlight? Will street hawkers throughout the world still thrust paperbacks under tourist’s noses? What will Cambodian children sell in place of pirated travel guides?

The impact of the traveller’s book has never been unproblematic. Travel, by its nature has economic and social impacts, both good and bad, and the lost or left behind novel is as unquestionably a part of it as the travel guides that lead tourists in their hordes to the same ‘undiscovered’ beauty spots.

When travelling in countries where five Australian dollars can feed a family for a week, a twenty dollar book feels like a more benign and less in-your-face flaunting of wealth than a device costing hundreds of dollars. Perhaps it’s this Western guilt, as much as the need for a comforting familiarity which makes me feel happier travelling with my swag of books than an iPad.

It wasn’t until I came home that I read Slavoj Zizek’s recent piece in the Sydney Morning Herald linking the current situation in the Congo with the mining of minerals used in, amongst other things, high tech devices such as laptops and mobile phones.

It was enough to make me bury my head in a pile of books.

Cross-posted from Overland.

The times, they aren’t a changin’

2011-09-02T00:00:00Z

Just go with me.

Click on this link to one of the recent articles in The Age about the patent fight between the Big Fruit and Samsung over the new Galaxy Tab 10.1. Take special note of the picture of the tablet at the head of the article. Now click on this link to the Dynabook. And this one. And finally this one. Taking note once again of the tablet-like device images that pop up.

Amazed? Interested? Gobsmacked? All of the above?

I certainly was when I stumbled across images of the Dynabook and references to Alan Kay, its creator, several months ago while researching the history of the future of the book. Questions exploded in my head. How could an idea as potent as this have lain dormant for so long? How come we haven’t heard about the Dynabook-ness of the iPad, the Kindle and the myriad of other tablets out there? Where’s the iPad vs. Dynabook patent battle?

From there I plodded along the Alan Kay trail, keen to know more about the man behind the device behind the tablet. I found this article about the link between Dynabook and the iPad posted on the eve of the iPad’s release back in 2010 in which I was surprised to learn that the Dynabook was still news even at that stage of the tablet game and even to computer tragics like the good folk at Tom’s Hardware.

Perhaps we haven’t heard anything because Kay doesn’t feel he’s been ripped off by The Big Fruit. He has a working relationship with Steve Jobs and it seems that they both acknowledge the links between the two devices, as outlined in the Tom’s Hardware piece. So could the silence surrounding the Dynabook iPad nexus perhaps have something to do with the fact that The Big Fruit has more money that the US government? Who knows?

Kay seems to be more of an ideas guy than a businessman, an entrepreneur or a marketer. Someone more interested in making stuff than making money out of stuff. And, despite all the obvious similarities between the two devices, I think that point of philosophical difference is where the two devices diverge and perhaps explains why we haven’t heard more from Kay or about the Dynabook.

Dynabook was conceived in the 1960s, like today another so-called era of big ideas and wholesale change (Was it? Is it today?). Kay’s idea back then was to create a rechargeable flat screen personal computer, with a keyboard and a stylus for drawing, that was linked to a wireless network and that retailed at a reasonable price. Sound vaguely familiar? What’s not so familiar is the idea that this platform would be one on which users could create content. It was a machine geared to the Web 2.0 produser model of internet consumption and production – thirty years before such a concept even existed.

So in that sense it’s nothing like the iPad; it’s far superior.

The iPad, in contrast, is a very passive device. It’s great for consuming email, Twitter, books and media, but it’s not very good at producing sophisticated content. I have tried valiantly for months to find a way to use my iPad in the creation of content, but I can’t. Sure, if I bought a keyboard for it I’d be able to word process, but I still couldn’t use any Adobe programs.

Then there’s the great App con: these individually structured pieces of software that allow us to do very isolated tasks reasonably well, but which rarely have the functionality of their desktop equivalents and which don’t allow for easy integration. Apps fragment processes such that it’s like having one program that takes my key out of my pocket, another that puts it in my hand, a third that lets my hand put it in the lock, while a fourth is needed to actually turn it, and so on, rather than one seamless operation that does it all.

Kay touches on this himself in Tom’s Hardware article expressing his belief that computers today could be much more powerful than they actually are. And I think most of us suspect that is true. Does anyone really imagine that The Big Fruit is discovering new things all the time, things that they couldn’t possibly have thought of any earlier (like cameras on the front and back of the iPad – wow!) that prompt them to release a new iPhone and iPad every year or so? Of course not. It’s not that there’s a constant trickle of new developments requiring constant hardware updates, rather it’s a cynical grab for cash reliant on our addiction to the new. The Big Fruit embodies all the buck generating ideas of the Dynabook but none of its beauty in terms of capability or of what it might do for education and for people’s ability to create on computing devices.

So much for reading in a time of change Meanland pals. We might be consuming our texts in a changed format, thanks to digitisation, but in terms of the political and economic forces behind such changes, it’s business as usual, which really shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone.

All those early hopes and visions of the internet post Web 2.0 being a place where traditional power structures and political channels might be circumvented, where all voices might speak and be heard, have turned out to be silly and naive. The best ideas are still slaves to the cheapest buck – and apparently that’s what happened to the Dynabook way back in 1968. Why would anyone spend money on developing such cutting-edge technology when they could make a much faster profit out of something else – i.e. the desk top computer? I wonder what wonderful ideas are currently being squashed in favour of the bottom line.

The more things change the more they stay the same.

Cross-posted from Overland.

Barbarism, politics and the poet-blogger

2011-08-24T00:00:00Z

My entry for the Meanland blogger competition began with a reference to the work of the Marxist thinker Walter Benjamin and his mostly enthusiastic view of the impact of modern technology on artistic production. I’d like to begin this blog with a quote from Minima Moralia, the wonderfully complex and magnificently complicated book by Benjamin’s friend and fellow German Marxist, Theodor Adorno, who most definitely did not view technological advancement as a positive condition for artistic production.

In this passage, written in the late 1940s, Adorno equates technological progress with destructive, rapacious barbarism, and advocates an equally ‘barbaric asceticism’ as the only means for defying the savagery of unbridled technological expansion:

Progress and barbarism are today so matted together in mass culture that only barbaric asceticism towards the latter, and towards progress in technical means, could restore an unbarbaric condition. […] The older media, not designed for mass-production, take on a new timeliness: that of exemption and of improvisation. They alone could outflank the united front of trusts and technology.

For Adrono, the printing press – which ‘inaugurated the bourgeois era’ – is a technological invention that has brutalised ‘the real book’ (by which he most likely means a handwritten copy) by turning the work of literary art into a mass-produced exchange/fetish commodity. If so, one obvious way of restoring the realness of text would be through primitive, ‘barbaric asceticism’ of, for example, spoken word and oral storytelling. As such, and considering the similarities between digital media and oral forms (as briefly proposed in my essay), could it be said that online writing provides the writer with the space for ‘exemption and improvisation’, with the means for ‘outflanking the united front’ of the publishing industry and stifling financial and ideological interests?

My response to a similar question apropos of the ebook has been rather negative; but ebooks are not the only form of digital publishing, and in some contexts they are far behind other modes of electronic text presentation. In terms of poetry, for example, e-publishing has lagged far behind poetry-blogging, a phenomenon which deserves a great deal more attention and scrutiny than it has received. I wonder to what extent, if any, the poet-blogger, by refusing to have her work published in the conventional poetic media such as literary journals and newspapers is, in Adorno’s sense, ‘outflanking’ stolid and oppressive platforms, and by so doing opposing the ‘barbarism’ of conventional publishing.

The late Australian poet-blogger Paul Squires – who was, in the words of his unnamed interviewer on Overland, ‘everywhere online that there is poetry’ – preferred publishing poems on his personal blog to sending them to print journals since, among other things, he saw himself as resisting the publishing powers that be. In his 2009 Overland interview, Squires cited among his reasons for being a poet-blogger:

the fact that the capitalist, colonialist, militarist scum have control over both the education system and the media. They’ll never get control over the internet and it is the most subversive, democratising tool since the printing press. Information is power, people talking to each other is power.

The subversive power of poetry-blogging has been most recently demonstrated – albeit negatively – in the case of the teenage Syrian poet-blogger Tal al-Mallohi who was, according to Al Jazeera, sentenced to five years in prison for espionage on 15 February of this year. The charges most probably relate to her politically sensitive writings such as poems seemingly bemoaning the Syrian government’s apparent capitulation to Israel, as can be seen with the last poem published on her blog prior to her arrest in 2009, ‘Al-Quds, Sayyida al-Mada’en’ (‘Jerusalem, the Lady of Cities’). Whether her publishing poems like this in a print medium would have resulted in her arrest is a moot point, yet it is obvious that the availability of work such as hers to a global readership via the internet was a factor in her perceived threat and therefore the harsh – indeed, as some may argue, barbaric – punishment meted out to her. As also mentioned by Al Jazeera, al-Mallohi was initially charged by the Syrian courts for ‘revealing information that should remain hushed to a foreign country’.

It is quite unlikely that any Australian poet-blogger would be imprisoned for expressing contentious political views in poems published on her weblog, but the practice is not devoid of critics in Australia. One obvious criticism levelled at poet-bloggers here stems from the timeless quality vs quantity argument; it has been said that by saturating the cyberspace with literally inestimable amounts of unedited, unrefined poems – mostly in draft form – the poet-bloggers are contributing to the decline of quality, readability and therefore readership of contemporary poetry. As observed by one of Australia’s key poets and poetry critics Chris Wallace-Crabbe – and quoted in Jaya Savige’s article in The Australian – among the perceived reasons for the current lack of mainstream cultural interest in poetry has been ‘the lethal mix of vanity publishing, the uncritical gushing of blogger poets and narcissism’.

This view has been countered, with varying degrees of success, by quite a number of proud poet-bloggers – such as Maxine Beneba Clarke – but I for one am wary of uncritically embracing poetry-blogging. What, for example, could possibly be achieved by two very talented young Australian poets having a (no doubt very jocular and friendly, and hopefully mock) ‘poetry blogging battle to the death’ by seeing which poet receives the most reader comments? Wouldn’t gestures like this confirm poet-bloggers as indeed computer-savvy narcissists? And is there really no difference between a poem that has been carefully, at times painstakingly, constructed, edited and subjected to degrees of self-criticism by its author over a period of time – during perhaps numerous rejections by print journals and/or professionally edited e-journals – and a poem that has been posted on its author’s blog immediately after being spouted for the sake of generating online comments?

Barbarism is, to be sure, a relative concept. And as Benjamin famously said, every document of civilisation is, in the end, also a document of barbarity. I suspect that if Adorno was writing today, he would view poetry-blogging with a great deal of suspicion, as yet another example of technology further entrenching us in the wasteland of artificiality and reification. I personally believe there is some truly wonderful poetry to be found on blogs (see, for example, Jill Jones’s Ruby Street, Derek Motion Typingspace, Tara Mokhtari’s poetry blog, and Joel Scott’s hedging your bets) but I also look forward to more poet-bloggers taking Clarke’s advice – i.e. to desist from ‘post[ing] unedited drunk ramblings on Saturday nights’.

Cross-posted from Overland.

How I buy books: past, present and future

2011-08-24T00:00:00Z

I have a dream: to travel the world, visiting its unorthodox bookstores. First stop is a shop on Newtown’s King Street titled Better Read Than Dead. Next is a secret room tucked away in New York that is possibly not secret anymore, thanks to Paris Review and others. Third port of call is The Book Barge, which floats along UK waterways.

So here’s where I admit to being naive. When I wrote for Meanland on how I read now, I was not sensitive to our stores and the way they are hurting.

No one said it aloud; I saw it in the quiet way booksellers were retreating. As if I had waved away their concerns with an internet-driven hand. I might be buying cheaply from Book Despository and Amazon but whose place had the giants taken? Did I not remember my weekly visits with once tiny boys and the small rocking horse that my elder son used to ride on? Isn’t it curious that my sons are likely to play-up elsewhere, just not in a room shelved with paper spines? How often was I visiting my local bookstore? Hadn’t I once been loyal?

When I heard Borders was going down, part of me was smug. After all, this American leviathan had come to Australia to knock our Independents off their feet. Conveniently I forgot hours spent in the literature section of a massive Jam Factory store ten years ago as my beau (now my husband) knelt in front of Lord of the Rings collector editions as if paying homage to the greatest storyteller of all time. I ignored that through my visits, I was buoying this read-and-drink-coffee outlet while smaller mustier shelved shops remained empty, waiting for their patrons to return. The Borders fascination didn’t last long. Soon we grew weary of bright lights and a barrage of calendars. Books seemed classier and more intelligent when purchased from Readings Carlton or the Brunswick Bookstore. Plus, author-friends were launching first books. I left Australia at this time. When I came back, I became more intimate with Readings Hawthorn, where Stephanie Alexander once spoke to an audience of at least fifty women on the importance of growing up in a food-loving household. Soon I settled in the burbs where the range of books wasn’t quite as vast as what I had known.

My online buying frenzy began almost through default. I had stumbled on Mo Willems in our local library. His Elephant & Piggy Books tickled my then learning-to-read son’s funny bone. I travelled from bookstore to bookstore trying to access every one of the series from the New York Times bestselling author and illustrator. His latest titles were only available – my local bookshop tried but to no avail – through Amazon.

Enter Book Depository with their free shipping and ‘About Us’ web page wording, which if I remember correctly, had the company sounding like a charity. If I wanted to order a novel or picture book online and feel good about it, Book Depository was for me.

In the space of two years, how I bought changed. Book Depository was cheap (if we ignore Australia Post picking up the tab – which we taxpayers later pay – as soon as books arrive in our country) and easy. I could buy hardbacks, paperbacks, rare books and ones with pictures from the comfort of my couch. Instead of ordering overseas titles online and shopping locally for Australian titles, I was gorging it all through the web.

One night I itched to read a novel then and there. I was on Amazon. A couple of clicks later, Simon Mawer’s The Glass House was on my iPhone. Quickly I moved through the novel’s early chapters, my finger gliding across the screen as if through water. Soon, I wanted more. Surprisingly, more came in the form of a traditional book which I bought from my local store.

When Angus and Robertson announced their closure, I was not perturbed. Another chain. I had no real connection. Then Amazon took over Book Depository. Something in me snapped. The people of Amazon could not tell me, face-to-face, which books they were fond of and what I might like. They could not present my gifts in wrapping I chose, nor did they have an array of good-looking cards should I wish to buy something more than a book while visiting. That weekend, after coffee and macaroons in Cavallini, I strolled with a friend into the Clifton Hill Bookstore, my children hurtling down to the back to throw themselves on corner cushions. I bought four junior books (surprisingly, each cost less than fifteen dollars), three handmade cards and a gorgeous material bookmark, a funky pink donkey stitched across its face.

What gets at my guts is that Readers’ Feast will soon close its doors. Only a month ago, on walking from Bourke onto Swanston Street, I touted the bookstore as one of Melbourne’s sunken treasures. Ashamedly, I did not usher my family down the escalators for a peep. If I had I may have told them I saw the author Audrey Niffenegger speak here of first books which she printed and bound by hand in batches of ten. A friend of mine – an academic and writer now living in Berlin – adored working in this cantina of books. When we both studied creative writing at the University of Melbourne, I would visit. Store aisles were like Thai market canals where I could pluck whichever exotic fruit I liked. I am still afraid to email her the news lest I hear her pain. Hers will be an ugly cry, as if part of her is being removed.

If I buy organic food locally even though it’s triple the cost of conventional supermarket goods, I do so to enjoy produce without pesticides, shop ethically and to ensure my local organic store will exist to serve me tomorrow. As a mother and reader I am wondering: how can I extend this kind of thinking to cover the local purchase of tree books? Which choices do I want available in my family’s future? Will I continue to pour cash into the big guns’ pockets or will I support the small stores? If I’m to put my money where my heart is, then I will cherish independent bookstores. I will visit as often as I can, and buy what I can afford.

Considering what’s now on show at your local bookstore, you might like to do the same. Flipbacks were launched in Australia last week. Small enough to fit in the palm of your hand, they are flimsy in the best sense of the word. Made of bible-like paper, they flip back rather than turn. Coming in at $19.95, I bought David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas last weekend. Amazingly, it’s very light. When my fingertips brush over wafer-thin pages, it fans out a feathery wind.

Cross-posted from Spike.

Something is happening here but we don’t know what it is ... apologies Bob

2011-08-24T00:00:00Z

The mainstream debate on the future of the book is still very much caught up in the print versus digital question: whether we engage in one industrial process or another, to produce one form of technology or another, to essentially deliver the same artefact: a device capable of storing and delivering text-based information.

While the artefacts produced are quite different in form (print book vs ebook) they essentially perform the same function and, in that sense, they can be considered to be the same.

This is a necessary, but at the same time short-term focussed, argument. It looks at what we have now (and have had for as long as any of us can remember in terms of books), the text-based, and seeks a way to preserve that information storage and dissemination concept into the future.¹

But what if it’s already too late to preserve that model? What if trying to make the purely print-based work in a digital world is as limited in scope as trying to do radio on TV? I’m not suggesting that we abandon text, or that books as we know them will disappear tomorrow, just that we might do well to acknowledge that something new is emerging that might shake up the literary world in as powerful a way as the novel did in the eighteenth century and onwards.

Bob Stein, founder and co-director of the institute for the Future of the Book in New York, takes the idea of the book way beyond both the page and text. He believes that a book ‘fundamentally is a vehicle for moving ideas around time and space’. As such he sees movies, photos, paintings and songs and ‘anything that has encoded ideas in it that can be distributed’ as books. Radical? Perhaps, but is it the ideas he expresses or his use of the word ‘book’ to refer to such non-bookish things that rankles? Do we need a new terminology?

Stein builds on this concept, speaking of a book not as a thing but as a place (an idea he develops in an article entitled: a clean well-lighted place for books) where, ‘any number of people can jump into the vehicle and have a conversation about the contents, so the book becomes a mechanism for people to talk about the ideas’. In a digital world he sees the book, or at least the novel, becoming more like a multi-player video game, with readers interacting in and around the book. This is an idea which at first might seem too sci fi, too far away in the future to be of any real import now. But is it? Two recent newspaper articles might suggest otherwise.

By now we’ve all surely heard of Pottermore, J K Rowling’s ebook distribution platform and online Potter playground. Nobody knows exactly what Pottermore will be, but it seems that fans will be able, through the site, to somehow enter a virtual world representation of the Potter books in which they can play, interact and perhaps create their own narratives, as well as buy ebooks. A quote from Sidneyeve Matrix, a professor of media and mass communication at Queen's University in Canada, in a recent piece in The Vancouver Sun describes the thinking behind Pottermore: ‘this isn't about simply transporting book clubs online. It's about transporting the entire world within the book and everything that comes with it.’ It’s about making the book a place. It’s about the ‘game-ification’ of the novel.

Before you eat me alive, let me say that this kind of experience probably won’t replace the traditional novel format for me, but then I’m an old fart. It might, however, herald the arrival of a new kind of storytelling. It might even become so huge with younger generations that by the time they reach my age (46) such platforms will have marginalised the novel as completely as the novel did poetry.

Another piece published in The Age hints at this game-ification not being a one-way street. As much as novels are becoming game-like, games are becoming novel-like too.

In an effort to combat flagging sales caused by players becoming bored with traditional shoot ‘em ups, game companies have begun to develop the idea of game as place. In Star Wars: the Old Republic, for example, players enter a universe in which, by themselves and through interaction with other players and elements within the game, they make decisions about narrative and character development. Such games are becoming incredibly complex arenas within which players increasingly create their own stories.

In another game changing shift, (pardon the pun), the game Mass Effect 3 (to be released March 2012) promises hetero and same sex in-game romance. Really? Romance in a game? Now we’re all listening, even if only pruriently so.

In a quote which echoes Stein, Ken Levine of Irrational games says: ‘Photographs tell stories. Movies tell stories. Songs tell stories. Games tell stories.’ The goalposts are moving. Storytelling itself seems to be on the move, or perhaps it’s breaking shackles imposed by print which nailed it to the page and to text?

What does all this mean for the current print vs e debate? Perhaps not much at this stage, but if Pottermore works then what’s the bet that there’ll be a JaneAustenmore^TM, a StephenKingmore^TM, or a DanBrownmore^TM sometime soon after.²

Perhaps we should all take heed of Bob Stein’s advice for present day novellists: ‘go work for a game company.’ Nuff said.

I hope that by using terms such as ‘information storage and dissemination concept’ I’m not disappearing up the arsehole of my own vocabulary as our former PM Kevin Rudd did with phrases such as ‘programmatic specificity’, I just want to, in this instance, remove the romance from the discussion and focus on the mechanics of what books are and what they do. Incidentally, I love a print book as much as the next book nerd.

All terms trademarked by John Weldon. I need the money!

Cross-posted from Overland.