Blog - Meanland: Reading in an age of change

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.

The world is my library and we are all librarians now

2011-08-24T00:00:00Z

Ever have that childhood fantasy about being locked in the library overnight? No? Hmmn – just me then.

I don’t have that dream any more, and it’s not just because I’ve spent large slabs of my life in libraries and the books in my house are stacked two deep on the shelves and overflowing into piles on the floor.

The library fantasy was more than a nascent book-lust, a gluttony to have the library and everything in it to myself. It was about wanting to know things. The books were portals to other places, other worlds. Each book was a promise of losing myself in something new.

I get that promise from the internet now, as well as books. That same sense of wonder and delight, and sometimes horror, I used to find turning the pages of my grandfather’s set of Arthur Mee’s Children’s Enyclopaedia – each page a mix of fact and fiction, folklore and lies. If I want to know something now, I turn to the internet.

But don’t misunderstand me. The fact I can get some of the same sense of wonder from the internet in no way renders the library obsolete. The net is merely an extension of the library which has finally burst its physical bounds to encompass the world. And part of ‘turning to the net’ means searching library catalogues. One of the things the internet has done really well is to connect libraries, making their physical and virtual collections accessible to more people.

Of course, the internet shares the same limitation as my local library – there’s much that it does not encompass and probably never will. Estimates of the size of the invisible web vary, usually coming in at around four to one. Even if the search engines can locate something, there is no guarantee that the words you type in the search box, your search strategy, will retrieve it. (But then, most people are happy with a basic search and don’t look beyond the first two pages of results – probably roughly equivalent to what’s available on the shelves at their local library.)

Finding something is not always the point. Sometimes just looking is enough. I love the idea that somewhere out in cyberspace lie dark archives and hidden libraries. Perhaps even Steven Hall’s raw shark texts lurk somewhere in the gloom.

But a lot is findable. You’ve probably heard the old line about the internet being a library with all the records thrown on the floor? Well, maybe, at first, for about five minutes, but the thing about libraries is they attract librarians. People started picking up those catalogue cards pretty damn quickly.

Metadata and xml in source code show obvious links to the original catalogue records, while hyperlinks function like simple ‘see’ references. But we quickly moved beyond the type of records that need experts to create them. The point of a library has always been to organise information so that it can be found. Social networking allows everyone’s inner librarian to shine.

John Weldon in his recent Meanland blog post on ‘digital writing and oral storytelling’, highlighted the use of Digg and Delicious and other social networking tools as part of a return to oral storytelling. That’s true, but they’re also great ways to create and share libraries. Twitter lets us point others towards information, or follow them to it. We ‘like’ things on Facebook or share photos on Flickr. We tag our photos or allow Facebook to tag them for us. We create cloud tags, and we look for better and easier ways to organise and share our books and information.

But if everywhere and nowhere is the library, then people – usually people who don’t use libraries – start getting concerned about what to do with library buildings. The rash of public library closures in Britain and elsewhere has been eloquently protested by Philip Pullman and Zadie Smith amongst others. Nevertheless, I believe the obituary for the library is as premature as talk of the death of the book and bookshops. Ali Alizadeh’s recent post on ‘the death of the book and other utopian fantasies’ highlights the complexities of these issues.

Seth Godin recently wrote that we need libraries because ‘the library is the house for the librarian’. Godin was trying to highlight the importance of librarian as specialist. Unfortunately the image the ‘house’ analogy conjures for me is a doll’s house complete with a Nancy Pearl shooshing librarian doll in the corner.

The library is a place for people – not a house for the librarian.

Godin goes on to chide librarians for being overly concerned about ebook lending models. His blog post had been critiqued by a number of librarians including Bobbi L. Newman and Phil Bradley. But ebook public lending models are something we all need to be concerned about.

Public library access to ebooks is important. Anyone can walk into any public or academic library and take a book from the shelf and read it. That’s not the case with ebooks, which require devices and licences and logons for access. They’re the equivalent of the books tied to the bookstand in the days before public libraries. Instead of chains we have proprietary platforms and technological protection measures.

It’s fun for those of us who can afford it to debate the ‘thingyness of books’ or whether an ‘old style book’ or an ereader is easier to use. You can argue your point with passion all over the net including with Kim White at the Institute for the Future of the Book. Ultimately, the choice of which book or ereader we take to bed, like who we choose to sleep with, will always come down to personal preference and availability.

Libraries will always have their resident homeless people, their impecunious readers, and people, who because of technological barriers will never negotiate ereading without assistance. And libraries are great sustainable models – everyone wins. Authors get paid via public lending rights, publishers get their cut and those who need to, get to read for free (they’re also sustainable in the sense of shared resources delivering a smaller global footprint). That’s why librarians are concerned about elending models. That’s why we all need to be concerned that the push for ebooks and ereaders doesn’t disenfranchise those who want to read.

If the world is the library and we’re all librarians now, then we have to make sure there continue to be spaces, both virtual and physical, where everyone can read for free.

Cross-posted from Spike.

Winning Meanland essay 4: Digital writing and oral storytelling

2011-07-05T00:00:00Z

‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, the essay by the early 20th century thinker Walter Benjamin, is one of the most important explorations of the impact of technology on culture. Coming in the aftermath of the disputes regarding the artistic merits of photography against painting, and amid the debates pitting cinema against theatre, Benjamin argues that modern electronic mediums have a ‘progressive’, even liberating effect on society: “ Mechanical production of art changes the reaction of the masses toward art. The reactionary attitude toward a Picasso painting changes into a progressive reaction toward a Chaplin movie. The progressive reaction is characterised by the direct, intimate fusion of visual and emotional enjoyment with the orientation of the expert.”

Is the impact of the contemporary digital revolution on publishing a similar phenomenon? And, if so, is our ‘reactionary attitude’ toward print writing being replaced by a ‘progressive reaction’ toward digital texts? According to Benjamin, modern technology ‘emancipates the work of art from a parasitical dependence’ on organised institutions, and by so doing, allows for a ‘simultaneous collective experience as was possible […] for the epic poem in the past’. Is online writing having a similar effect? Does it emancipate literature from a dependence on publishing hierarchies, by facilitating communal, participatory experiences similar to ‘epic’, that is, oral storytelling?

As a writer who began his career as a performance poet, I agree with Benjamin’s view regarding the simultaneity and collectivity of oral literature. A performance poem can be distinguished from a page poem in the former’s choice of common concerns, common words and conversational structures. Such choices do not, however, necessarily signal a desire for populism, but indicate that an oral poem as such must produce a common meaning that can be simultaneously shared by all or at least most members of a given audience. In oral literature the presence of an audience is not an external, secondary factor but an innate and crucial element of the way in which the work functions.

It is precisely such an active presence of an audience or a community of readers that most dramatically distinguishes digital writing from print writing. And the most obvious form of, to use Benjamin’s terms, a ‘progressive reaction’ to a writer’s (digital) work by her readers takes the form of online comments, perhaps the digital version of an audience’s cheers, boos, laughs and heckles at a live reading. Alongside other features that enhance the interactivity and connectivity of online texts, such as hyperlinks, videos and sound, comment threads are key in providing a ‘fusion of visual and emotional enjoyment.’

While in the earlier days of the Internet, online comments were more or less reserved for pieces likely to attract strong responses from very large numbers of users – such as opinion pieces on contentious political and social issues appearing on the websites of major news organisations – online comments are now increasingly a feature of a great deal of all forms and genres of digital writing and publishing. As the American poet Shanna Compton has observed, online poetry journals as well as the websites of print poetry journals are ‘using blogs and comment features to fill in the gaps between issues, keep content fresher, and encourage reader feedback’; and such features are ‘changing the focus of aesthetic debates.’

An example of such an impact on ‘aesthetic debates’ instigated by the comments posted to an online piece of writing is the (now deleted) discussion following a post on Australian poet Pam Brown’s blog the deletions regarding the re-emergence of traditional lyric poetry as a reaction against avant-garde poetry. The particular points and arguments raised in this discussion have since been cited by critics in print (e.g., by Brownyn Lea in an essay in Westerly) and online (by Michael Brennan on Poetry International Web). This specific literary debate was reignited when I wrote a book review for the website HEAT Poetry Online, resulting in some of the contributors to the earlier discussion posting equally forceful comments. Based on the personal correspondence I have since had with quite a number of poets who followed this comments thread, I believe the comments posted in response to my review have somewhat contributed to furthering discussions of contemporary Australian poetry.

There are, of course, limits to such a ‘progressive’, interactive engagement with a community of readers. A major negative outcome has been the ability by many to post unacceptably hostile and offensive comments. This, in fact, was the very reason for the first of the abovementioned debates regarding the aesthetics of contemporary Australian poetry being removed from the Internet. According to media commentator Matt Zoller Seitz writing in Salon, due to the extraordinary quantities of ‘bile, profanity and wanton viciousness’ found in comments threads of many digital publications, some media outlets have had to either adopt ‘stricter moderation policies’ or identify and ban commenters who have posted inappropriate, defamatory statements.

One may question the illiberal tendencies of such censorious measures, or the efficacy of attempts by many media organisations (as reported in The New York Times) to have commenters register and provide information about themselves prior to posting comments, information that in most cases cannot be verified. Either way, it is clear that the ‘collective experience’ provided by digital outlets that use commentary is not always infused with, to again quote Benjamin’s enthusiastic evolution of earlier electronic mediums, an ‘emotional enjoyment with the orientation of the expert’. For many writers, editors and publishers, enduring, moderating and censoring countless vitriolic, hateful, non-expert comments is far from ‘emotionally enjoyable’.

Benjamin’s mostly celebratory account of ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ ends with reservations regarding the inattentiveness and ‘absent-mindedness’ of moviegoers, before a sobering and ominous epilogue that warns the reader about Fascism’s cunning exploitation of technological reproduction. (Benjamin himself would eventually fall victim to the Holocaust.) It is quite possible that, by breaking with the detached and non-mutual process of reading a print text, multimodal digital writing has indeed evoked the participatory, organic spirit of communal mediums such as oral storytelling or perhaps even the carnival; but there is no guarantee that this spirit will be used solely as a means for a positive, progressive end.

Cross-posted from Spike.

Ali Alizadeh is an editor with the online journal Cordite Poetry Review and with the print journal VLAK: Poetics and the Arts. He’s the author of six books, the latest of which is Ashes in the Air (UQP, 2011). He holds a PhD in Professional Writing from Deakin University and has a website.

Winning Meanland essay 3: The Internet has not impacted upon my reading habits in the slightest

2011-07-01T00:00:00Z

‘The Internet has not impacted upon my reading habits in the slightest’ has to be up there with ‘the book is dead,’ and ‘libraries are on the decline’. They’re statements that sound plausible until you start to really interrogate them – but we’ll get to the last two some other time. (If you want to catch up on some of the issues, have a look at Meanland on the Significance of the library, and Book deletions, and Sherman Young’s blog and book ‘The Book is Dead’.)

I’m sorry to have to break it to you, but even if you’re the most book loving, computer-phobic person on the planet, your reading habits have already been affected by the Internet. You mightn’t know your wiki from your twitter. You may only read books that have a cover and a spine, and get your newspaper delivered over the fence each morning, but you’ve still been impacted.

You may buy your books from your friendly bookseller, chat up the cute librarian, and discuss the latest bestseller with your mates, just like you’ve done for the last fifty years, but the Internet has affected your reading habits.

Take your morning newspaper. You can head straight for the crossword, or start at the sports pages the way you’ve always done. You can sit on the train and rattle your paper at people swapping headlines on their iPhones, but the newspaper you’re reading today is not the same paper you were reading 15 years ago. It’s manufactured differently, structured differently and the journalists work in different ways.

Journalists use the Internet to gather and exchange material more quickly and they construct their pieces on the assumption that you have at your fingertips a range of supplementary resources. Their articles provide links to longer pieces on the web, in other newspapers, and in other mediums. The explosion of the ‘side bar’ box and an abundance of colour images come to us courtesy of the Internet. Newspaper editors no longer assume that they will be breaking news and the proliferation of by-lines indicates that what we are looking for in our newspapers today is as much expert commentary and interpretation as news.

Then there’s your lunchtime trip to the library. If we take the definition of the Internet at its most basic – as computer devices exchanging information across networks, then chances are your library was an early adopter. The Internet changed your library years ago. Quick connections to other branches and other libraries allow libraries to run distributed collections. Shared catalogues mean more books more quickly for you, and sharing resources allows libraries to eke their limited dollars further.

But even the way the books are chosen has changed. You may not be using the Internet, but your librarian is; your fellow readers are. Instead of waiting for the bookseller, or for literary magazines with reviews to make their glacial way from the Chief Librarian’s desktop, your librarian has quick access to a range of sources including reviews and commentary and sophisticated bibliometrics to help choose the books that grace the shelves.

Similarly, the books produced by publishers, the way authors write and market themselves, and the way booksellers choose books have all been influenced by the Internet. (Witness the huge number of conferences and discussion papers on the future of the book.) Changes in publishing processes dictate what is available in your favourite bookshop – or even the viability of your favourite bookshop.

Publishing models, be they print or digital, subscription or open access are changing. This impacts what is available for you to read in book format, and therefore your reading habits.

I’m guessing if you’re claiming the Internet hasn’t changed your reading habits then it’s because you’re not reading books online, or books that morph into games, or meld with other mediums. You’re not choosing your own endings, or regularly publishing your own content. But then, why are you reading this blog? (Go on, admit it, you have changed.)

I guess at the heart of the assertion is a fear that change rather than broadening your options will limit them. That somehow someone is going to force you to read in a way that you don’t want. But whether you believe we’re breaking free from a television induced stupor into a new world of creativity and Cognitive Surplus like Clay Shirky, or believe with Nicholas Carr that our attention spans are diminishing to those of a gnat, it doesn’t really matter. Putting a finger in the dyke isn’t going to do anything, this time.

Because we read books we’re capable of holding two contradictory thoughts in our head at same time: So the Internet has changed our reading habits, but it will never change our reading. (Go read Fahrenheit 451 if you’re really worried about the death of the book.)

So perhaps when you tell me that the Internet hasn’t impacted your reading you just mean that reading is reading, a choice, a delight, an introduction into individual and shared worlds. In the end, the device, the method, the style, the delivery, or the shape of the words, doesn’t matter.

There always has been just you and the word. There always will be.

Cross-posted from Spike.

The death of the book, and other utopian fantasies

2011-06-29T00:00:00Z

Well, it’s official: the (printed) book is dead, long live the (e)book.

Or so many political and cultural elites would like us to believe. On the very day of my writing this blog, for example, we were subjected to federal Minister for Small Business Nick Sherry’s apocalyptic diagnosis that Australian booksellers will be annihilated within the next five years, thanks, in part, to the (supposed) explosion of online sales of ebooks. In a less dramatic and more considered register, Kate Eltham, CEO of Queensland Writers Centre, pontificated on the ABC television’s Jennifer Byrne Presents, that the advent of ebooks and e-readers was disrupting ‘the underpinning supply chains that are currently supporting modern publishing’.

Significant to both Senator Sherry’s and CEO Eltham’s perspectives are their disconcertingly upbeat views of these (apparently) cataclysmic changes. For the Minister, the prophesied obliteration of bookshops promises a brave new world in which ‘online trading present[s] a growth opportunity for businesses to expand their potential customer reach’; while for Eltham a future without paper books is nothing short of paradisiacal:

I'm optimistic in the best sense. I think that we are going to see an abundance of titles available. We're going to see a multitude of channels to get those titles. And we're going to see conversations taking place between readers that didn't take place before. So I'm excited and I think this is going to be a really fun time.

Commentators, far more eloquent and informed than I, have questioned the validity of the claim that the printed book has run its course. Suffice it to say that, as Meanland’s own Jacinda Woodhead has shown, Amazon’s sensational news of their ebooks outselling printed books was, at best, highly dubious; and according to Jeremy Fisher, in his Meanjin Meanland essay, ‘[t]he printed book is showing no signs even of a death rattle’. While disagreement between the ebullient advocates of the ebook and their opponents are likely to continue for years to come – until, perhaps, either the e-reader has been, once and for all, assigned to the dustbin of history alongside other notable technological failures, or the printed book has joined the stone table, the papyrus scroll and the illuminated manuscript in museums – what interests me is the excessively sanguine, indeed utopian view of those who see the (proposed) demise of the printed book as an unconditionally wonderful thing.

Why is it that seemingly learned people – who have, one can safely assume, read a book or two during their lives – are so ecstatic about the collapse of not just an industry but one of the tenets of civilisation? What exactly are the redemptive, heavenly consequences of the Four Horsemen of the Internet, ebooks, online shopping, and the vertiginous Australian dollar bringing an end to the profane worlds of print publishing and printed-book selling?

The most obvious answer is, of course, the commercial interests of corporations who, for example, release inflated figures of the sales of their ebooks to boost the sales of their e-readers, or the blatant interference by other interested corporations who, for example, pay influential public figures to champion the cause of an e-future. (According to the Age, Senator Sherry’s comments apropos of the death of bookselling in Australia came at the launch of a public awareness campaign ‘organised by online payment company PayPal’.) In an even slightly less imperfect world, the Capitalist economic base would not be capable of so effortlessly molding the cultural superstructure and propagating spurious assumptions as facts; but I shall desist from indulging in utopian fantasies of my own, and instead explore one example of a myth or, in this case, a fairytale that supports a dominant ideology hard at work trying to convince us all that This-is-the-end-of-the-book-as-we-know-it-and-we-should-all-feel-very-very-fine.

The story concerns one Amanda Hocking who, according to one enthusiastic YouTube appraisal, is a ‘26 year old [North American] writer who was turned down by several publishers only to publish her work as ebooks for Amazon Kindle earning her millions of dollars’. As someone who has had more than his fair share of rejection from many, many publishers, I warm to the story of a fellow struggling writer who has told the ‘haters’ – as one of the presenters in the above YouTube clip has eloquently put it – ‘to suck it’. Also, as a Marxist, I’m very happy to hear that a young, working-class woman has taken control of her own means of production and circumvented exploitation by elitist publishers and distributors. But a closer look at this American Dream tale of going from rags to riches in the age of the ebook reveals this supposedly ‘revolutionary’ tale as a sadly disingenuous, deceptive fantasy.

To begin with, Hocking’s self-e-published bestsellers are far from radical or new in any sense of these words. Among her books are vampire romance novels written for young adults. While possibly emulating the Twilight series is not – rather disappointingly – a punishable offence yet, the fact that this ebook success story could have only come about as a consequence of the immense popularity of Stephenie Meyer’s series of printed books undermines the triumphalism and hubris of those who view Hocking’s success as a repudiation of print publishing. As Jenny Lee has written in Overland, successful self-published e-titles cited by one advocate of ebooks ‘are all in well-established popular genres’, a fact which, in my view, greatly weakens any claim the proponents of this latest publishing technology could have to it being a radical departure from the apparently atrophied paradigms of print publishing.

Also, as it would have been blatantly obvious in my quoted introduction of Hocking, her story serves, perhaps against her wishes, as publicity for Amazon Kindle. While I certainly hope that this obviously industrious writer receives fair payment for her work – although it is rather worrying that, as she mentions in this Associated Press clip, she’s yet to be paid any royalties by Amazon – it is quite possible that here, as with many other e-publishing success stories, ‘the beneficiaries’, as also noted by Lee in her Meanland article, ‘aren’t self-publishers but the [online] store-owners, who are some of the largest corporations on the planet’. While viewing the abovementioned clip, note how Amazon’s e-reader Kindle is rather conspicuously plugged, as is, perhaps oddly, the energy drink Red Bull, presented here as a writer’s drink.

The most self-contradictory aspect of the view of Hocking’s writing career as an exemplification of the utopian wonders of ebooks and e-publishing, however, is its truly fairytale, she-lived-happily-ever-after ending. According to her own blog, Hocking’s ‘new young adult four-book series’ is to be published – for a no doubt gargantuan advance – by St Martin’s Press, one of the United States’ major print publishers. And, although as with almost all other publishers that I know of, the Press’s parent company, Macmillan Publishers Ltd, has embraced digital publishing options, these publishers cannot be seen, in any sense of the word, as e-publishers – as of June 2011, according to The Bookseller.com, only 8% of Pan Macmillan’s sales are accounted for by ebook sales. So if e-publishing is the glorious future and print publishing an expired past, why is this paragon of e-writing abandoning the electrophoretic ink screen of the e-reader gadget for the enervated paper pages of a printed book?

The simplest answer seems to be that the printed book is neither dead nor dying. As much as I for one would like to see hierarchies and stifling bourgeois ideologies of much of the existing print publishing and bookselling challenged and disrupted, on the basis of the frankly flimsy premise of much of the unsubstantiated hype and hyperbole surrounding ebooks, digital technology is not likely to liberate us into a utopian future in which any writer can get published, recognised and rewarded for their work.

I fear that, to the contrary, we may end up with hundreds of thousands of obsolete e-readers and further toxic e-waste being dumped on the slum dwellers of Ghana or China, where staggering quantities of the affluent nations’ high-tech effluence are disposed of by some of the world’s most deprived and vulnerable in some of the most monstrously dangerous work environments imaginable. The image of rivers becoming contaminated, water undrinkable and soil non-arable as a consequence of the processing of mounds of our unwanted e-readers is most certainly not a utopian fantasy, but a properly abject, dystopian reality.

Cross-posted from Overland.

Winning Meanland essay 2: The internet has not impacted upon my reading habits in the slightest

2011-06-29T00:00:00Z

For the ten minutes before my children sleep the internet has not impacted upon my reading habits in the slightest. Tonight’s book is a treasure. Behind its thick crème cover, its pages, also crème, are stiff and square with sixties-vintage pictures. Chapter One, Down the Rabbit-Hole, begins on page eleven.

‘Why not page one?’ a son asks.
‘If you flick through and count,’ I say, ‘it’s page eleven.’

But he’s forgotten what I’ve said, absorbed in the blurred edges of Alice’s golden hair once painted with watercolours or pastels.

We tried ebooks over the summer (kindle on iPhone). The pictures were ordinary, the numberlessness was disorientating and the text too small on that piddly screen. It was decided. For the nightly family read, we will stick with tradition.

The wonders of television, that strange medium that revolutionalised the twentieth Century. The joys of colour, thinner televisions and going digital. What did it do to theatre? Whilst movies and plays can be an expensive treat, neither is extinct nor threatens to be. Not in Melbourne anyway.

I’d like to think that an artful city rewards plays like Arnold Zable’s Café Scheherazade. FortyFive Downstairs is to run a second season, through winter too. That iphones and internet are gimmicks taking over our lives is possibly true. The consumer ultimately chooses. For myself, I’ve been downloading e-books of late. They’re just so convenient.

Strike me down for not supporting my local bookshop. I’m reading more online extracts than book covers. I’m sampling first chapters via kindle (on PC and iPhone might I add, not iPad). If I’m sure I’ll read chapter two, I download the whole to my laptop in a heartbeat, at a measly $7 a pop.

At my kitchen sink I savour twenty-to-forty minute New Yorker Podcasts. From my mobile’s iPod modern laureates read short stories from the magazine’s vault. Last week I listened to Tobias Wolff, Cynthia Ozick, Junot Diaz and Paul Theroux. Via the Guardian Books Podcast, Jeanette Winterson and Peter Carey speak of deviate lives and thorough research.

In the car on the way home from coffee with friends, I indulge in ABC Radio’s BookShow Podcast. Last month, after reading ‘While Not Writing A Book: Diaries’ in The Monthly (print version), I searched out Helen Garner. It was the way clusters of elegant font had spilt down the white almost-square page like rivulets. I kept visualising the text’s shape on the page as I read it. This kept feeding me, pushing me to want more.

On hearing Helen talk I wasn’t satiated, so on cutting out details for a discussion on truth at the University of Melbourne (yes, The Age is still thrown on my lawn at 5am every morning) I organised a babysitter so I could sit on a plastic seat in an auditorium and see her in person for free.

Once an e-book consumes me, usually mid-way, I itch to flick pages and sense the novel’s bulk. I walk into a bookstore or click through an e-store. Soon the paperback is in my hands and I can see its form more clearly. Essentially, I am buying the same book twice. What a lovely reward for an author who has kept the ball of my finger slipping across the screen when Facebook, kids, the dishes and sleep are calling me.

Throw tomatoes at me for not being a scaremonger. Paper won’t lose its fascination. Nothing can replace thumbing through a book that has been loved and is well worn. No wonder shelves are full of outer shells whose insides haven’t been touched for years. Relics of our pasts, their spines are as good as photos, showing us where we’ve been.

Only after seeing Alice through Tim Burton’s kaleidoscope was my oldest son remotely interested in the book. Finally, I was able to tell him how drawn I had been to modern/antique pictures on crème, the hardback bought before he was born so that we could read it together. For the first time he looked at what I yearned to show him for eight years. Tonight we continue an adventure my second-cousin likens to a trip on LSD.

When moving pictures and written word come together to feed and inspire each other I rejoice for an opportunity to live in the 21st century. If a movie can interest boys in a book they might not otherwise read, then Alleluia. Two more literate children.

If an iPhone provides a mother with twenty more minutes reading a day, doubling last year’s intake by this year’s May, then bravo kindle for luring her into gaining a little more intellectual and psychological prowess.

I walked through Borders last night. It was like being at a wake of a person I never kind of liked but visited anyway.

The demise of the local bookstore? I wonder how it can fight for my dollar now Book Depository can mail books to me at a fraction of what I used to pay. I’m still fronting up. I will pay for an experience by buying what I like when in store. I hope I don’t have to drive to the next suburb for the privilege soon. That paper won’t become my expensive treat.

My greatest fear is that publishing houses will not be able bring out paperback, hardback, audio, e-format and whatever else our future fancies. I dearly hope that support for telling stories in a myriad of mediums grows rather than diminishes; that stories, in all their forms, thrive.

Cross-posted from Overland.

Winning Meanland essay 1: Digital writing and oral storytelling

2011-06-17T00:00:00Z

As we mentioned last week, the hunt for a Meanland blogger resulted in not one, not two, but four Meanland bloggers! Here is the first of the winning Meanland essays, which we'll be publishing here, Overland and Spike over the next week. Regular Meanland postings will resume at the end of June.

Digital writing, which uses linking, video and commentary, is a return to oral storytelling traditions.

Literacy conjured printing, which invented copyright, which invented the author, who in turn invented the reader and silent contemplation, which killed orality.

That’s the Twitter-sized history of the effect of print on orality (those in need of a deeper analysis might like to check out Walter J Ong’s Orality and Literacy, or for something a little more zingy, Marshall McLuhan’s The Gutenberg Galaxy).

Print demanded texts that could be reproduced exactly and en masse. This did away with the notion of communal storytelling through interruption, addition, rehashing and conversation, as they were in the oral storytelling tradition. To succeed, print also needed rigid grammar, syntax and spelling, it needed one fixed version of a story told from one perspective; it needed the author, singular.

Before print, the idea of a text even having an author was pretty rare. As it was impossible, pre-print, to mass produce exact copies of one’s work, it was not possible to sell enough of them to make a living. Therefore the idea of owning a particular version of a story was almost unheard of, much as we do not consider that we own copyright in our social media conversations and tweets. It wasn’t until stories became saleable, in printed-book form, that the idea of story ownership became interesting. Printed books became one of the first mass-produced commodities and authors began popping up everywhere.

Prior to this, writing was more an adjunct to speech than a discrete discourse. Books were, in the main, written to be spoken aloud and people read and chanted them aloud together. Scholars kept notes in books to aid with their discussions; these ‘commonplace books’ were filled with quotes and useful information they’d picked up in class or from colleagues. Think of Digg, Diigo and Delicious as online versions of the commonplace book.

What digital writing does, albeit at this stage in a small way, is to remove the air of fixedness that printed text has imposed on writing and storytelling. Digital texts can be altered endlessly and cheaply – altering an existing printed book is a time consuming and expensive exercise. Digital texts are also free to ignore the conventions of grammar, syntax and spelling, invented by print, (d)evolving to more oral-like enigmatic forms. It’s amazing just how quickly, once writing moves off the printed page and becomes once again an adjunct to communal storytelling and conversation rather than an end in itself, that it divests itself of formality. F u dnt blve me snd me a txt

Digital Rights Management (DRM) technologies currently prevent us from altering commercially produced digital texts too much, but the time must come (and soon) when this tech is cracked and we are downloading and playing with book torrent files as we do with TV, music, games and film.

What we might see then, when anyone can download and play with almost any text, is a rapid return to shared story telling. Readers might exchange ideas, criticisms and comments with authors in much the same way as they now do in the news media.

Author John Birmingham is already engaging in this process. He spoke in April this year at Institute for the Future of the Book (if:book) symposium The Reader saying that he sometimes uses Twitter and his blog to research, asking his followers/readers for help with specialised subject matters outside his ken. Admittedly that’s not quite communal storytelling, but it is still a significant dismantling of the producer/consumer barrier between writer and reader.

EPUB 3.0 (the soon-to-be-released latest version of the industry standard online publishing software) promises to offer the digital author the option of streaming video and audio into their texts. This brings back to storytelling the qualities of gesture, nuance and tone of voice lost when we moved from the spoken to the printed word. If we can crack digital texts one day will readers then be able to stream their own images and sound into them?

Once readers are able to interact with longer form text in the same way they are able to with news text, how long then before the gatekeeper, author becomes a gatewatcher, willingly, or otherwise, offering stories to a virtual community of pseudo co-storytellers in versions that are always evolving and never fixed? How long before we see the produser enter the realm of the novel?

Devices such as the Kindle and iPad already allow us to create our own commonplace books, by providing readers with the ability to clip and bookmark interesting passages and quotes. Could this then lead to produsers sampling the work of other writers, much as musicians have done since the digitisation of music? If Helen Garner expresses a concept, or emotion much better than I do couldn’t I just link to a digital version of her work, rather than writing my own clumsier piece? Could I even include chunks of her work in mine? Yes, I can! In fact it is already being done: see Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and others.

The implications of this new shared storytelling, this pseudo-orality are manifold, especially with regard to copyright. Will my version of Monkey Grip, entitled Monkey Grip with Real Monkeys be an infringement of Garner’s copyright, or a new work? The great challenge to be faced by any return to oral storytelling practices will be: who owns the story.

Through social media we’re already chanting our narratives together, not out loud but virtually so, through our status updates and our tweets. We create communal stories making choices as authors do about which lead to follow, which characters to pursue and how they should interact. Through these media we achieve virtual community and virtual-orality. There’s no value in these exchanges yet, just as there was no value in storytelling until the invention of print, but then we’re in the early stages of digitised writing, so who knows where we might end up?

Cross-posted from Overland.

Announcing the winners of the Meanland blogging competition

2011-06-10T00:00:00Z

We are very pleased to announce the winners of the Meanland blogging competition.

Ultimately we had over seventy entries and the standard was frankly dismayingly high. In the end we decided that choosing just two was simply impossible, so we decided to select four excellent bloggers who will each blog once a month for the Meanland project.

The winning essay-posts will be appearing online at Spike, Overland and Meanland over the coming weeks, so keep an eye out.

And without further ado, here are the winners:

Catherine Moffat

John Weldon

Diane Simonelli

Ali Alizadeh

Congratulations to the winners, and a warm and very grateful thank you to the many entrants. Judging from the wealth of insight and intelligence we encountered reading the entries, the future of reading and the written word is very bright indeed.

Zora Sanders, Meanjin, and Jacinda Woodhead, Overland.

Marshall McLuhan is stalking me from beyond the grave

2011-03-25T00:00:00Z

Not a fan of media theorist Marshall ‘the medium is the message’ McLuhan? Okay, I don’t go in for the technological determinism either, but you can’t deny that the man was uncannily prescient when it came to predicting how our culture would develop – a ‘global village’, electric technology ‘reshaping and restructuring patterns of social interdependence and every aspect of our personal life’ – and how these changes would be feared – ‘we drive into the future using only our rear view mirror’. He even divined the demise of print culture, and ‘electronic interdependence’.

So there’s all that, which surely loans him a few seconds of your time, and then there’s this:

Ahem. I’ve been thinking a lot about McLuhan because, ironically, I’ve been teaching a course on online media.

At first, I thought about him in relation to convergence: the way all forms of media are starting to closely resemble each other (see 3AW for instance, where you can now watch videos of radio personalities on air).

McLuhan wrote about the effects of technology on culture and our relations within that culture. He posited that technology created new environments that then shaped our cultural patterns, but we didn’t have the objectivity required to perceive these patterns. Instead, we’re lured by the content – a breaking story here, a blog post there – rather than looking at the medium and how it’s shaping and changing our world, our thought patterns, our interactions, which, even now, are being shaped by the internet. Or this may be what McLuhan had said, if he lived to see the web.

So, some extrapolation is needed. In the past, when print was the dominant medium, if we imagined writing a story, we’d imagine a story with a beginning, middle and an end, the easily recognisable three-act structure. But the web, with its multimedia, interactivity and non-linearity, is changing the way we write, create, communicate and structure. How do you write a story if you know your potential audience now expects more than the singular and linear?

A couple of days after this profundity, I happened across a video of McLuhan, an excerpt of a much longer documentary from 1970. Watch as McLuhan and Tom Wolfe sit in McLuhan’s backyard, chatting about oral traditions in deck chairs on a sunny lawn – it’s utterly surreal:

I was reminded of McLuhan again last week when researching abstract notions of news and its value, and came across a video where Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia co-creator) and Andrew Keen (author and ‘educator, entrepreneur and internet cultural critic’) debated whether the internet had killed print journalism. (Watch from 3:10 to see Keen, but be warned: actual viewing may cause heart palpitations.)

Now, I’m sort of of the opinion that Keen should be banned from ever penning another book because 1) he sees no cultural value online, and 2) he cites Judith Miller and Thomas Friedman as journalistic pillars of society – and yet, this uncritical view of content reminds me of McLuhan and the idea that it’s the medium that matters. Writers like Keen, for instance, are possessed of the idea that the paper and news is authoritative and collective, while the screen is individual and narcissistic – without any critique of the information delivered or how it’s delivered.

This morning I came across an article about Douglas Coupland’s new book: Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of My Work!, about McLuhan, his genius and that unavoidable question: ‘how are new media changing the way we think?’ Coupland writes:

One must remember that Marshall arrived at these conclusions not by hanging around, say, NASA or I.B.M., but rather by studying arcane 16th-century Reformation pamphleteers, the writings of James Joyce, and Renaissance perspective drawings. He was a master of pattern recognition, the man who bangs a drum so large that it’s only beaten once every hundred years.

Ten years ago, there weren’t many writers touting McLuhan’s genius; the internet has changed that. Was he so very revolutionary, or did he simply look backwards, analysing how humans have historically reacted to major changes in technology? Evgeny Morozov’s review of Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains begins with a fascinating analogy predating McLuhan:

In 1889 the Spectator published an article, “The Intellectual Effects of Electricity,” intended to provoke its Victorian readers. Robert Cecil, the prime minister, had recently given a speech to the Institution of Electrical Engineers in which “he admitted that only the future could prove whether the effect of the discovery of electricity… would tell for good or evil.” The authors attacked him for being soft on electricity. Its material effects were welcome—“imagine the hundred million of ploughing oxen now toiling in Asia, with their labour superseded by electric accumulators!”—but its intellectual effects were not.

Electricity had led to the telegraph, which in turn saw “a vast diffusion of what is called ‘news,’ the recording of every event, and especially of every crime.” Foreshadowing Marshall McLuhan by almost a century, the magazine deplored a world that was “for purposes of ‘intelligence’ reduced to a village” in which “a catastrophe caused by a jerry-builder of New York wakes in two hours the sensation of pity throughout the civilised world.” And while “certainly it increases nimbleness of mind… it does this at a price. All men are compelled to think of all things, at the same time, on imperfect information, and with too little interval for reflection.”

Maybe it’s unfair to lump McLuhan in with the likes of Keen and Carr. After all, McLuhan focused on the social and cultural shifts of technology (as opposed to ‘the micro-levels of neuroscience’), and he’s been dead for 31 years – who can say what he would have made of the web.

If McLuhan is trying to tell me something from beyond the grave, it may just be: ‘It is the framework which changes with each new technology and not just the picture within the frame.’ I’ll have to think on that a while.

Comment on this post at Overland.

Visual-eyes

2011-03-17T00:00:00Z

Recently, David McCandless gathered together the results of fifteen or so well-known ‘Top 100 Books’ polls, analysed them, then produced this consensus cloud:

Been feeling listless and haven’t yet read To Kill a Mockingbird? The consensus is the book could change your life, as it has the lives of many before you.

In his TED talk last year, ‘The beauty of data visualization’, McCandless spoke of his devotion to visual language: ‘It’s about finding patterns and connections that matter, then designing that information so it makes more sense or tells a story or allows us to only focus on the information that’s important.’

The ‘Books Everyone Should Read’ cloud is heavily text-based, however; would it be even possible to depict these findings graphically? It’s not as though the books have distinguishing, recognisable shapes the way, say, animals do.

Happened upon on Brain Pickings, this is a stunning example of Isotype: International System Of Typographic Picture Education. Developed between 1925 and 1934, Isotype charts conveyed educational or complex information in pictorial form. They were ‘an essential foundation for our modern visual language’, says Maria Popova, evidenced today ‘in everything from bathroom signage to computer interfaces to GOOD’s acclaimed Transparencies’.

Isotype was print-bound, as were, originally, tables, histograms, pie charts and bar graphs, though for many a year now we’ve worked with them on computers and the internet. They too can aid comprehension, yet are regularly limited by usage and design. Do they attract readers? Generally, no. Are they visually thrilling? Rarely. How often do they document every intimate relationship an individual has had over 23 years of their life?

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There comes a time, in this data-swamped world, when the most cogent piece of text is a chart or a graph or something else that presents information in a graphical way. Because a picture paints a thousand words, but data visualisaton can paint at least 100000.

(Created by an intern in the data infrastructure engineering team, this image maps 10 million pairs of Facebook friendships.)

Data is meaningless without context: compared to what, over what time span, influenced how? 10 million Facebook friendships sounds inane until you see them as luminous strands connecting human beings across the globe.

Data visualisation should communicate information effectively. If its form can match its functionality, well, that’s often art. If the focus is solely on the contours and the colours, meaning can be lost or diluted. Fortunately, that wasn’t the case with the ‘History of Cubism and Abstract Art’.

(‘Here are some ideas on linking lines and causal arrows, a draft of some material from my Beautiful Evidence,’ writes Edward Tufte.)

There is much data out there; by and large, it’s not presented legibly – have you visited the ABS recently? Still, in their defence, they’re only collating the data; it’s our job to interpret it.

As with all writing, you try to lead your reader to a conclusion.

(Illustrates the combined 1125 years that 118 people who were later exonerated spent on death row in the US.)

Good data visualisation means your reader can grasp something quickly, that it can be further disseminated and understood. It is symbolic writing, in some ways, and the impact can strike and linger. Yet, it’s not only about aesthetics or an agenda. One of the most successful data visualisations is Google Maps, where streets are compiled into a giant readable, interactive database.

(The Gesellschafts- und Wirtschaftsmuseum in Wien, Vienna, where Isotype was invented.)

Cross-posted from Meanjin. Comments welcome there.