Reading in an age of change:
a collaborative project by
Meanjin and
Overland.
Reading in an Age of Change is a collaboration between Meanjin and Overland, two of Australia’s finest literary journals, that seeks to drive rather than simply react to this debate. Throughout 2010, editors Sophie Cunningham and Jeff Sparrow will host and publish a series of events and articles that tackle the impact of digital media, shifting intellectual property rights and economic change. Speakers and guests involve some of our foremost thinkers from both Australia and overseas, including McKenzie Wark, Chris Meade, Cory Doctorow and Kate Eltham. The project will instigate a broad and varied public conversation on the future of reading, and shed some light on literary culture in years to come.
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. …read more »
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. …read more »
‘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. …read more »
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. …read more »
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’. …read more »
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. …read more »
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. …read more »
We are very pleased to announce the winners of the Meanland blogging competition. …read more »
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’. …read more »
On data visualisation: In his TED talk last year, ‘The beauty of data visualization’, David 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.’ …read more »