Relevant to recent discussions here, oyster is a service that let’s you subscribe for $10 a month and it works like a book library. Get as many books as you like. It is like last.fm or spotify for books, haven’t looked at it yet but the design experience looks good. The article on wired is worth a read.
Things to notice. It is not selling books, it is selling a service. It relies on mobile media, it is not selling ‘things’, it is subscription based which means an ongoing revenue model.
IN today’s unsymposium the discussion wandered around the shop about the essay and the literary. On the way home it sparked a little florid flurry of ideas that arose from that half baked discussion. A couple of weeks ago Actor Network Theory (ANT) was mentioned, and while what follows isn’t specifically ANT, the way to think of it is not as a linear sequence of causes but a network of relationships that could have different sorts of outcomes, and that the novel was one particular one, and more importantly it is this aggregation of different things, at different speeds and moments, that sees the novel happen. In this view it isn’t that the novel is at the end of a process and these are the parts of steps, but that the novel finds itself within all these things that have their own, particular, individual histories and trajectories, parts of which touch the novel. (For example the relationship between making wine and the printing press, these histories touch each other, but one doesn’t ’cause’ the other and the printing press is not the ‘culmination’ of an idea.)
I want to write about the novel because the discussion today begun from there, and it is a very useful example of how to think about what we describe as the specificity of media history not as this narrative of cause and effect, but as a conglomeration of, well, stuff. Ideas, technologies, economics, religion, technological appropriation, cultural transmission, and so on. Now, if I were particular sort of theorist, for example some sort of Marxist, I might decide that one of the parts of what I’ve described as a ‘conglomeration’ is more important than the others, in trying to explain how novels happened (and so as a Marxist I might see the emerging forms of capitalism as essential to the whole thing), but that risks a sort of theoretical chauvinism (why is capitalism any more important than realising the wine press over there would solve the technical problem of applying regular constant pressure to actually be able to print?). Personally, I think it is more elegant, and possibly more accurate, to recognise it is a complex messy assemblage and then try to recognise the terms or parts of this assemblage, and as an assemblage to recognise that the parts have their own histories, and uses, and their role here is not just to somehow give birth to printing and later the novel.
So, the novel. There was a good question today about the literary and the digital and the book. My answer was simply that if you take the literary out of the question then the book is, today, irrelevant as a particular form. It simply doesn’t matter. For some things it remains the most convenient form, but that is rapidly changing. In most contexts most people don’t care if it is a book or not (something on paper, with a cover, made up of serial pages), and in many cases a digital form which is searchable and can be annotated and all the rest is more use to you and preferable to a book. Think court decisions text books, legislation, manuals, diagnostic manuals (technical, medical, psychological) even a copy of Shakespeare that can automatically show you every occurrence of a phrase, in context (what we all a concordance), and then provide links to other occurrences of the similar phrases in other works by Shakespeare. (Once upon a time not so very long ago the complaint about ebooks was that you ‘couldn’t read them in the bath’ – seriously. Then things like the iPad came along, which you could, but if you dropped it… Except if you drop your book in the bath then, well, that’s usually buggered too. Now the complaint is about the smell of the paper, or its feel. Now, seriously, if this what makes literature have literary value, just go and buy some paper be done with it, as this is so very seriously a fetish dressed up as an argument to be embarrassing!)
I digress. Unusually. I want to stick the literary back into the conversation and make the provocative claim that the literary and the book aren’t intimate bedfellows, and might not be in to the future. They were intimate, but they don’t have to be, or, more provocatively perhaps the literary will just have had its moment and fade, to be enjoyed by a small band of academics and buffs, while the world moves along to other things. Why? How?
Let’s keep it simple and think about the novel. The novel needs the book, well, it did. The novel needed:
Printing is fundamental here, since paper is flat and small compared to vellum (which is thick and the manuscripts often enormous), and now we have a small, intimate writing intended for an audience of one. And as people wondered what to do with it, they experimented, and we eventually arrive at the modern form of literature we call the novel. Personal, interiorised characters (we wonder and are told about their thoughts and feelings), small enough to be in the home, and linear enough to be read across several sittings, short enough and in the vernacular and so not presuming to require a life times study (aka the bible, classical literature).
Therefore the novel is a confluence of lots of different things. Technologies, cultural changes, individuals, trade routes, emerging capitalism, etc.
Now, one of the founding novels in the west is Don Quioxite, published in two volumes (1605 and 1615). That makes it near enough to 400 years old. We have had writing since 3200BC in the middle east and 1200BC in China. If we take China as our case, then we have had writing for 2800 years before the novel came along. Now, while the novel will still be around when I am in my dotage, and I suspect yours, it seems to be an extraordinary intellectual chauvinism to think that something that has been around for about 12% of the time we’ve had writing (and stories) is the final, privileged forever, definitive and going to stay just where it is thank you very much, narrative form. There is, in the history of narrative and its associated technologies, nothing that supports this view.
Stories on the other hand are a constant, while their media and technical form (oral, prose, song, dance, painting, essay, letter, film, game, serial, novel, lyric, song, word, voice, image, sound, air, light, magnetic tape, digital 0’s and 1’s, chemical reactions – photos, film ) seems to me to be anything but constant. To think that the book, as the vanguard and privileged narrative form, smacks of the same sort of imperialism that assumed, a century ago, that the world wanted to be white, colonised, industrialised and ‘modernised’. A view that made perfectly good common sense now, but which gets no recognition as legitimate today. Print here is our master, and thinking that this is the end or final form or the highest form of narrative, our privileged form, is to be its servants.
We have electronic literature and poetry, so that is already one way in which the literary happily leaves behind the page, ink, and paper. It is minor in relation to all the other literary production that is going on, it might fizzle out, but we have had literature prior to the book, which shows that literature does not have to equal the book, though when it does, the novel is the privileged form. Hence, in these conversations, when we say book most people mean literature, but even then what they actually mean, is the novel. Will the novel continue as our preeminent literary form? I don’t know, but history to date says it is unlikely. This is not the same as saying it will disappear, just that its place will shift.
What has this to do with network media? Well the digital is the place where this is being tested, as we witness the rise of ebooks and in many cases see ebook sales outstripping physical sales. This shouldn’t be surprising, it happened with music several years ago where vinyl is, as the novel might become, one for an informed elite rather than its mass, popular form. But its deeper relevance for network media is simply as a case study to realise it is not a linear series of causes and effects but something like a network where different elements have agency – mechanics, metallurgy, religion, education, secularisation, capitalism, guilds and craft practices, market trading routes (which is how print and printing spread), and so on. It is, a bit (don’t force it too much) like an ecology where if we look at a forest the forest is the product of complex interactions of all its parts, there is no simple cause and effect but instead systems of feedback that include geography, geology, meteorology, soil, species, animals, plants which all have their own time scales, their own speeds, their own histories. Recognising this density is what we need to be able to do, rather than thinking there is an answer, or a specific way of approaching what it might mean, that will make guaranteed sense of it. A forest doesn’t mean anything, it just is. I can make it mean timber for houses, or a habitat for a rare species, or a beautiful view, or a site for a hotel, or an example of indigenous significance, or a place for families, but none of these help you to understand what a forest is. In relation to network media, what we’re doing this semester is beginning to think what the network is, rather than trying to provide ways to try to work out what it means.
Courtney realises that how we have been taught to write essays, and what an essay is, in school, is not really what the essay is. This bastardised version of the essay is what happens when it is turned to an instrument to standardise and assess. Sort of kills its joy. Yes, good essays follow ideas. As far as I know the main advice is the TEEL structure, which is, well, so proscriptive as to think that something good comes from formulaic steps. It is what we call teleological, so you have to know where you’re going before you begin. This is actually the opposite of learning, discovery, invention, creativity. This subject is taught as this other sort of essay. A door is ajar, we have a look inside. Different doors different days, you open some, we open others. If you want to model and afford learning, discovery, invention and creativity it seems to me all of us have to accept the risk of not quite knowing where things might lead. Finally, Courtney wonders about facts and evidence. There are amazing essays about history that use facts and evidence (see Jeff Dyer’s work), they are not excluded.
Anna has a preferred location to do her niki research from. I can see why. Now, step back fifteen years. That first sentence was science fiction, every part of it.
Really enjoyed Georgina’s post after reading the Graham article about the essay. Yes, the essay is a way to come up with answers, not writing the already known. As humanities students it is our lab, our experimental space, where we test and invent. We don’t do this somewhere else then report on it (which is what most of us have been taught an essay is) but the essay is actually where we do the thinking. This is one reason I like blogs. And posts like Georgina’s. Simply because it is thinking in the moment of the writing and discovering something. That should be the point of writing in a university in the humanities. Experiment and thinking in the language of our practice (writing). The essay is a technology, treat it as that and the question becomes what do you want to do with it.
Kylie notes my comments about structure emerges through practice. This is one of the key ideas of networked media (in general and the subject). We don’t know what will become significant, whereas in old style media this was simpler. There were only three commercial TV networks in Australia. Each has to be incredibly important simply because of that. What was shown at any one time had to matter, in a significant way, to someone. The internet stuffs that up as it is a medium that can distribute any sort of media, in any old way (including ways not thought of yet), so rather than three commercial networks, where unless the government sold spectrum to allow a fourth, there is literally no possibility of adding another (putting aside the billions required to do this), we have a platform where anyone can produce and distribute media. And just because I’m small, doesn’t mean I can’t get an audience. Even sometimes, a big one. So what will come to matter emerges out of the network, not because there is a pre-existing structure that I get put into.
Seems parts of my research time (the time when I ordinarily write essays, book chapters, conference papers) is being swallowed in the carnival that is the mediafactory networked media blogs. Sitting at home this morning editing some work, quick check of my Feedly subscriptions and 211 unread blog posts. This is good, but also raises a common problem of what we call ‘scale’ online. For example, while it is a good idea for people to be able to ask questions, in a lecture scenario of 120 students and 50 minutes the scale doesn’t work, there simply isn’t the capacity for everyone’s questions. Similarly online it might be nice to reply to people who contact you, at a certain point this becomes too large a task. This is why people who ‘get’ the network invent things like Twitter, which scales elegantly. It is one to many with some possibility of direct communication but it isn’t premised on it specifically. In our case, at the moment, I write into and around your blogs as a way of providing feedback, promoting the role of blogging as knowledge making and learning, and to ‘shape’ our understanding of things. But it doesn’t scale. 120 students writing this much means it is not a model (where a teacher reads and responds) that is sustainable. It is, though, a good model for a brief intensive time to kick start come hot house something. Be interesting to try to change this after the blogs are assessed, for instance working out a way to get you to write more specifically to each other’s posts?
Valerie Keller on change, and organisations. Why is this relevant? Some of you will begin your own companies, and you need to understand this. Most of you will work in other companies, and while you might start at the bottom most will rise quickly. Change, how to manage it but also do it successfully, is the currency that will let you survive. As we’ve said, change is the one constant. Given that, we end up with two groups. Or three. Those who notice the change afterwards, then try to catch up. Those who notice the change then think it doesn’t matter (and then it’s too late – once upon a time the Saturday Age newspaper was phone book thick – oh, bad example because, um, Sensis, the directory business in Telstra that once made millions from the Yellow Pages, well, they’re kinda in trouble too – anyway the Age was phone book thick, it was full of classified ads, in Melbourne if you were looking for a house to rent, buy, a car, pets, old furniture, factory equipment, the Saturday Age was to the go to paper, it was literally described as “Fairfax’s rivers of gold”, and made so much money they could afford high quality journalism and made them the flagship newspaper in Australia, they ignored the rise of the internet until they had lost pretty much all of their classified advertising, been on the back foot ever since), and those who initiate the change. We want you to be in that first group.
Then hot on its heels a story about Evan Williams (Blogger, Twitter, and now Medium) and how Medium – which is doing amazing things – is a company with no managers. Read it, deep double loop learning. This IS the model of this subject. Not that there is no senior teacher, or perfectly mapped out curriculum, but who you are as people and what you become is more important than any naff content of the subject. Learning and beginning to create knowledge (which is already happening via the blogs) is the first big change that the network enables. You are already doing it, and in a rather odd way (a nice odd way is what I mean), many of you haven’t realised it yet…
Just a list culled from the earlier post about the Boston Globe sale, Patrick picks this up, wondering specifically about journalism. He also, earlier made some good points about traditional media being just that.
Nice parody about the death of print, courtesy of The Onion. A nice speculative come fictional task would be to read the obituary for television. What would you say? Why had it died?