Feb
28
Men who talk to Pigs
Filed Under eBook, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, Publishing, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment
Phil Archer, senior patriarch of the BBC’s fifty year old radio soap opera “The Archers”, died this week. One of the memories aired recalled his habit of talking his problems through with a favourite sow. The therapeutic value of this cannot be doubted (think only of the Empress of Blandings). Outside our back door on the farm we had a pen of four baconers. Tom, Dick, Harry and Tother (The Other – our sustained imaginative capacity in naming names was not impressive – and we named each pen with the same names when their predecessors departed for market). They existed to eat the table scraps of a large household – and to be my confidants, advisors and custodians of every secret that came my juvenile way. Their responses (after feeding) were always courteous and sagacious, and graced with a recognition of the value of what I had to say not always accorded elsewhere to the youngest member of the family. They formed a network of therapeutic empathy.
These thoughts came to mind this week when reading of Richard Dawkins’ problems with comments on his blog : one fundamentalist creationist called him a ” suppurating rat’s rectum ” and this is as polite as it gets. But James Harkin, reflecting on this for The Observer, also notes the way in which opinion follows the crowd on the Web, and the way in which other’s approval sparks our own. Here we are community sheep, not sapient pigs, and the urge to shout down opposing voices in shorter and terser text (I am always worried by capitalized blog comments) becomes over-whelming. And social media align us quicker than ever before with received wisdom from our community: watch out then for fascism online.
This week I gave the lecture already referred to here (and which will be appearing in Downloads soon). One of my questioners asked about the future of reading and writing, and I found myself unable to answer except in terms that he ust have found very depressing. We do have a new form of reading within the networked community already: “power-browse” is a way of catching at the essence of things, and noting (and sometimes following) the things that link with them. We also have a new way of writing: into the interstices of our readings we interpose messaging which is intended to convey meaning through association. This can be highly misleading, and much blogging and messaging seems to me to be about sorting out the inconsistencies. But we are in our infancy: we will learn.
So it is no use complaining that David Shields’ new book, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, is a hymn in praise of plagiarism. The entire social network discourse is founded upon plagiarism, as users repeat and re-interpret through epetition. Similarly, Shield’s reviewers have attacked his assault on the narrative form of the novel. They all assert, without evidence, that we need stories.
I do not see this in the network space at present. Nor indeed is experimentation, like Penguin’s attempt to write a community novel, very encouraging. Cory Doctorow has made a presence from what is in effect blog-supported serialization; Charles Dickens would recognize this form as being unchanged from the serializations of Blackwoods and others of 150 years ago.
So one thing I shall be doing in coming weeks is looking at the development of multiple media art forms in the web , looking at Liza Holton and Kate Pullinger amongst others as artists and publishers who demonstrate a future for stories in multiple media (or “transmedia”, as some are already calling it) publishing. Any thoughts on other places to look would be welcome .
Meanwhile , there is a lot more to say on the ” future of reading ” question. And the discussion is a very old one , as illustrated by Tim Martin in reviewing Robert Darnton’s The Case for Books http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/56908e02-2262-11df-a93d-00144feab49a.html on FT.com. ”
Part of the delight of Darnton’s book is his adept grasp of how history repeats itself. He has the scholarly nous to show that worries about books and reading habits extend back far further than the information age. His introduction quotes the Italian scholar Niccolò Perotti, writing with asperity to his friend in 1471 about “this new kind of writing which was recently brought to us from Germany”: Gutenberg’s black-letter type. “Even when they write something worthwhile,” Perotti complained, “they twist and corrupt it to the point where it would be much better to do without such books, rather than having a thousand copies spreading falsehoods over the whole world.” Perotti was writing barely two decades after the invention of movable type but the complaint would not sound out of place in the mouths of today’s critics, as they complain of the ephemerality of the blogosphere, decrying “churnalism” and “factoids” and lamenting the Chinese whisper effects of the contemporary internet.”
I am now going out to find a a sympathetic ear ( lop or prick’d will do , but there is something very comforting about the philosophical nature of the Gloucester Old Spot ) and discuss this further . I will let you know what I learn .
Feb
17
Speaking with Voices
Filed Under B2B, Blog, Industry Analysis, internet, news media, Publishing, Uncategorized, Workflow | 1 Comment
I have to be “moved to speak”, which is why the progress of this blog is so jerkily irregular. A childhood fascination with George Whitefield, the eighteenth century hedge preacher in my native Gloucestershire, taught me about the compulsion to speak out. Whitefield once spoke to a crowd of 10,000 (it is said) at Kingswood outside Bristol, and “men and women answered his call with their voices, compelled to speak as the spirit moved them”. (My father preferred the more refined oratory of the nineteenth century society preacher, Charles Haddon Spurgeon, who reduced vast audiences to tears, but my father’s daily observances were more moved by prunes than prayer so I take this reference lightly.)
You are being taken down this track by someone under pressure, from friends and colleagues, allegedly “interested in what you will say about the sale of the Guardian’s regional newspapers.” I am not so moved. The deal is trivial and, given the UK regional press, inevitable. The consideration is only interesting if you recall that two years ago DMGT refused an offer of £1 billion for its Northcliffe regional company: valued at the the price point established by this latest deal they would now get, by my calculation, £220 million. One of the disadvantages of reserving all voting rights to A shareholders, and they all being family and friends, is that you lock in a sentimental regard for the past as well as defending yourself against predators. Meanwhile, back at the Guardian, we have all long acknowledged that the not-for-profit trust at GMG can only act to protect the newspaper. More locked in sentiment. The Guardian has 37 million registered online users, but exists to keep the print. Then I, who love the paper, say turn print into the offshoot of the web and create custom newspapers deliverable from local print centres working on contract to deliver to subscribers within 12 hours of customization. The next attack must be on the print works.
But the voices I am really moved to write about are on mobile phones. Two discussions this week convince me that we are not taking the mobile or the mobile network seriously enough. We are still in the Stone Age of mobile content. Is there not something faintly ridiculous about Steve Jobs telling the media last week that they were doing a grand job, and their content was ” invaluable”? And the media having an attack of the shivers about Apple not giving them enough user data, or allowing them to connect print or web subscriptions to the Apple store subscription. Truth to tell, I cannot think of a single media property that is “have to have” on an iPad. You buy the device , and then it is “nice” to be able to read a Murdoch newspaper on it (possibly nicer there than anywhere, given the obliterating possibilities of “delete”). Sports Illustrated seems to be taking the platforms of mobility seriously, but for the most part inflexible real world content , or lightly reheated web content is the menu on offer. When the content/service/solution is so hot that you can give away the reader with the subscription, then we will know that we have cossed the great divide. Until then, the content industry just has a crossed line.
So who does know anything about this? Well , the B2B boys are well down the track. Here is the voice of the head of IT at the US insurer Nationwide, talking to the FT about his mobile apps: “For the best experience, it is better not to have a web-based version [of the application] but one that is specific, depending on what the user is doing. It is about having right functionality.”
“It is not just a question of designing applications so they fit on a mobile device’s smaller screen, he says, but providing the right amount of task-specific information to field-based staff. Too often, re-purposed PC or web applications produce cluttered screens, and frustrated users.”
So this will be our test bed. B2B publishers will want to quickly integrate content into mobile workflow models. Apps will become cheaper and cheaper to originate and customize and a great deal of current workflow and process content work will migrate into mobile, after existing for a while in both fixed line and mobile networks. Commercial users will “publish ” for themselves, and content originators will become systems integrators ( proprietory and third party content integrated with process software to drive solutions), as well as sellers of key standard pieces of functionality.
In the course of time those who survive these troubled media years will be publishing fluently to all of the networks. I do hope the Guardian is one of them. And I am certain that by then the hegemony of the keyboard will have been broken, and we shall be communicating with these platforms in the most natural mode possible – our Voices.
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