I haven’t talked about Apple for a while and, honestly, I am not going spend too much time on them now. It’s their platform and they can make up whatever rules they want for it. Frankly, it’s not the only game in town. My media purchasing is not limited at all by not having any Apple products or their iTunes software installed on any of my systems. I know they have a large share of the marketplace right now (The University has a huge Apple following), but I do love a world where those things still can and do change. Apple is not the end-all-be-all; it is merely another company trying to lock-in as much money as it can before the cards start to tumble.

I believe in content. I don’t believe in platforms. Apple can do what it wants. Some content creators will cave and pay their 30%; the rest won’t. In either case, content continues and what Apple has proven is that their iPad or iPhone – or any of their hardware, for that matter – has a very limited value. It’s the all about the apps. It’s the content that really matters. The iPad user doesn’t care about the iPad, they care about what cool things they can get for their iPad. That is what Apple is trying to control because that is where the money is. Console developers knew this a long time ago. They could sell a console for a low profit and then feed off the game licensing. This is all that Apple is trying to do. The difference between Apple and console developers is that games used to be sold through retail stores. Apple wants complete control of that as well. Then again, look at Sony, Microsoft, even Google. They all want to do that, to some extent.

As creators, we need to ask ourselves where our content is best placed. Since I am still a small – well non-existent at this point – content creator, Apple’s 30% cut is too high for me. Of course, this ignores all of Apple’s other onerous policies regarding content (which makes me wonder – will Apple also seek to control the type of content that is sold?). Even if I ignore all of those issues – which I wouldn’t -  I don’t want to pass a 30% charge to people interested in buying my work. Of course, I also like to eat. Apple has taken a very adversarial role with content creators and I don’t think that is a positive for anyone. Obviously, Apple doesn’t want my content and luckily I have a whole wide online space in which to sell without Apple. Yeah, it can be rougher out here. Apple’s carefully tended garden, with its manicured lawns, has its benefits. Those benefits just don’t outweigh the costs of lock-in. I have, yet, to see any valid reason that does.

I admit I am a bit spoiled living in Iowa City. This is a mecca for poets, writers and artists of every stripe and color. We have an amazing array of creative talent that passes through this city and I am more than happy to take advantage of it. While I may grumble about driving back and forth to Cedar Rapids as much as I do, I really am glad to have finally moved down here.

There is a problem, though. Iowa City is a unique place and in most small to mid-sized towns the arts are too often easily discarded. Bemidji, a town in North Central Minnesota, is smaller than Iowa City; although, after including some of the smaller surrounding towns that size differential begins to diminish somewhat. It has a college, Bemidji State University that serves about 6,500 students in a variety of degree programs including a BFA in Creative Writing and degrees in the Visual Arts, Art History, and Theater [nbcite title="Bemidji State University" year="2010" month="11" publisher="Minnesota State Colleges and Universities" url="http://www.mnscu.edu/campuses/profiles/bemidjistate.html" monthacc="02" dayacc="04" yearacc="2011" type="website" ].

Like everywhere else, times are not good in Minnesota. The budget shortfall is coming close to $6.2 billion and this means cuts to the Universities. There is logic here, I am sure. It’s not a good logic, but I am sure there is some. Student loans are already exceedingly onerous and many people now have to decide whether education is worth the cost. Cutting funding, well, that’s just the icing on the cake and it smacks of cutting your nose off to spite your face. Growth isn’t going to happen if your population isn’t educated well enough to actually find and create new jobs. But hey, who am I to question the mindset of the “powers that be?”

The BSU president, admittedly, is facing some tough choices. He has a $5 million deficit to deal with, thanks to the Minnesota legislature, and he wants his university to survive. So he developed a plan to focus on the majors that drove (and this is a word I am rapidly coming to despise) employability. What does this mean? It means a complete removal of the Art History and Theater major. It means trimming back on English and the Visual Arts. It means adding funding and faculty to the Business and Mass Communication majors. Yeah, you read that right. It means adding to those majors while cutting many others. I understand the president has difficult choices to make. I just hope that he listens to those who have concerns and rethinks a few of his decisions.

If you read the article on the Bemidji Pioneer (linked below), you will see that this isn’t just a BSU issue. Professor Parson’s comments on the issue seem especially cogent. This is an issue with how the relative importance of these programs is determined statewide [nbcite author="Anne Williams" title="‘Honk if you love the arts’: Theater, art supporters protest outside BSU’s Deputy Hall" year="2011" month="02" day="01" publisher="Bemidji Pioneer" url="http://www.bemidjipioneer.com/event/article/id/100025605/" monthacc="02" dayacc="04" yearacc="2011" type="website" ] and, I would argue, on a national level, as well. After all, we’ve seen similar cuts in Albany, NY [nbcite author="Margot Adler" title="Cuts To University's Humanities Program Draw Outcry" year="2010" month="11" day="15" publisher="National Public Radio" url="http://www.npr.org/2010/11/15/131336270/cuts-to-university-s-humanities-program-draw-outcry" monthacc="02" dayacc="04" yearacc="2011" type="website" ] and elsewhere. Do a search for “university cuts arts and theater” and it’s easy to see that BSU is not alone. This is a problem, everywhere.

I’m not going to go into the whole spiel on how much money the arts actually bring in to a community. I’m not going to rant on the benefits and strength of a having a background in the arts. I’ll save all that for another time. What I am going to say is that the loss of culture does not begin in the big cities. It begins in the small towns across this country. If you ever wondered why ignorance seems so prevalent in certain areas, look to cultural decline. Look to a lack of funding for the Arts and you will find a culture in stagnation, unwilling to adapt and change because it doesn’t know how.

It was never taught.

[nbcite print="apa" ]

The ownership and digitization of culture was the topic of a report released on the 10th of January by the Comité des Sages, a Reflection Group assembled by the Vice President of the European Commission for the Digital Agenda, Neelie Kroes, and the European Commissioner for Education, Culture, Multilingualism and Youth, Androulla Vassiliou. Cultural heritage, they argue, is a “universal common good” (9) and access to that heritage should be free and open to all. While they strongly advocate for public-private partnerships they believe that the ultimate responsibility for the preservation of this cultural heritage remains a largely public and governmental responsibility. They see no impetus for a private organization to continue to maintain a work once its commercial viability has waned (29). Of course, this is Europe where created works do actually still enter the free domain not the U.S. where copyright is all but eternal and culture exists only if it can turn a profit. In many ways, this is exactly what the Comité des Sages seems concerned about. By relying on private companies to manage culture – which is just one drawback of the current U.S. copyright insanity – there is the possibility of a “digital Dark Age” (8) in which public and open access to a shared cultural heritage is all but completely lost or limited.

One area of serious concern that is addressed rather heavily is that of orphaned works which constitutes a large portion of 20th century works. So many of the works from the last century are orphaned that the report warns that “there is a ‘black hole of the 20th century’” (17) in which works remain in copyright but are out of distribution and where there is no adequate record of who currently owns the rights. The numbers there are truly astounding and I strongly suggest looking at the statistics in 5.1.5 which note, for example, “almost 90% of the photographic record in UK cultural institutions as orphaned” (17). In addressing orphaned works, it is important to note here that this report is a fairly balanced one which stresses the rights of the owners of a work up until the end of the current EU copyright rules. They do advocate a single system for all orphaned works rather than one segmented by type and I think that makes sense. The sheer enormity of the task at hand would make any added complexity a serious barrier to their ultimate goals.

There does seem to be a real acknowledgment within the report that digitization of culture should be a pressing and immediate goal. While the report’s main thrust has to do with the already ongoing development of a central public repository of European culture, Europeana, the authors seem to acknowledge that this cannot be fully realized without some private partnerships. They quote reports that estimate the cost of digitizing the combined collections of Europe to be at around €100 billion. While they note that projects in other areas have called for somewhat similar funding they do admit that such comparison should be taken with a grain of salt (33). They also acknowledge that culture is not static but added to on a daily basis and thus they are not only looking at digitization but to long-term preservation as well. They outline many of the barriers and issues related to this aspect of digital culture in latter part of the report. The more interesting take here is that they do see the possibility for involvement by tech, travel, media and that seems more than reasonable. What’s more is that they envision a solid return on this investment without limiting access. Beyond the mere payment for involvement, many of these companies could see returns in terms of research and development in new technologies as well as growth opportunities in other sectors. Obviously, I would like to see this more fully spelled out but what they suggest so far is interesting to say the least. It should be noted that this is merely a guidance document but it’s well worth reading. If anything it shows many of the difficulties faced with the digitization of cultural content while at the same time laying a solid argument for why such digitization is so important.

I was going to avoid Patton Oswalt’s obvious trolling in his declaration and desire for the death of supposed Geek culture [nbcite author="Oswalt, Patton" title="Wake Up, Geek Culture. Time to Die" title_periodical="Wired" year="2010" month="12" day="27" url="http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/12/ff_angrynerd_geekculture/all/1" yearacc="2010" type="blog" ]. Indeed, I ignored it for almost a week. It does keep coming up, though, so I thought I’d post some ideas on the appropriation of Geek culture by pop culture.

Let’s start painfully simple: geek culture is pop culture. It always has been. Remember Star Wars? That bastion of nerd culture was incredibly successful. Paramount even learned how to make money from Star Trek. Science fiction made money. We know this. It was all over books, television, and film in the ‘70s and ‘80s. Marvel and DC weren’t some back alley avant-garde artists, they were large companies earning cash and that cash wasn’t coming from a few nerds huddled about in their parent’s basement. It was coming from the mainstream.

I know it’s nice to pretend that it was all ours but the truth is that it never was. I know this is hard to understand but creators tend to want people to embrace their creations. We make things and write things for an audience and most of us don’t sit there quietly hoping that we only get accepted by two or three people. I would love for my work to sell a million copies (I would love for my work to sell any copies, for that matter) and I wouldn’t consider that success a sign that I have suddenly lost all my geek culture cred. In fact, it’s the creators who get to really have that cred. The geeks and nerds, the true ones weren’t content with what was there, they’re the artists, authors and filmmakers who imagine what happened next. That creative culture isn’t part of the mainstream and it never will be simply because it’s a lot of work. Yeah, it’s more accessible and part of Oswalt’s etewaf but the actual act of creation requires effort and runs counter to the idea of the sated consumer.

Everyone wants to cry when their secret thing is discovered and suddenly becomes common. It’s hard to leave the notion of being in the know behind but that is part of life. We grow up, culture grows and evolves, but the geek and the nerds remain. Some channel their love into science. Asimov’s stars are replaced by real ones and impossibly cool devices are transformed from science fiction to science fact. Others move on to tell new stories and discover new tales that will encourage and drive the next generation into its own future.

Sorry, Patton. Geek culture is not going to die. We need it too much.

[nbcite print="mla" ]

Publishing vs. Distribution –
We tend to view publishing and distribution as a unified action and this is not accurate¹. Publishing requires the careful and attentive curation of works by experts who know both the audience and the works in question. Distribution is the method by which those works are provided to the public. You can, to paraphrase Doctorow, place your work in the garage and someone may see it but that’s not publishing. Just posting your work online is the modern equivalent to tossing it in your garage, the chance someone will actually see it is rather low. The Internet, then, is a means of distribution not a means of publishing. This is key to understanding the importance of publishers and it’s also, in my opinion, why there will be a rise in small publishing houses that curate specific types of titles for niche audiences, at least for a while.

The Slush Pile -
Doctorow’s commentary was incredibly apt and again I am paraphrasing, “If you sat me in front of a computer with a web browser and told me to stop clicking when I ran out of interesting things to look at, I’d starve first.” There is a plenty of quality work available online and that work can be customized for audiences. If I post a small video on YouTube for myself and a few friends it may get the play I want even if I don’t reach a million clicks. In addition, as Doctorow noted, the actual cost of clicking on a poor quality work is so low that it is relatively nonexistent. I can easily and immediately go somewhere else and lose little to nothing in the transition. This is entirely different from other forms of media.

The ‘net as an Echo Chamber -
While there are certainly wide assortments of groups that can reinforce any type of opinion a person has on the Internet, it is also very rare that an individual belongs to a single isolated silo. For example, someone may be a conservative or a liberal but they are also mothers and fathers, teachers, professionals, fans, car nuts, and who knows what else. What the Internet does is provide easy transitions between such silos.

It should also be noted that the echo chamber complaint is far less a problem than the echo chamber that can result growing up in a small rather isolated community. Online, leaving the echo chamber is only a click away. The same cannot be said of a small town. My personal opinion is that the real source of concern about the online echo chamber is actually rooted in the idea that the local area is losing its grasp on shaping opinion. Frankly, I don’t always think that is such a bad thing.

Teaching in New Media -
Our kids can’t pay attention! Sound the alarms! This type of argument sounds very similar to every other type of argument that has been made about media in the past. Yes, media can impact how we learn and how we think. Books did, radio did, television did, and so will the Internet. The key is not wholesale disavowal but a reasoned and rational approach to how the new tool can impact and possibly improve teaching. This is especially true with technology – again I point to Rushkoff’s Program or be Programmed. Cory shared an assignment that he taught once and I think it is a great example of how to educate students about new media in general. He had his students contribute to the discussion and make edits, where appropriate, to Wikipedia entries. Then he would track their user names to see the work they were doing and have them comment on it during class time. Quite honestly, this was a fantastic idea and one I may steal in the future.

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