Text and Hubris

As I have been shifting from school back into professional life, I have been looking heavily at freelance work. It is the style of work that suits me and this is the best possible time for me to pursue it. So, I started to look for jobs. I am a strong technical writer but I realized that my available content as a technical writer or even a technical blogger is all hidden behind corporate firewalls. Most of my technical work was done for specific platforms or companies. I don’t have much a portfolio.

This site primarily focuses on literature and new media but it is supposed to include to include some technical information as well. So I’m going to start doing that. It might help a few people, it gives me something to write about, and it gives me something to show prospective clients. If this is my face to the world, I better make it worthwhile.

Oh and if you know anyone in need of my services, don’t hesitate to let me know. I’m available!

I had the opportunity to attend an informal discussion/presentation by Lance Mannion with occasional comments from Stephen Kuusisto titled Literary Writing in the Second Digital Age. In it they discussed whether blogs deserve their still often-maligned status as the creation of narcissists screaming into the echo chamber or whether they were something more? Mannion and Kuusisto argue that for many writers the blog has become the next evolution of the much vaunted author’s journal. As such, they contain snippets of ideas that can evolve and build into future poems and stories. They become a place for an author to share opinions, moments of reaction, and whatever else seems to fill their lives. The blog, then, for these authors becomes a medium for sharing and, almost more importantly, for storing and recalling important moments and thoughts. While it is not a replacement for other forms of writing, it is a valuable tool for the authors who are so inclined to use it.

Listening to Mannion talk, what quickly became apparent was that his blog primarily acts a way to stay connected with the world beyond his computer. According to him, the best part of running his blog comes when he is able to leave the screen behind and, instead, meet and talk with intelligent, powerful, and connected people the world over. The blog became a way to connect, share, and meet these people. It was, in a sense, his contribution to the commons and the discussions that were going on. I love this idea because, at least in my mind, this is the real reason the Internet should exist. It opens the doors of communication even wider. Even as I type this, my twitter client is streaming, collecting a #litchat discussion stream which I will read later and I have added both Mannion’s and Kuusisto’s blogs to my RSS feed. While we may not always like to admit it, writers like community. We want people to read us and, in turn, we want to read other people. That is almost a required function of the job.

While both Mannion and Kuusisto made clear that blogs were not a replacement for print publications, Kuusisto did note how publishing his work in a digital format made it more accessible and allowed for a much faster translation and dissemination of his works than did traditional print. This idea that there is a balance between print and digital publishing is one that I wish more people would take into account. Print isn’t going away, it will be a tragedy if it ever does. Instead, there is this great balance where digital access is opening new doors for distribution and even creating new ways of making print accessible. This is, in almost every way, a symbiotic relationship not a parasitic one.

Beyond that, what really caught my attention was a brief discussion on how literary fiction and poetry is, in some sense, a (and I am trying to remember the exact phrasing here) “socially informed and culturally aware form of vanity publishing.” Somewhere, I hear a clamor of authors gathering their pitchforks but I think there is some truth to that statement. There appears to be a false notion for many undergrads (and even some grad students) that there is money in writing. I’m not sure where that comes from as we have been told from day one that there is no money in writing but I am sure the first year out of college will disabuse them of such a notion. If we’re not doing this for money, then, if we write, we do so because we think we have something to say and that is, in a very real sense, vanity.

It’s why this blog is called Text and Hubris. But that is the point, after all. I want to share and I want to tell my stories. I hope that there are enough people who want to listen/read and in return I do my damnedest to be great listener/reader as well. It is the least I can do.

As I close, I will continue to complain about notification for these events. If I had known about it earlier, I would have have noted it here and in the CW4 forum as well. I am sure this would have been very valuable to the Intermedia and New Media students but it didn’t look like it made it to any of them. As with so many things, my only notification came from a hastily propped up sign on the door to EPB. Obviously, this was a talk that fell directly into my interest and study area, so I did cancel a meeting in order to sit in. I’m glad I did. I just wish more people had that opportunity.

Links
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Lance Mannion: Lance Mannion
Stephen Kuusisto: Planet of the Blind

Post-PC world? Really? Tell me, how many apps (Apple or Android) are developed without a PC? Post-PC simply means buying read-only devices. It means an acceptance of the projected norm and a surrender of creative control to those who still have… PC’s.
» Read the rest of this entry «

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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I’ve been following up on the whole Open Bookmarks project and I’m impressed with the idea. As my last post will attest, I grow weary of the din of angst (of hurrahs) that surrounds the always unstable and transitioning world of literature and the arts. Just as literature is not going to die, neither will the need to study it. If anything, that need is greater now than ever. With this in mind, I welcome the idea of marginalia rising in importance and becoming something of value.

For most of my life, books and I have had a private rather insular relationship. I would share parts with close friends or in book clubs or classes but, by and large, my notes and thoughts remained unshared. Indeed, most of the books in my library were rarely lent out and even then I would have been quite upset if those I had shared the text with decided to add their thoughts to the margins. It wasn’t until I started examining early Renaissance manuscript culture that I realized how much my fastidious care of my own books was doing a disservice to the text.

It is easy to see the creation of books as a one-sided process. The author writes the text while the reader passively reads the text. In my opinion, reading books in such a way is never as satisfying as it could be. Just like my children were taught in elementary school, reading is an active process. It is more than active in terms of understanding and comprehension, however. Reading should engage thought; encourage conversation, if you will. This conversation used to take place in the margins of the printed text. Now, it can take place in a virtual space.
The why is simple, it adds context and develops a better understanding of the texts and the world in which they were written. In all honesty, I think Prof. Alison Wiggins of the University of Glasgow says it best in her article on marginalia in Chaucer’s work,

This kind of simulated experience is certainly part of the attraction of marginalia — the thrill of eavesdropping on the conversations of the dead. These conversations may be addressed by individual readers to the author, or they may be the conversations that readers had between themselves, around, across, or adjacent to their books. Either way, marginalia offer the possibility, the hope, of conjuring up the noisy, animate world that once surrounded these now long-silent volumes. ¹

This noisy world still exists today and modern texts would be the better for it.

That said, there is still room for concern. The most pressing is who owns the annotations that people make and who controls the distribution of those annotations. Without individual control and ownership over annotations there looms the risk of misuse and abuse. This should be addressed early in order to facilitate the growth of this idea.

It will be interesting to see what Open Bookmarks brings to the table. I look forward to what comes next but then, I usually do.

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