Text and Hubris

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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I wrote a 90 line poem for workshop this week. I actually loaded it into Excel just to make sure the syllabic pattern was right in a line by line count. Tomorrow, that work gets torn apart. I know this is the nature of the beast and I’m not really frightened of their opinions. I am, however, terrified by the possibility that this may be it. That I may not be good enough. In other words, that little critic has taken residence in my skull and what he whispers is downright evil.

This semester has been hard and I feel a bit out of touch in a way I really don’t like. I know that I said yes to one too many projects. I love helping in Cedar Rapids but, with driving and what not, it takes away 8 hours of work time. That means my actual job, a job that I do value, suffers and the one project I was incredibly excited about sits idle. Of course, my volunteer work in Cedar Rapids is not the only issue. It’s been hard to find time this month for all sorts of reasons. I am behind schedule everywhere and that, well, that needs to be fixed as soon as possible.

In a lot of ways, I’ve already begun the process of repair. I am not racing the clock nearly as much as I was earlier this month. I promised this blog would be both an exploration of my poetry and prose and the author who writes it. That is exactly what you are getting. I am looking for solid tools to move forward with and to create and I think I will share this process with the readers as I go. Over the next month, I will be pushing out new builds for my work sites and for the youth program. In addition, I will be completing classes and moving forward with my plans for grad school. The truth is that I love this stuff. I love to write. I love to create and build. I love it and I am terrified of losing it. I think this is the crippling doubt the bogs me down. The good news is that , while the critic is loud, there is always that other voice, that anti-critic, that keeps whispering to me as well.

“They haven’t beaten us til we let them…”

I spent the last few weeks playing with Posterous and trying to integrate it with my existing WordPress platform. I had my reservations about the process. Posterous is not a site that I own and I am not a fan of handing my content over. It did have a great autoposter, though, and I was looking for a simple way to publish to multiple places. The idea of using email was incredibly attractive.

To that end, I can’t fault Posterous at all. It does a great job and I do highly recommend it. It is fully customizable and easily managed. It’s flexible and easy to use but powerful enough for many power users. Unfortunately, for me, it was another step in a chain of dissimilar products. While Posterous and WordPress do work together, a lot of what I do with WordPress cannot be easily duplicated via autopost in posterous. WordPress categories were never right with the posterous auto-post and I generally found myself re-editing WordPress after they finished. It ended up being more work not less.

This means that I will be disabling my Posterous in about a month. All posts are mirrored to my primary site here and I have found a WordPress post-by-email plugin that may actually work a bit better for me. We will have to see how that goes!

I will keep you all posted.