1 note (via jaybushman)
I wish I was writing something insightful and supportive about the charming delight that is Parks & Recreation and how it and Community interact with their television and Internet audiences in provocative ways. I wish I was writing something celebratory about the clever enthusiasm of those shows’ audiences and how they play and participate with those shows through animated GIFs and winking referential quotes. I wish I was writing something lively and fun that praised these things while hinting at something that neither of us had exactly thought out loud before about what makes these shows work.
I might title the piece “The Ballad of Ron Swanson.”
When I buy a book, I am effectively buying water (the content) and a bucket (the actual book, with all it entails). I am taught that most of the value is in the bucket, because that’s what pricing is keyed off of. Hard vs. Softcover establishes the price, not the quality of the content, nor even things I might take as indicators of quality, like the author. So right off the bat, the bucket industry has trained me that the price of water is low, maybe even free. They don’t care though, because they make their money on buckets.
To muddle things further, I have been taught by living in a civilized society that it is entirely reasonable for me to drink the water for free as long as I don’t steal the bucket. That is, once I own a book, i can resell it or give it away and if I don’t own the book I can read it for free by borrowing it from a friend or from the library, or even just by having it read to me. Once again, I’m taught that the value is in the bucket.
Now, the bucket makers aren’t necessarily happy with this arrangement, but they’re kind of obliged to deal with it. Part of that is social pressure – this freedom is part of the culture of books, and fighting it makes you the bad guy – but another part of it is more cynical. See, every other non-consumable good in society is tied to these rules as well – you can gift and loan tools, jewelry, cars or anything else you can think of. To buck this trend, the bucket makers would have to say “Well, wait a minute, we’re different than these other goods. We have this great water which has value of a different kind” and that’s a problem, because so far the whole model is based on putting value on the buckets, not the water, so they don’t want to upset that cart.
This has worked great for a very long time, and people really love their buckets, but some crazy guy has invented plumbing. Suddenly I can get my water from the source, and that really fucks things up. The ways in which it fucks things up are a whole other conversation, but here’s the bit that interests me.
What happens when, if I want to make a gift of a book, I don’t need to buy a new bucket?
See, I will never feel bad about libraries or gifting read books, at least under the current model, but I also feel it probably hurts creators more than anyone else. The idea of “gifting” an electronic file really means “giving a duplicate” unless you want to do something particularly cumbersome with it, and I can see a universe where, in the absence of buckets, the cost of that is small enough to pay casually, and goes directly to the creator.
Sure, this upends a lot of assumption. If money goes to the creator directly, he then becomes the person who has to _hire_ all the people who make a book possible rather than them hiring him. That’s drastic, so much so that it may seem impossible. But in my gut, I’m wondering if it’s the only possible outcome.
-Rob D.
PS – So it’s clear, this is not a “Death to Publishers!” position, merely a “The roles of everyone involved in the book chain are potentially subject to drastic change over the next decade or three”
”7 notes (via terribleminds & deadlyfredly)
What if Twitter… came to life?
We asked some of our friends to film their favorite tweets. We didn’t care how they did it. They could read it. They could act it. They could do it with puppets. Whatever they wanted. The only rules were it had to be a tweet written by someone else and it had to contain the entire tweet and nothing but the tweet.
This is what they gave us.
We hope you enjoy it.
@poeks & @sween
(via)
Quote from Wired’s Clive Thompson.
Do we, though, Clive? Do we think of writing as being either “good or bad?”
While adaptive writing and a carefully wrought paragraph are vital to good discourse, and I agree that the Internet can be a great tool for literacy as long as we’re typing to each other (it’s only a matter of time until video’s the majority medium, isn’t it?), there are two ends to the wire: the writer and the reader.
Writers need to know how to adapt their voice to function, like a designer adapts form to function. However, without appreciation of language, without the listener holding some work to scrutiny for the sake of criticism or praise, new adaptations of voice may go undeveloped. That is, you don’t learn to adapt your voice if the listener doesn’t give a shit how you say something. Readers need to appreciate quality writing, and while the Internet is good for that, too, people need to break a gravity of apathy and risk seeming uncool by engaging the written word — by challenging and daring each other. Great haiku weren’t just written to get around an impediment, they were challenges posed by other poets.
It’s not enough to write and read. We have to hold each other to standards and challenge each other to elevate our writing and, thus, our thinking. We need to help each other develop our various voices.
I think plenty of us get this. I think plenty of us think about writing as being something other than a binary “good or bad,” Clive. Some of us write for a living, but lots of us write for our lives.
