by David Burn | Jul 11, 2007 | Digital culture, Literature, Media
Andrew Keen has the digeratis’ panties in a twist. His new book, The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing Our Culture and Assaulting Our Economy grew out of a controversial essay published last year by The Weekly Standard.
According to the review in the The New York Times, his book is “a shrewdly argued jeremiad against the digerati effort to dethrone cultural and political gatekeepers and replace experts with the wisdom of the crowd.”
Mr. Keen argues that “what the Web 2.0 revolution is really delivering is superficial observations of the world around us rather than deep analysis, shrill opinion rather than considered judgment.†In his view Web 2.0 is changing the cultural landscape and not for the better. By undermining mainstream media and intellectual property rights, he says, it is creating a world in which we will “live to see the bulk of our music coming from amateur garage bands, our movies and television from glorified YouTubes, and our news made up of hyperactive celebrity gossip, served up as mere dressing for advertising.†This is what happens, he suggests, “when ignorance meets egoism meets bad taste meets mob rule.â€
This reaction to the democratization of media is to be expected. I’m surprised there aren’t more such critics lurking about. Grassroots structures scare so called experts. This particular expert is also quite the name caller. The San Francisco Chronicle invited him to guest blog, and he used the opportunity to say:
Unfortunately, the intellectual life of Silicon Valley is monopolized by intellectual communists like Stanford’s Larry Lessig, hippies posing as futurists like Stewart Brand and Kevin Kelly, new-age geeks like Larry Page and Craig Newmark, wide-eyed economic utopians like Chris “Long Tail” Anderson and technophile impresarios like John Battelle and Tim O’Reilly.
Thankfully, he also calls himself an elitist.
I fully admit to being an elitist. I believe in a strictly meritocratic society of experts, one is which creative ability is rewarded. I think that most people have little talent and shouldn’t be encouraged to think of themselves as writers or musicians or porn stars. I want to be educated and entertained by the opinion of Habermas, Zizek, Lucy Kellaway or Maureen Dowd, rather than the ranting of some half-educated blogger.
This guy has the whiff of Ann Coulter about him. In other words, the more outrageous his babble the more press he gets.
by David Burn | Apr 25, 2007 | Digital culture, Politics
On the eve of the season’s first Presidential debate tomorrow night in Oranegburg, SC, I thought I’d take a look at what really matters—the number of MySpace friends each candidate has to his or her name.
But hey, let’s not say that numbers are everything. What kind of friends do these politicians attract? That must count for something (not at the polls, of course). With this in mind, Edwards the Handsome looks good. He has Liz for Edwards [& a better America] in his corner, for instance. Liz is 16, attractive, likes good music and isn’t afraid to express her progressive values. One of the stickers on her MySpace page reads, “I’m Straight, Not Narrow.” Another reads, “Born Okay the First Time.” Liz is too young to vote, but she’s already an influencer. Maybe there’s hope for America yet.
by David Burn | Mar 31, 2007 | Digital culture, Media
Editor & Publisher picked up a Poynter study on media consumption.
In a surprise finding, online readers finish news stories more often than those who read in print, according to the Poynter Institute’s Eyetrack study released Wednesday at the American Society of Newspaper Editors conference here.
When readers chose to read an online story, they usually read an average of 77% of the story, compared to 62% in broadsheets and 57% in tabloids.
In addition, nearly two-thirds of online readers read all of the text of a particular story once they began to read it, the survey revealed. In print, 68% of tabloid readers continued reading a specific story through the jump to another page, while 59% did so in broadsheet reading.
by David Burn | Feb 25, 2007 | Digital culture, Media, Politics
Anna G. Arutunyan, an editor at the Moscow News, writing about the Russian blogosphere for The Nation, reports that 700,000 LiveJournal users post in Cyrillic, making them second only to English speakers.
The LiveJournal community in Russia is known as Zhivoi Zhurnal, or ZheZhe for short. Arutunyan says Russian bloggers are becoming a lively alternative to mainstream media, and they’re using the site as an online organizing tool for offline protests.
LiveJournal founder Brad Fitzpatrick first visited Moscow last October when his company, Six Apart, announced a partnership with the Russian media company SUP-Fabrik, which would service the enormous Cyrillic sector. What struck him was the social magnitude of ZheZhe and the serious content of its journal entries. In America, “LiveJournal is lots of people writing to ten people [each, and] reading each other,” he told me. In ZheZhe this is magnified into thousands of readers. What for Americans is an electronic diary accessible to a few chosen acquaintances became, for Russians, a platform for forging thousands of interconnected virtual “friends.” And Fitzpatrick believes it has potential as a tool for activism. “I really appreciate what it is as a political platform.”
What ZheZhe seems to illustrate is that a crucial aspect of civil society is not just the freedom to report on what you see but the ability to get people inspired enough to react. Russians are already notorious for their centuries-old communal spirit–or sobornost. ZheZhe might be one of the technologies that will finally get them to act on it.
For additional user-generated content from Russian, check out RuTube.
by David Burn | Dec 5, 2006 | Digital culture, Literature
Science Fiction writer, Cory Doctorow, wrote a piece for Forbes on the business value of giving his work away for free on the internet.
I’ve been giving away my books ever since my first novel came out, and boy has it ever made me a bunch of money.
How did I talk Tor Books into letting me do this? It’s not as if Tor is a spunky dotcom upstart. They’re the largest science fiction publisher in the world, and they’re a division of the German publishing giant Holtzbrinck. They’re not patchouli-scented info-hippies who believe that information wants to be free. Rather, they’re canny assessors of the world of science fiction, perhaps the most social of all literary genres. Science fiction is driven by organized fandom, volunteers who put on hundreds of literary conventions in every corner of the globe, every weekend of the year. These intrepid promoters treat books as markers of identity and as cultural artifacts of great import. They evangelize the books they love, form subcultures around them, cite them in political arguments, sometimes they even rearrange their lives and jobs around them.
Doctorow argues that eBooks are viral artifacts that want to be passed from one friend to another. He also says they are, in essence, ads for the printed and bound versions of his work, which many of his readers eventually purchase.
by David Burn | Sep 4, 2006 | Digital culture
Wall Street Journal questions whether bloggers, especially those who rely on their sites for income, can afford to ever take a break. It seems an appropriate question on this day of no labor.
In the height of summer-holiday season, bloggers face the inevitable question: to blog on break or put the blog on a break? Fearing a decline in readership, some writers opt not to take vacations. Others keep posting while on location, to the chagrin of their families. Those brave enough to detach themselves from their keyboards for a few days must choose between leaving the site dormant or having someone blog-sit.
To be sure, most bloggers don’t agonize over this decision. Of the 12 million bloggers on the Internet, only about 13% post daily, according to the Pew Internet and American Life Project. Even fewer — 10% — spend 10 or more hours a week on their blogs.
I clearly fall into some strange category, for I have my hand in six blogs at the moment. Rain or shine, work day or day off, I take in information. Blogging is what comes out the other end. It may be shit somethimes, but it’s a totally natural process.
by David Burn | Aug 28, 2006 | Digital culture
Like many busy people who rely on the interweb today, Jory des Jardins, one of the co-founders of BlogHer, gets buried in email, particularly the unwanted kind. Yet she keeps her sense of humor about it–not an easy thing to do with persistent electronic intruders.
I’ve stopped looking at SPAM as the problem and begun to look at the bright side of including it in my life. I know that if I don’t receive it, something is most certainly wrong with my computer or internet connection. It’s the equivalent of a breathing machine; it provides a din of normalcy that I’m used to.
by David Burn | Jul 15, 2006 | Digital culture, Literature
Blilionaire blogger, Mark Cuban recently wrote, “The Internet is Boring. It’s old news.” Perhaps it is, but the people found therein are far from boring, or old news. By putting the power of the press directly in the hands of individuals with something to say, we no longer need rely on the filters–editors, agents, publishers and retailers–to access the material we seek.
Seattle writer, Ariel Meadow Stallings, reads over 100 blogs. She recently wrote, “Among my group of blog peers, there are very few of us who still write honestly on our blogs. In the Age of Google it can feel too risky to write about the juicy stuff, and with the number of trolls crawling around the web it can be pretty rough to bare your soul and make yourself vulnerable.”
I can relate, as I too keep my laundry mostly in the hamper. But there are others who air it out, and the more they do, the more addictive their writing becomes. Heather Armstrong is famous for presenting the minutae of her life, and the lives of her husband, dog and young child. In fact, she now makes her living by living as an open book.
Holly Burns is another writer not afraid to share. And like Armstrong, she’s wicked funny. Here’s a bit of her wit:
Q. What would you say to President Bush if you could speak to him for 30 minutes?
A. I’m not sure I could stand to be in the same room as him for 30 minutes. Could we do it behind glass, with one of those prison telephones? Because then I’d probably give him a whistlestop crash course in grammar, and hold up flash cards to quiz him on pronounciation. I’d tell him to just step down already, and I’d probably use the word “smarmy.” Maybe I’d also use one of my rudimentary Cantonese phrases. And not “please stop the bus.”
Here’s more of her prose styling:
My name is Holly Burns. I currently live in Charleston, South Carolina — though sort of by accident. It’s very pretty and the lemonade is good and I totally love how everyone is named after streets and has a set of monogrammed notecards, but I do sometimes look at my driver’s license and think OH MY GOD, I LIVE IN SOUTH CAROLINA.
Burns and her man recently left Charleston for San Francisco. The Palmetto State is now short one prolific and interesting voice.
Cuban’s provocative statement about the web being boring stems from what he sees as a dearth of earth shattering innovation. As an entrepreneur looking to make his next billion, he may be right. But I’m also right. The web is a delivery mechanism. Saying it’s boring is like saying telephone lines are boring.
by David Burn | Jun 9, 2006 | Digital culture, Literature
Wendy Atterberry and Sarah Hatter publish Awesome!, a site about cool shit. The pair also launched a book publishing concern in January, Misc. Books and Press. Their first release, The Very Best Weblog Writing Ever By Anyone Anywhere In The Whole Wide World, is now available for pre-order.
We were so sick of bad writing and boring weblogs getting so much attention, we started a publishing company with the intent to issue an anthology of the best weblog writing we could find. We wanted to bring all the attention back to people who deserved to be mentioned in the press but were overlooked because of the popularity of the status quo.
Sure enough, I’ve only heard of two of the authors–Claire Zulkey and Holly Burns. The others I need to discover.
The release of this book brings me back to a topic I’ve given a lot of thought to in recent months–writing styles and editorial directions on blogs, particularly my own. I generally practice what’s become known as cut and paste blogging. My posts here and on Adpulp tend to be more about what I’m reading, than what I’m writing. I point to things.
Because I have other outlets for my writing and writing is my job, I don’t often feel the need to stretch creatively in this space. I approach it more like note taking. My blog posts are a narrative archive that I can access later, for whatever reason. And I’m good with that, but when I read a literary blogger or professional journalist who does use her blog to stretch creatively, it gives me reason to pause.
by David Burn | Jun 4, 2006 | Digital culture, Music
There’s a new Panic podcast, or Panicast, on the block. We have Ted Rockwell of Everyday Companion to thank for this effort.
At the moment, I’m listening to the Panic’s first-ever performance at Red Rocks in Morrison, CO. I love early 90s Panic. It’s got that whiskey in hand, rocking chair on the front porch sound that I find comforting.
Everday Companion Podcast is available on iTunes. There are curretnly nine episodes for download. Just search for “Widespread Panic” in the podcast directory.
