Posts by giovanni tiso
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Hard News: Rough times in the trade, in reply to Russell Brown,
If we had a foolproof system for recognising and rewarding creative works on their innate merit, all this stuff might be less necessary, but we don't have that.
We have never had it, but that's no reason to allow the perfect to be the enemy of the good.
We do however now have a system for measuring the readership of blogs and how many times a YouTube video has been watched and we could probably meter peer-to-peer quite effectively, not to root out infringers, but to see what people reward with their time, or through citation/reuse. So we could begin to think of a system that directs resources to the makers of that content. Even if it happens to be Warner Brothers or Cameron Slater.
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Hard News: Rough times in the trade, in reply to Russell Brown,
Authors face a more difficult transition than most; they have fewer alternative revenue options. But it's a little surprising we haven't seen more innovation. Dickens wrote novels as magazine serials -- why don't we see that now?
Lanier would retort that we are not seeing a lot of innovation in music or literature themselves, let alone in the way that they are packaged for consumers. And we are always being sold innovation as one of the upsides of this technological revolution. So where is it?
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Hard News: Rough times in the trade, in reply to nzlemming,
Giovanni called it "your brave new world" but it's not mine - it's here and it's not going away.
Sorry, that doesn't cut it. Copyright law is not a naturally occuring phenomenon, it's a legal framework. The people who came up with it could have said well, unregulated print media is what there is, and it's not going away. And so too in our time if we decided to create an international framework for taxing the proceeds of the likes of Google, or changing the way that the traffic of bits is paid for, we could - there is nothing in the technology that prevents it. It's politics.
Saying that what there is is all that there could ever be, adapt or die, nobody is owed a living, etc., is not a pragmatic response, it's an ideological response. - one that is very popular because Californian-style libertarianism has a stranglehold on the discourse on digital media and because it serves the interest of corporations that are much more powerful than the old media dinosaurs that we paint (not always unfairly) as the enemies of the people.
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Hard News: Rough times in the trade, in reply to Martin Lindberg,
My original point in using Salinger and Proust was that they were reclusive and would have been unlikely to succeed in a world where you need to become a brand and diversify.
Sure, but it's not just that. I mean take Kafka, who didn't even want his stuff published - pretty hard to imagine him spending half the day licking the balls of his Twitter followers. But there is still further value in his works having commodity value in a capitalist society. It means they can get published in translation, or critically annotatated, or edited (a key function in posthumous works) because those professions are rewarded by the system.
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Hard News: Rough times in the trade, in reply to Russell Brown,
The way that talented artists with rich folks always have, I would think. Proust never left home and when his mother died he received a large inheritance that kept him while he did his greatest work.
From which he never earned a dime anyway, since he died before publishing it. I would have also accepted "John Milton sold the rights to Paradise Lost for five pounds" or "James Joyce was a successful and well-known writer but still needed the help of a wealthy benefactor to write Ulysess". Yet those works continue to generate an income for the publishing industry and for critics and commentators, even now that they're out of copyright. (Well, not Ulysses, which isn't yet.)
My point being that the commercial model gave commodity value to the works themselves, which defined the career of professional writer, whether you hacked it or not. To say that there is no longer going to be value in the actual works except as vehicles for ancillary activities like speaking tours and merchandising (or other forms of "engagement" and "innovation" open to the smartest entrepreneurs) means breaking a very important social contract - which is not something I think we should do glibly. I would also contend that how to ensure that intellectuals, journalists and artists can have at least some expectation of earning a living is as much our problem as it is theirs.
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Hard News: Rough times in the trade, in reply to Lilith __,
May be true up to a point but relies on the crowd to judge what has merit.
The crowd includes critics (and not necessarily just professional ones) who in turn have a following. There is a reason why traditional media companies want in - they realise that social networks do some of the functions of arts and culture promotion that used to belong in the mainstream very well indeed.
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Hard News: Rough times in the trade, in reply to Lilith __,
The internet and twitter offer great new ways to connect with fans you already have, but unless you are very lucky and go viral*, you can put your brilliant work out there and no one will ever find it.
Actually, I think quality gets found, but it needs to be displayed in the right context. If that violinist had played wearing a disguise in a concert hall, my guess is that people would have noticed he was good. And actually, to give social networks their due - they are pretty good at promoting unknowns on merit (although there are those like Jaron Lanier who would argue that their taste trends conservative). They're not as good at paying for the stuff, however.
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Fine. But for the record I am far from disdainful of change.
ETA: I owe you an answer for this:
"What does this mean? They manage what exercise? They are purely about marketing, with very large budgets, and I doubt they manage any aspect of it - it's all done for/to them by their publishers."
What I meant is that they regularly attend all the myriad promotional junkets that megastardom requires, it's not as if they sit back and let the publishers do all the work. So they manage fine.
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Hard News: Rough times in the trade, in reply to nzlemming,
That's your misconception but not what I was talking about above. It's actually about engagement, creativity and diversification.
Talk me through how Marcel Proust makes a living in your brave new world.
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Hard News: Rough times in the trade, in reply to nzlemming,
Why?
Because they manage the exercise already, while Salinger and Proust never did. But your examples (and our counterexamples) are meaningless. There are in fact good writers who are excellent self-promoters, probably none more so than Neil Gaiman. What beggars belief is the idea that we should somehow be glad that marketing will become the be-all and end-all more than it already is.