Eighteen Challenges in Contemporary Literature

Bruce Sterling in WIRED online projects on the difficulties faced for literature and book publishing today. Below are what he sees as eighteen challenges for contemporary literature:

1. Literature is language-based and national; contemporary society is globalizing and polyglot.

2. Vernacular means of everyday communication — cellphones, social networks, streaming video — are moving into areas where printed text cannot follow.

3. Intellectual property systems failing.

4. Means of book promotion, distribution and retail destabilized.

5. Ink-on-paper manufacturing is an outmoded, toxic industry with steeply rising costs.

6. Core demographic for printed media is aging faster than the general population. Failure of print and newspapers is disenfranching young apprentice writers.

7. Media conglomerates have poor business model; economically rationalized “culture industry” is actively hostile to vital aspects of humane culture.

8. Long tail balkanizes audiences, disrupts means of canon-building and fragments literary reputation.

9. Digital public-domain transforms traditional literary heritage into a huge, cost-free, portable, searchable database, radically transforming the reader’s relationship to belle-lettres.

10. Contemporary literature not confronting issues of general urgency; dominant best-sellers are in former niche genres such as fantasies, romances and teen books.

11. Barriers to publication entry have crashed, enabling huge torrent of subliterary and/or nonliterary textual expression.

12. Algorithms and social media replacing work of editors and publishing houses; network socially-generated texts replacing individually-authored texts.

13. “Convergence culture” obliterating former distinctions between media; books becoming one minor aspect of huge tweet/ blog/ comics/ games / soundtrack/ television / cinema / ancillary-merchandise pro-fan franchises.

14. Unstable computer and cellphone interfaces becoming world’s primary means of cultural access. Compositor systems remake media in their own hybrid creole image.

15. Scholars steeped within the disciplines becoming cross-linked jack-of-all-trades virtual intelligentsia.

16. Academic education system suffering severe bubble-inflation.

17. Polarizing civil cold war is harmful to intellectual honesty.

18. The Gothic fate of poor slain Poetry is the specter at this dwindling feast.

Are academics better bloggers than journalists?

From Andrew Sullivan's blog:

Felix Salmon, using a Brad DeLong post as a springboard, explains why academics have taken to blogging more easily than many journalists:

“Situating your work and your contribution in the ongoing discussion” is exactly what bloggers do — and it’s something that journalists find very difficult. Being original (the fetishization of the “scoop”, even if it’s only by five minutes) is vastly overpraised in journalism, and journalists as a group tend to imbue everything they do with an incredible amount of secrecy. Try asking a magazine writer what she’s working on: she probably won’t tell you. After all, you might scoop her!

I think Brad’s insight helps explain to a very large extent the reason why academics took to the blogosphere with so much more alacrity than journalists, and why journalists-turned-bloggers can be pretty stingy with links and hat-tips, at least when they’re starting out. And of course it helps explain the otherwise inexplicable decision by Bloomberg to bar its reporters from even discussing “media competitors”, let alone linking to them.

Tenth-rate estate

I thought that I would point out this pile of crap from The Courier-Mail, as it attempts a hatchet job on cultural studies. An invitation to Associate Professor Jason Jacobs from the Faculty of Arts at the University of Queensland to be a keynote speaker at a conference on The Sopranos at Fordham University in New York gets written up like this:

TAXPAYERS forked out up to $2000 to help send a University of Queensland lecturer to a US conference on the mafia TV series The Sopranos.

The kind of low-rent university bashing is a staple of Brisbane's monopoly print newspaper, despite the fact that is also derives considerable revenue from the universities through various education supplements, as well as often relying on academics to comment on television show when they are running a story including, yes, The Sopranos. I certainly know that I have done 30 minute interviews with Courier-Mail journalists at short notice, and many people in media and cultural studies have done the same.

Readers of this blog would know that I am a fan of The Sopranos so my comment may be coloured by this. I am also a fan of Jason Jacobs' work, and feel that he deserves much better than this nonsense. So if anyone needs some 'Cliff's Notes' (as they say in the US) on how to respond to this stuff, try this:

• Television is the most widely used consumer entertainment technology in the world, with UNESCO estimating that 65% of the world's population or abut 4 billion people, have a TV in their homes. It is therefore important to understand how it work, not only as a technology, but as a disseminator of culture;
  
• The Sopranos has been watched by ten of millions of people around the world. In the US, its audience was about 14 million, even though it was on HBO, which is a premium cable channel;
• The Sopranos has a particularly complex and sophisticated narrative structure. On tis, don't take my word for it, but check out Steven Johnson's Everything Bad is Good for You, where he cites the how as an example of popular culture that is making its audiences smarter by requiring them to deal with multi-strand narrative;
• The gangster genre was been a recurring device used as an allegory to tell wider stories about 2oth century America, from Scarface, Public Enemy and White Heat in the 30s and 40s, to the Godfather film of the 70s, to Scarface, Goodfellas and Casino in th 80s and 90s, to The Sopranos in the 2000s;
• Without knowing the details of UQ's budget, I would suspect that, like most Australian universities, it now derives about half of its total budget from non-government sources (student fees, grant income, consultancies, IP etc.), with the other half coming from HECS payments no being made by past students. So the idea that 'the taxpayer' as generic category is paying for this travel that the journalist in question - Darren Cartwright in case you are interested - doesn't know much about how universities are now funded;
• Given that you would struggle to get a return flight to the US for $2000, I would say that both UQ and Australia are getting a bargain to have Jason Jacobs' work recognised internationally at such a conference.

A quick Google check on coverage in U.S. media would suggest that they are far less sniffy about any of this than we find in the embattled provincialism of today's Courier-Mail.