Seeing the light?

I don’t know if it’s just because I’m looking out for stories like this, but man, it’s all about the indies these days. In the mainstream media, I mean. Cos they’ve always been out there, but having The Age write about these subcultures and alternatives means they are becoming REAL alternatives. (Gah, patronising. I just mean, if the mainstream media is paying attention, the underground might be about to see some light. Or maybe it’s the other way round. Heh.)

As usual, I have no time to go into this in more depth, but here’s the articles anyway:

http://www.theage.com.au/news/web/youtube-chases-the-indies/2008/06/20/1213770885370.html

http://www.theage.com.au/news/biztech/tv-print-urged-to-embrace-digital/2008/06/20/1213770882115.html

http://www.theage.com.au/news/music/labelled-with-love/2008/06/19/1213770781342.html

One of these days I’m going to have time to get my news from somewhere other than The Age, too.

It’s Up!

The Brown Owls online documentary is finally up and running, and can be found here.

The lovely Pip has blogged to the MM@M-related world about it. Hooray!

I’m glad it’s done, but it actually wasn’t as stressful as I’d imagined it might be. And it was a lot more fun than writing 3000 word essays for Research Strategies. Ugh.

Hopefully Dean will post a list of all the other students’ work so I can check them out too… It’s frustrating to catch little snippets of what everyone’s grappling with in class and not see the final outcome. Then again, do I need more distractions from my 9-5 workload? I don’t think so…

Back to it!

e.

A dinosaur that might survive?

My lunchtime trawling of The Age online has come up trumps again. This article was in yesterday’s Technology section. It’s a somewhat histrionic report on the US government’s proposed ‘Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement’, that was exposed on Wikileaks a few days ago.

While the Agreement certainly goes far beyond what a sane person would consider reasonable boundaries, and I am no fan of mega-corps milking the creative juices out of artists who feel they have no choice but to work within the current distribution frameworks, I’m still left feeling that somehow the book industry is different. We barely turn a profit, for a start. (Trust me, my wages come out of that profit, and there are PLENTY of people running juices bars bringing home much larger paychecks than mine.) Also, the technology required to make a really beautiful book just isn’t available to individuals. (Except perhaps the Hungry Girls. They’ve done a pretty good job.) And while there is plenty of really great writing out there, especially in the burgeoning blogosphere, it seems unlikely that the online fiction industry will take off in the same way as, say, iTunes.

Part of this is purely commercial. It’s easy for a songwriter to stick a tune or two on their MySpace page for free and include a link somewhere to either buy the rest of the album, or find out where you can see them play, paying them an entrance fee. Sure, they may never hit the big time, but chances are, they’ll do ok. A writer, on the other hand, can hardly post a 3-minute chapter of their novel online and hope it grabs you enough to fork out for the whole 50 000 words. It’s just not the same. A book is a whole, and while purists may argue the same about the lost art of the complete album, there has always been a place in the music industry for stand-alone hits. It’s just not that easy to hypertext a story. (It can be done, but this is a very specific genre.)

I’ve been turning over this question of what the future holds for the publishing industry all semester, and although I’ve always felt that it was just somehow ‘different’ to those other art forms rapidly adapting to the digital era, I never could put my finger on why. But I think, despite all the clammering noise about the ‘way of the future’, the book is somehow both a thing of the past, and something that will never get old. The business models and the bookstores have evolved enormously, and some of the advances being made in the production process are pretty incredible. But the thing at the heart of the industry, the fibre of publishing – the STORY – has barely changed at all. And so long as we yearn to read our stories, long and linear, I think we’ll be just fine.

Ah, the sentimental peace that comes with finishing a semester’s work. Time to curl up with cup of tea and a book…

Self Evaluation Task

I don’t think I ever did post up the list of things we’re supposed to be assessing ourselves on by the end of the semester, but it seems like a great way to procrastinate about writing an essay for another subject, so here they are:

1. Have I learnt how to make a simple web page?
2. Have I improved my writing-for-the-web skills?
3. Do I have a better understanding of online technologies?
4. Have I learnt the art of hyperlinking?
5. Have I created a relevant resource?
6. Does my project create or add to a community?
7. Have I participated and collaborated within the class?
8. Does my blog contain relevant data/research?
9. Have I expanded my knowledge/critique of online environments?
10. Have I created a fully functioning website

It’s a very postmodern way of earning 15% of my mark. The temptation is there to zing through it all and give myself gold stars, but of course I won’t quite be able to bring myself to do it. The ol’ conscience will kick in and I’ll squirm at giving myself full marks for the ‘relevant data’ question especially. But considering that at least half of the questions are complete gimmes, I reckon I’ll probably do pretty well! (I’d quite enjoying being in Dean’s position at the end of next week… Love to have a nosey around and see how ballsy people get!)