Hooray for Pip!

Things are coming together for my online doco, which is such a relief. I was beginning to feel a little panicked for a bit there, but it’s all good.

Brown Owls are the topic, and I’m hanging out with founder-lady Pip on Saturday to make a start on the content. There’s a meeting on Monday night that will fill in a few more blanks, and pretty soon I should be ready to rock and roll with the Dreamweaver bizzo. I still need to find a website to base my doco on, but I’m getting there.

Pip’s also lined up some other crafty types for me to chat to, like Angela from Sew Your Own, Nichola and Justine from Mix Tape Zine and Jhoanna from One Red Robin. Hooray for Pip!

This semester has been absolutely mental so far, and the next week or so is really going to have me under the pump, but I almost feel like I’ll get through it ok now. It would be nice if I could put work and birthdays and engagements and life on hold for a bit, but that ain’t going to happen, so I’ll just have to soldier on.

Think I’m going to sleep through July.

A little venting.

All this talk of new world orders and change and cutting out the middle man has got me thinking.

Perhaps in this subject it’s ok to not get right into the Communication Theory, but it’s really not ok in the wider world of university research. Which, when you’re writing about grassroots movements, neo-crafters and the handmade, is a bit of an issue. The whole idea of user-generated content and democracy and level playing fields is incredibly undemocratic within the context of traditional establishments of higher learning. I know we sort of touched on this in the first lecture, but in trying to suss out journal articles and capital-A Academic writing about my masters topic, I seem to have run into a couple of problems.

There are definitely articles out there on online communities and the way they work, but the ones I’ve found are pretty theoretical in nature. And they’re definitely not written by the people who are part of the communities. They’re written by academics, largely working within the traditional academic publishing world of referenced journals. Which generally means that the work they’re producing is of a very high standard. All very well. But when the people I’m really interested in looking at don’t have PhDs or access to the review panels of respected journals, it becomes a little trickier. Especially when they’re not crackpots. They’re thoughtful, intelligent, and often very well-educated, but they spend their time in the world of home studios and weekend markets rather than in tertiary classrooms.

Of course, there’s always the chance that the research I’m pining for is out there somewhere and I’m yet to find it. But I still think the point about user-generated content is a good one…

Last year’s docos.

I’ve had a quick look through a few of the documentaries, and the one that seemed most interesting to me was Digital communication and the ‘flash mob’by Scott Markworth. It’s a pretty clean design, not too many colours, nice clear font, and no vertical scrolling, on the front page at least. The links within the pages are a bit confusing, because although they all seem to direct you to another page within the site, they don’t actually tell you that’s where they’re going. It’s only when you look at the labels at the top of each page that you realise where you’ve ended up. Other than that though, I quite like it.

I also didn’t mind Street children by Jerilee Cardoz. It’s a cute idea to link the kids to the petals on the flower, but I think it would have been more useful if there were some labels there too, so you could hover over a face and at least see their name. The site’s not very linear (apart from the home page), and I think I actually would have liked a bit more direction.

Another doco that makes me realise how important clarity and planning is, is Queen Victoria market boys by Surajate Pokmangmee. This one seems to have two home pages, which is a bit unnecessary, but also, while the ’second’ homepage looks pretty cool, it’s really hard to figure out where you’re supposed to be clicking and what you’re going to get.

Without being overly critical (and bearing in mind that next year’s students will have the chance to bag out our work!), I hope that I can come up with something a bit more coherent than most of the documentaries listed on Jenny’s site. Although I haven’t looked at them all, it seems like the key is planning and preparation. Know what you want to do and how you want to do it, so that you have time to fulfill your expectations, or at least come close.  Depending on the state I’m in by the end of semester, I might be happy with just making sure there aren’t any typos!

Is the sky really falling?

I’ve been thinking some more about the whole ‘end of the world as we know it’ scenario, and what that might mean for me, specifically.

I think it’s pretty clear that the music industry is in for a really big shake-up. Or at the very least a long, slow decline. Given that with a little bit of talent, one person can make an entire album using standard software like GarageBand, and distribute it through any number of alternative means (see Sandra’s post), the old model doesn’t look like at all like one that’s going to last.

There’s signs that TV might not be all that far behind. Digital cameras are cheap as, and YouTube, while perhaps not the ideal forum, is at least a way to make your work publicly available. The part where you have to pay people (i.e. actors who aren’t your friends) for they work they do still means that the standard model has some life in it, but as Tessa was saying the other day, it might not be for long.

I’m more interested in the publishing industry. eBooks and readers have been around for eaons, and periodically there’s huge panic about the sky falling and real printed books disappearing from view FOREVER. But it doesn’t ever seem to actually happen. While there are definite seismic shifts going on in the world of academic journals (See apophenia’s blog for an idea of how explosive this issue can be), trade books (i.e. the standard range in your local Borders, A&R, whatever) seem to be roaring along. Book sales increase exponentially each year. A lot of what gets bought is pretty ordinary, sure, but at least it’s being published. (There’s a whole world of argument about the declining state of literary fiction, poetry, etc, etc, and I guess eventually these sorts of books might end up relegated to the world of print-on-demand, but that’s another post.)

I should probably try and get some figures for sales of Kindles and the like (which you can read more about here) but as far as I can tell, I still have a job making real books. Electronic versions of a lot of those real books go into Google Book Search, NetLibrary, and various other ebook retailers, but the paltry income they generate is barely worth the effort. (Luckily, once they’ve made it to publication, it’s hardly any effort at all.)

So really, what’s going on? Is it just because I know more about this particular process that I think there’s more to it? Will it be possible in the future to skip the parts that include editors, proofreaders, typesetters, text designers, etc, and be a maverick self-publisher with (gasp!) good quality work that doesn’t reek of loony fringe? (There is one book that I know of that’s pretty much succeeded in all this. It’s pretty small, and it’s a cookbook, but the Hungry Girls have done a great job.) Or is simply too hard to get good quality stuff out there without the help of all those other people?

The crazy weather that’s going on outside (a cyclone in the city? seriously? maybe the sky really is falling!) is wreaking havoc with the power here, so I might just post this now and add more later, but it’s a start…

Look what they’ve done to my song, Ma!

Ok, so it’s not exactly high-brow, but while we’re on the topic of corporate involvement in entertainment, check out the awful results of Dr Pepper’s attempt to get hip with the kids.

This is the original ‘Chocolate Rain’ song, a minor YouTube hit by the unsigned (and very deep-voiced) Tay Zonday. (You don’t need to listen for more than a minute or two, because it kind of goes around in circles. Catchy, no?)

And here is the abominable Dr Pepper-funded version.

So not hip.