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Meanland: For and against a digital avant-garde

poster_perdu_flarfOne of the more prevalent perceptions propagated by the dominant ideologies of the last few decades has been the belief in the death of the avant-garde. Ever since the ex-Leftist French philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard decided to announce the arrival of a ‘postmodern condition’ by denouncing radical Marxist politics as well as artistic iconoclasm as outdated ‘grand narratives’, we have been more or less expected to view any attempt at challenging the status quo by either revolutionaries or radical artists as ineffectual and passé. But can the internet, the postmodernist tool par excellence, be used subversively as a means for creating confronting, cutting edge art? Can there be such a thing as a digital avant-garde? ... read more

Written by Ali Alizadeh on 28-11-2011, 15 user comments

Meanland: The death of the book, and other utopian fantasies

Well, it’s official: the (printed) book is dead, long live the (e)book.

Or so many political and cultural elites would like us to believe. On the very day of my writing this blog, for example, we were subjected to federal Minister for Small Business Nick Sherry’s apocalyptic diagnosis that Australian booksellers will be annihilated within the next five years, thanks, in part, to the (supposed) explosion of online sales of ebooks. In a less dramatic and more considered register, Kate Eltham, CEO of Queensland Writers Centre, pontificated on the ABC television’s Jennifer Byrne Presents, that the advent of ebooks and e-readers was disrupting ‘the underpinning supply chains that are currently supporting modern publishing’. ... read more

Written by Ali Alizadeh on 29-06-2011, 7 user comments

Winning Meanland essay 2: The internet has not impacted upon my reading habits in the slightest

For the ten minutes before my children sleep the internet has not impacted upon my reading habits in the slightest. Tonight’s book is a treasure. Behind its thick crème cover, its pages, also crème, are stiff and square with sixties-vintage pictures. Chapter One, Down the Rabbit-Hole, begins on page eleven.

Alice‘Why not page one?’ a son asks.
‘If you flick through and count,’ I say, ‘it’s page eleven.’

But he’s forgotten what I’ve said, absorbed in the blurred edges of Alice’s golden hair once painted with watercolours or pastels.

We tried ebooks over the summer (kindle on iPhone). The pictures were ordinary, the numberlessness was disorientating and the text too small on that piddly screen. It was decided. For the nightly family read, we will stick with tradition. ... read more

Written by Diane Simonelli on 22-06-2011, 15 user comments

Meanland: Marshall McLuhan is stalking me from beyond the grave

Marshall-McLuhanNot a fan of media theorist Marshall ‘the medium is the message’ McLuhan? Okay, I don’t go in for the technological determinism either, but you can’t deny that the man was uncannily prescient when it came to predicting how our culture would develop – a ‘global village’, electric technology ‘reshaping and restructuring patterns of social interdependence and every aspect of our personal life’ – and how these changes would be feared – ‘we drive into the future using only our rear view mirror’. He even divined the demise of print culture, and ‘electronic interdependence’. ... read more

Written by Jacinda Woodhead on 24-03-2011, 10 user comments

Meanland: In the future, they’ll be called ‘book deletings’

HarperCollins is committed to the library channel. We believe this change balances the value libraries get from our titles with the need to protect our authors and ensure a presence in public libraries and the communities they serve for years to come.

borroiwng books 2Remember the library card inside the front cover (sometimes the back) that used to be taken out when you borrowed? Or the pages of date stamps glued one on top of the other, dating back to 1984, 1973 or beyond? Well, those days of sharing ageing library books are gone, and not merely because the printed text is being outshone by its digital sibling. HarperCollins announced to libraries last week, via the digital distributor OverDrive, that they were limiting the lifespan of their ebooks to 26 checkouts. OverDrive informed US libraries: ... read more

Written by Jacinda Woodhead on 2-03-2011, 4 user comments

The world according to Meanland: the top ten things we covered this year (in no particular order)

Do you recall when Meanjin quarterly and Overland magazine announced (see A joint communique from somewhere in Meanland) their 2010 collaboration, Meanland or ‘Reading in a time of change’? Back then they promised:

This joint project aims to create a constructive dialogue on how we, and future generations, will read. It will explore the challenges and opportunities facing literary culture in the twenty-first century—from digital publishing to copyright, from globalisation to the changing nature of reading. We will explore the new literary realities facing readers, writers and publishers, and reflect on and intervene into the changing nature of reading, writing and publishing—circumstances that, naturally, also implicate both Meanjin and Overland.

... read more

Written by Jacinda Woodhead on 21-12-2010, 2 user comments

Meanland: On privacy and self in a networked era

In a recent article in the New York Review of Books, Zadie Smith expressed her discomfort with social media, most particularly Facebook, and the harm she believes it has caused to a generation’s worth of communication:

When a human being becomes a set of data on a website like Facebook, he or she is reduced. Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility. In a way it’s a transcendent experience: we lose our bodies, our messy feelings, our desires, our fears. … Connection is the goal. The quality of that connection, the quality of the information that passes through it, the quality of the relationship that connection permits—none of this is important.

... read more

Written by Jessica Au on 12-11-2010, 1 user comment

Meanland event: Reading without privacy

Announcing a very exciting Meanland event – and the last for 2010 – Reading Without Privacy.

Today, we’re all reading and writing more than ever, on text messages, on Twitter and on Facebook. But has social networking broken down the distinction between our public and our private lives? What are the rules for writing in forms that are so intimate and entirely open? Do we Tweet as ourselves or as representatives of our employers? And is new media helping us work differently or just work harder? Critic Alison Croggon and Jonathan Green, editor of ABC’s The Drum, discuss these questions and more, with Sophie Cunningham and Jeff Sparrow. Chaired by Michael Williams. ... read more

Written by Editorial team on 11-11-2010, 2 user comments

Meanland: You will read ebooks. Maybe. One day.

RecordEver since I read Jacob Lambert’s piece at The Millions last week, The Paper-Reader’s Dilemma, I’ve been thinking about the possibility of a casual proliferation in electronic reading. How the transition might overtake us without our permission, without, in fact, us even realising. In his piece about admitting digital change, Lambert wrote:

I might say we’re at a moment when we face this choice as readers—the decision to climb into the boat or stay on familiar shores. But the decision is not truly ours. Time and again, these choices are made for us, by a collective sweep and push. One day, everyone holds an iPod, and the next day, so do you. Those who resist—the pipe smokers and vinyl hounds, stubborn to the end—come to seem affected, or possibly insane. The rest of us seem modern, and eventually commonplace.

... read more

Written by Jacinda Woodhead on 5-11-2010, No comments

Meanland: When does print matter?

NewspapersPicking up where I left off… though not with Nicholas Carr (at least, not immediately).

At the Wheeler Centre’s weekly lunchtime soapbox event Anna Krien addressed the question of whether newspapers still matter in the digital era. Krien’s central argument was that print newspapers needed to recognise and mobilise the features that make them unique and play to their strengths, rather than playing catch up with their online competition. Print newspapers can make a virtue of their relative slowness; can devote resources to research; can provide in-depth analysis and long-form reportage; can deliver a product that is worth the paper it is printed on (i.e. is worth its cover price and is worth whatever effort it takes to carry it from breakfast table to briefcase to beachside). In so doing, newspapers can leave the speedy work of ‘news coverage’ to the web. Printed papers, with their research, analysis and critique, can be the roughage in our media diet, giving us something to chew on: slow-to-digest information that complements the news snacks we get online. ... read more

Written by Caroline Hamilton on 29-10-2010, 2 user comments

Meanland: On ‘anonymous’ sources

‘[W]hat bothers me,’ wrote Christian Kerr in last week’s Australian in regards to the outing of Grog’s Gamut author, Greg Jericho, ‘is that someone seriously expected they could stay anonymous online in this day and age.’

Clearly, Kerr reads a different internet to the average reader. Or there’s a mysterious social order he’s aware of that bloggers, public servants and citizen journalists are not permitted entry to, because there’s a profusion of anonymity in today’s journalism, both online and in print.

Despite the heated exchanges occurring between readers and journalists divided by the uncovering, the anonymity argument, as applied to the Jericho situation, is a misdirection – and thoroughly irrelevant. It does, however, throw up questions surrounding journalism, ethics and the protection of sources. The thing about anonymity in today’s online world is that some people deserve it, and other people – PR companies, the military, government departments – routinely get it. This is the crux of the argument about anonymity and why it matters. ... read more

Written by Jacinda Woodhead on 5-10-2010, 1 user comment

Meanland: Putting the community back in culture (and not a moment too soon)

The last few Meanland posts have focused on the nature of copyright and how it works and affects reading, writing and publishing in our new settlements on the digital frontier.

Many people feel a distinct sense of impending doom, as though creative and financial control have been wrested from the hands of writers, artists and musicians and let loose on the infinite and unpoliced data cables across the world. But copyright, by its very nature, is extraordinarily restrictive. Currently, for your typical, non-full-time creator, there is no means of saying to another artist, ‘Can I use your work?’ Rather we rely on ‘permission culture’, in which cultural products are monitored and controlled by corporations.

Contrary to what copyright culture and modern capitalism would have us believe, the sharing of culture is the norm for individuals, for artists and for society as a whole. In mediaeval Europe, say, someone would tell a rip-roaring (and doubtless violent and bloody) story that you remembered and retold when you travelled to your next village. And maybe you retold it with some slight embellishments. From its earliest days, human cultural history was dependent on the oral tradition, which transferred culture between generations and communities. ... read more

Written by Jacinda Woodhead on 23-09-2010, No comments

Meanland: Regarding the very modern ebook machine thing

Nick Hornby and his booksAt the conclusion of his column in the July/August issue of The Believer, Nick Hornby – a popular novelist with an aptitude for imparting his reading habits – promised: ‘In next month’s exciting episode, I will describe an attempt, not yet begun, to read Our Mutual Friend on a very modern ebook machine thing. It’s the future.’

The future, the one that used to be around the corner but now

Written by Jacinda Woodhead on 16-09-2010, No comments

Bookless shelves

Albert Camus wrote that the only serious question is whether to kill yourself or not. Tom Robbins wrote that the only serious question is whether time has a beginning and an end. Camus clearly got up on the wrong side of bed, and Robbins must have forgotten to set the alarm. There is only one serious question. And that is: Who knows how to make love stay? Answer me that and I will tell you whether or not to kill yourself. – Tom Robbins

Martin Hughes and Zoe Dattner interviewed Richard Nash at the Wheeler Centre and replayed the interview on RRR’s Max Headroom on 22 July 2010. Due to the miracle of modern technology, I listened to it the other day. ... read more

Written by Clare Strahan on 8-09-2010, No comments

Meanland: Doctorow on Copyright vs Creativity

Cory DoctorowCory Doctorow spoke in Melbourne on Thursday night as part of the Meanland and Melbourne Writers Festival ‘Big Ideas’ lecture series. For those unable to attend, I have transcribed below as much as I could from my indecipherable notes on the lecture, ‘Copyright vs creativity’.

Rule number 1: If there’s a lock for something and you haven’t been given the key, it’s not for your benefit. ... read more

Written by Editorial team on 6-09-2010, No comments