Interactivity is considered one of the defining features of the online experience, yet the reality of most media consumers today is one defined by interpassivity. And it presents a serious challenge for those of us engaged in online journalism.

I hold in my hands a cheap, ugly edition of every book in existence. At least that’s what it feels like. An ebook reader is like a portal, a word repository. It’s the world’s literature no longer bound by time and space.

Gwen Harwood’s sentiment about editors – eloquently expressed in an acrostic, has become Australian folklore. While some authors would agree with Gwen, for others it’s not as simple. Nor is it always obvious in this blogging, tweeting, forever-online world, who our ultimate editor might be. In many areas the editor-author partnership remains unchanged. Editors and […]

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 […]

In his fascinating Meanland essay ‘The crowd is our domain’, featured in Overland 201, Marty Hiatt responds to another Meanland essay, Cate Kennedy’s popular yet divisive ‘Driven to Distraction’. In her article ‘Driven to distraction’ (Overland 199), Cate Kennedy critiques contemporary internet culture from the perspective of the creative writer. While not opposed to the […]

Peter Craven made a grave prognosis in his recent defence of the cultural worth of Meanjin: ‘If Meanjin is taken online, it will cease effectively to exist.’ On Thursday on Drum Tim Dunlop countered with: ‘The sooner magazines like Meanjin engage with the realities of online reading – and pray their financiers give them enough […]

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. […]

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 […]

You know how you can spend hours drowning in YouTube clips of people hugging sea lions, animals behaving in endearing animal-like (occasionally very unsettling human-like) ways and outlandish songs – and then you glance outside and nine hours have gone by? To cut a long lesson short: killing time is not all YouTube is for. […]

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 […]

My name is Mark William Jackson and I was a compulsive blogger. It has been eight weeks since my last post. At my worst I would spend up to two hours per evening posting, responding to comments and checking statistics. If I wasn’t in my dashboard I was checking my email to see if anyone […]

At 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 […]

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 […]

Cory 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 […]

The arrival of the iPad in Australia has been greeted with everything from quasi-religious reverence to cynicism. The Steve Jobs camp has largely been focused on the language of revolution – a savvy if slightly hubristic move from the Apple marketing department. ‘It’s already a revolution and it’s only just begun,’ the voiceover in the […]

The Meanland essay in Overland 199 is written by author, SPUNC President and Wet Ink fiction editor, Emmett Stinson. ‘The pirate code’ delves into the underbelly of copyright during the digital revolution – and comes to some surprising conclusions: Right now publishers are abuzz with discussions of ‘book futures’ and the digital revolution, but there […]