west of the moon

user-directed content and the new world order.

I can't really say that I've been following the sf-writer "pixel-stained technopeasant" kerfluffle with interest, because there isn't much that's -interesting- about one guy making an intemperate rant and two hundred people finding various ways to tell him he's wrong.  I do see one thin thread running through this particular intemperate rant, though, that connects to some issues of broader relevance, and that's the idea that by making content available free to readers, authors and publishers are contributing to the creation of a environment where no one gets paid to produce content. 

Anyone who's paid any attention to online publishing knows that it's not a clear or direct link.  Plenty of authors are making content available free to readers but still getting paid for their work.  I think at this point all of the free-to-read online SF magazines pay their authors, and most of the free book downloads are promotional releases of novels for which the authors have been paid in a traditional fashion.  Taking half a step back, though, there's a lot in the "webscabs" rant that reminds me of discussions we were having four, five, six years ago about the commercial viability of web publishing.  The concern, at that time, was that readers were become trained, as it were, to expect free content on the web, so it would be hard to persuade them to pay for it. 

That was the concern in 2001 and 2002.  By 2007, it's a settled issue.  Readers -do- expect free content on the web.  But that's only one aspect of a much larger set of changes that have swept through the consumer media landscape since then.  It's not even a question of readers expecting to pay less and get more--it's a question of media consumers in general expecting to have a much higher degree of control over their entertainment experience.  When you look at how this is playing out in television, the changes are so obvious that I honestly feel a little silly outlining them all.  But between TiVo, iTunes, and the rebroadcasting of first-run network shows on affiliated cable stations, the viewer experience of television watching is, for many people, fundamentally different than it was just seven or eight years ago.  Not only that, but television networks are putting a lot of time and energy into providing additional free content on the internet.  Most of the television shows that I watch have supplemental material on their websites--podcasts, character blogs, video clips, interviews, even tie-in graphic novels. 

And no, there's no direct line between these additional features and additional revenue.  Making money on television shows used to be a pretty straightforward enterprise, from what I can tell--your show aired at a certain time each week, and you could estimate how many people watched it, and based on that estimate, advertisers paid you in order to get their product in front of those viewers, either through straight commercials or through product placements.  If your show ran for long enough, you could get it into syndication, which brought in additional money.  That model has changed, in any number of ways, but it looks to me as though television people have been pretty savvy about adapting to the change.  You may have to work harder to build brand loyalty among your viewers, but once you've built it, you can capitalize on it in many different areas.  Project Runway doesn't make any direct money from Tim Gunn's podcast, but the podcast makes people even more excited about the show, and that makes them more likely to watch the reruns, buy the DVDs, and be ready and waiting when the new season starts.  (And the bigger viewer base undoubtedly brings in more money for the product placements that saturate the show.) 

I realize I'm not saying anything new or profound here.  The point I'm trying to make, though, is that the media landscape has changed for everyone, but some types of media have been quicker to adapt than others.  Print publishing has been doing a better job here than it's usually given credit for, and not just in terms of promotional e-book downloads.  The Jasper Fforde novel that I picked up before my vacation a few weeks ago had a sticker on it promising something like "DVD extras"; there was a code printed in the book that would unlock a bunch of supplementary content on the publisher's website.  Websites aren't the only way that technology is affecting publishing--anecdotal evidence (backed up by some quick websearching) suggests that the advent of iPods and other MP3 players has pretty substantively expanded the audiobook market.  Audiobooks aren't new, but they've come to occupy a new place in the consumer market, as a result of new technology.

To go back to where I started this post: five or six years ago, it might have been worth asking whether authors and publishers who provide their work to the public free of charge were helping to create a consumer environment where readers would expect to not have to pay for anything.  Right now, if you're spending any serious time on that question, you're doing so at the expense of seriously evaluating and understanding the media marketplace as it exists today.

The other way in which I've been thinking about this, though, is in terms of how it applies to teaching.  I'm extremely resistant to thinking about the teacher-student dynamic in terms of consumer or market terms, because I think it's not a healthy way to think about the teaching relationship.  That said, any responsible teacher has to take into account the fact that her classroom is filled with students who are immersed in this new consumer model.  When they're not in my classroom, my students are people who interact with information in a very different way even than I did when I was their age--and that wasn't -that- long ago, all things considered.  But the teaching models we use are still essentially the same.  Honestly, the teaching models we use are essentially the same as they were a century ago.  The shift to lectures, seminars, and hands-on lab work in the sciences, that happened in this country in the 1880s and 1890s; by 1900, most colleges and universities in the country allowed students to choose majors and take electives much as they do now.  The content of classes may be different, and the range of course options much broader, but the basic structure of a college education (and the script for what happens inside the classroom) hasn't fundamentally changed since approximately the first decade of the twentieth century.

I don't mean to imply that nothing's changed--certainly, there are plenty of people working with new models for teaching, and new ways of integrating technological advances into the classroom experience.  My point isn't that things aren't changing, it's that things -are- changing, for the first time in a very long time. 

The changes are happening on a number of different axes.  One is the user-directed-content axis.  The first steps, which seem like baby steps but have large implications, are things like webcasts and podcasts of lecture courses.  Baby steps because, well, what could be a more obvious development?  Large implications because, well, what does it say about the value of the classroom experience if students can just watch it later, and from home?  If you can get the same value from a podcast as you can from attending lecture, isn't the obvious conclusion that you could just do away with lectures together and assign more reading?  I believe that there's something about the classroom experience that is (or, at least, can be) enormously valuable for the student's education, but that's a proposition that (I think) used to be assumed and is now being questioned.  Podcasts are just the tip of the iceberg, though. 

The question of a student-directed educational experience, though, is fundamentally entwined with another axis of change, that of authority.  So much of the educational structure is based on the authority of the educator, and so many of the possible changes are based on refuting (to a greater or lesser degree) that authority.  That's a much bigger and messier question than I'm prepared to talk about at the moment, though. 

taking a moment.

I have been trying to figure out what to say--I've been trying to formulate a clear and articulate response to what happened at Virginia Tech this week.  I don't have one.  What I ended up saying to my class yesterday was that I don't know what to say, but I know that we need to stop and acknowledge it.  The story just gets more horrifying and more sad as more details are released, and it's difficult to be on campus all day and not feel some of it. 

great fortune.

The great fortune is mine, in that I've been practically drowning in wonderful media lately. 

Some of it has been happenstance.  Yesterday afternoon, for instance, I went to see The Lookout.  Based on the ads I'd seen, my impression of this movie was something like "fast and flashy action movie, starring that kid from 10 Things I Hate About You," and that sounded about right for my mood.  My impression of the movie was wrong, but in a good way.  This movie was stunning.  It could have been awful--the basic premise could have been gimmicky, any number of plot elements could have felt arbitrary and contrived--but instead it all pulled together in a really compelling and intense way.  I don't want to talk it to death, but seriously, this was a great movie. 

It seems unfair to talk about my great reading experience this weekend, because you can't share it.  (Tim sent me a draft of the second Marla Mason book, theoretically so that I could give revision suggestions, but I didn't have any suggestions, the book was just so good.)    But following on the "happenstance" comment above, I've had some great reading lately that was mostly accidental. 

For years now, I've been having people recommend The Alienist, by Caleb Carr, because it apparently has some thematic or topical connection to my dissertation research.  I finally decided to track it down, but had a moment of extreme confusion and ended up with The Intuitionist by Colson Whitehead instead.   This was one of the best mistakes I've ever made.  I did eventually get my hands on a copy of The Alienist, and it was extremely disappointing.  I see the why people recommended it to me--it deals with late-nineteenth-century psychiatry, which isn't the same thing as late-nineteenth-century psychology, but is close enough that I understand the confusion.  And they talk about William James a little, which should have endeared it to me, but instead was only irritating.  I'm not sure what I expected from this book, but it felt like a generic mystery novel dressed up in period clothes.  That might have been fine, mystery novels aren't themselves a problem, but it was just -dripping- with a self-satisfied sense of its own cleverness.  Historical actors like Jacob Riis, John Pierpont Morgan, and Franz Boas were paraded through the narrative for no apparent purpose other than to demonstrate that the author had done some historical research. 

I hate being so snide.  I really do.  I don't -like- disliking books, and I like even less being critical of them.  It's just that the book irritated me, constantly, and I kept reading it because I kept wanting it to do something really good, to really pull it out, and it kept not happening, it just kept being more and more irritating.  "Ho ho, good chap!  Let us now invent criminal profiling, with our crack team of misfit geniuses, including the science nerds, the plucky career woman with extraordinary empathetic insights, and the man who brings nothing to the team save his ability to act as the book's narrator." 

The point was not to talk about a book I didn't like, though.  It was to talk about a book I did like, specifically, The Intuitionist.  (I'm not destined to be a book reviewer, by the way, because I've never really figured out how to explain why I like a book.  I've done academic book reviews, and those are easier, because the criteria on which a book succeeds or fails are much easier to evaluate.  Fiction is so subjective.)  It's about a woman named Lila Mae Watson, who inspects elevators, but it's also about a world that isn't quite our own, and it's about modernity and verticality, and it's about the city and about isolation and about race and division; more than any of this, it's a beautiful book, one of those novels where everything else is overwhelmed by the beauty and the construction of the language. I read this in fits and spurts, waiting for the bus, eating breakfast, fitting it in around other things, and every time I had to put the book down, I felt like I was pulling myself up out of a dream.

My current interstitial reading (bus-stops and breakfast and brushing teeth) is 1491 by Charles C Mann.  I read an article by Mann in the Atlantic Monthly, four or five years ago, on this same topic, and it was one of the most fascinating things I've ever read, so I was thrilled to see that he'd written a whole book.  It's an exploration of new work in anthropology, re-examining the standard story about what life was like for the inhabitants of North and South America prior to European contact.  What I remember from the Atlantic article is that archaeologists and anthropolgists had found evidence suggesting that those societies were larger, more widespread, and -far- more technologically and culturally sophisticated than had previously been assumed.  At the time the article was published, it looked as though this was an intriguing fringe theory, but the book (so far--I'm only about thirty pages in) seems to be saying that just in the last few years it's gained a lot more credibility and currency.  It's a really engaging read, and it plays into a lot of the same issues I was wrestling with in my lecture course last semester.  I'm not very far along in the book yet, but I'm really thoroughly enjoying it.