Is privacy Selfish?

A joint blog with the FroggPrincess

Preface
Nearly four months ago, I signed off Facebook, saying I'd be gone for a month to work on my NaNoWriMo project. Back then it was late October, and I had some doubt that I'd finish 50,000 words in 30 days with the constant nag of Facebook zipping through the back of my brain. So I did what I always do when I need to buckle down and get work done: I cut out distractions. A month later, I proudly held (well maybe not since I never printed it) 50,899 odd words without a single Facebook login. By then the urge to grind away at Mafia Wars, Mafia II, and Farkle were distant stains in my mind; silly obsessions, that clearly needed no attention further. I logged in, updated my profile gloating my NaNoWriMo Win and logged off.

By December 3rd or so, I'd deleted my account. Well. Not really. Deleting a Facebook account, truly deleting it as in wiped hard drive deleting is damn nigh impossible. Instead, I painstakingly spent a couple hours, physically removing "allow" access to every stupid App I ever tried. Then I removed all of my pictures before going through and setting every single privacy setting to "Me Only" before firing off the "I want to quit Facebook email." I've since done the same to my Twitter and FriendFeed accounts.

Why? I like my privacy

Bullshit
Google my name: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Drew+Lackovic&aq=f&aqi=&oq=
It's not sparse. Most folks won't look more than three pages deep on a search return. You have to slug through eight pages of links before the search results start to thin out and display stuff that's not connected to me. In addition to having three stories online, five years worth of blog entries, several personal websites, old artwork, and dozens of forum posts in places like LinuxQuestions and UtterAccess, not to mention my CV, and all my address info (thanks to superpages.com), there really isn't much of me left to hide. So why disband from Facebook and social networking?

Well, It's complicated.
To start, I hadn't been on Facebook all that long. I can't remember exactly when, but I don't think it was any later than June of '09. I joined partially out of peer pressure (ala everyone else is doing it), and partially because I wanted to see if I could figure out why the hell it was such a popular phenomenon.

Why isn't Facebook's popularity obvious to me?

For all the time I spend on a computer (and believe me it's a lot of time), I really have never been able to see the interestingness in using the Internet to meet other people or to communicate beyond Email and IM.

As a proof of concept of this, back in college I played a lot of Diablo II. Usually though I played local network games with friends. We didn't chat while we played; we just smashed stuff and giggled at the secret cow demon level. On the odd chance that I did log into Battlenet, I was generally shocked at the poor typing and immature content of other players. This was still in the age before texting got big, but "UR" and "THX" were already starting to float about among others. So largely I ignored online gaming until one game appealed to my inner D&D Nerd, Ragnarok Online. Back then it was in Alpha...maybe early Beta. They talked it up as being a RP intensive game. At the time, my girlfriend had sneakily gotten me to quit playing real D&D, so my craving, so I thought, could be sated by this game.

I played from just before Christmas break till Valentine's day. I tried to roleplay. And not once in that time did I meet a single person worth talking to beyond the five minutes of interaction. Granted, I did silly things like selling flowers (a useless and worthless item) outside a boss' lair mainly to start conversations. Largely I got bitched out for not having any potions for sale and/or for actually being there and trying to start conversations (usually merchants would set up shop and walk away leaving the game running while they racked up the cash). And so, I left the realm of online video games for the relative comfort of console games and good ole Pen and Paper D&D.

Furthermore, once I joined Facebook, like everyone, I slowly amassed a group of "friends" that extended beyond my real-world friends I actually see and talk to on a regular basis. Granted, I can easily say that everyone on my friend list was someone I knew, and with my privacy settings the way they were, strangers wouldn't have been able to find and friend me even if they wanted to. And despite the fact that I friended several friends from highschool, some of which that still live in the area, not once did I really have any sort of interaction with any of them outside of the occasional assist in Mafia Wars.

So, Reason one for quitting Facebook: I don't find the net to be very sociable. Or I don't go to the net to socialize.

That whole cellphone thing
I don't use them. Facebook, Twitter and other social networks are moving to rely heavily on mobile principle--Twitter's ubiquitous "what are you doing now?" is proof of this. Folks with fancy internet cellphones can Tweet and Facebook away no matter where they are. It's a great way too to get around corporate firewalls if you can't Facebook on the ole work computer. But I abhor phones (Imagine that, a former 411 operator hates phones...there's a shocking twist, right?). And furthermore, I think the notion of being contactable at any time and location is obscene. I'm not that important (unless my wife's having a baby, you better not call me when I'm not at home).

This leads to reason two: If I don't like to be contacted by anyone, why would I want EVERYONE (as the new Facebook controls make your stuff go that broad) to know my momentary business? The advantage of having a blog is knowing that the whole thing is public, knowing that I have to filter what I say to a certain degree, because, despite the protection of the 1st Amendment, I could potentially still get nailed and/or fired if I were to slander an employer too badly, or say or do something on this blog that generally makes me look like such a giant dickhead asshole that no one would want to consider hiring me in the future.

Facebook, when I joined, let me set the visibility scope of my activities. And though leery and mistrustful, I accepted this as being good enough for government work, cranked up the privacy to "Friends Only," and despite some groaning from my more social friends, I felt fairly content in the broadcast footprint of my identity. Last December's privacy changes destroyed that happy little world, and would make increasingly larger amounts of my data public. Mafia Wars status updates to my friends are annoying enough (and I did feel bad for those flying around as much as they did), but the thought of all that kind of garbage flowing freely out to the internet for anyone to see, and/or for acquaintances or former students not on my friends list wasn't really acceptable in my head.

I think it's well accepted that we exist in a compartmentalized state. I am a different self at work at FMC than I am standing before students at Behrend, than I am at home playing the Mammas and the Babies with Molly than I am sitting here inside my head clattering some keys at 11:52 PM on a Monday Tuesday (strangely I'm revising this exactly 24 hours after I wrote it; what a co-inky-dink). night. Frontline has run a couple documentaries, "Growing Up Online" and more recently, "Digital Nation," in which this notion of multiple-selves is one that is covered. I remember one teenager in "Growing up Online" saying something along the lines of "There are two versions of me. The one you see here in the world, and the real me, the me that's on the Internet." Sadly, this girl's "real me" was a self obsessed with anorexia (which fortunately was being treated by the epilogue of the documentary). But to her, interestingly, the abstraction of the net, the separation of mind from body freed her to become what she felt was her ideal self. What startles me watching these documentaries, is the reckless willingness of the kids depicted to say/do/think whatever they want over the internet without second thought for potential repercussions. "Growing Up Online," for example discusses an incident where a number of high school students took the train into NYC for a concert at Madison Square Garden. The students YouTubed a number of videos of themselves partying and drinking on the train and at the concert. And when the school administration found out (thanks to one of the kids' PTO parent moms), they were all shocked and outraged that their drunken party pictures were getting them into trouble. There's no doubt that this kind of teenage drunken partying would have happened without the Internet; it has happened, arguably for every generation. My parents spent their teens careening drunk across the state line into New York where the drinking age was still 18 so they could get shitfaced at bars so ramshackle that the bathrooms were nothing more than holes in the ground. People died on these weekend binge rampage. Heading up to Clymer, NY as a kid, my mom showed me "Dead Man's Curve" many times; and she knew the men that died there--too drunk, too fast. But such is the role of late adolescence, to do stupid, possibly dangerous and regrettable things, but the fact that these things are caught on camera phone and willfully uploaded to the net for public consumption seems reckless beyond the point of common sense.

But then again, we live in an age where it actually as to be said, "Hey girls, don't take nudie pics of yourself and email it to your boyfriend, because he'll share it with the whole school."

There's no doubt in my mind that the Internet reduces inhibitions. The faux anonymity of it's existence, allows us to swing up a hefty set of brass ones and pull off a lot of shit we would never do or say in person. Sites like Facebook thrive upon this notion. Zuckerberg's recent statement about how folks want to share more shows that he's interested in cultivating an environment where barriers between this sharing are continually broken down, paving the way for an ever wider superhighway of personal data flowing in all directions. And the barriers? Privacy. Privacy makes for poor business because the private self doesn't want advertisements even if they are catered to private interests. The Private self also won't share as much information to as many people, and in a world where click-throughs equate to dollar signs, again less clicks is less money.

Another danger rises from the miasma of wide-open user information channels: data mining. While this is still in its infancy, the potential danger of social media data mining is immense. PleaseRobMe.com is a perfect example. From their "Why" Page:

The danger is publicly telling people where you are. This is because it leaves one place you're definitely not... home. So here we are; on one end we're leaving lights on when we're going on a holiday, and on the other we're telling everybody on the internet we're not home. It gets even worse if you have "friends" who want to colonize your house. That means they have to enter your address, to tell everyone where they are. Your address.. on the internet.. Now you know what to do when people reach for their phone as soon as they enter your home. That's right, slap them across the face.

The goal of this website is to raise some awareness on this issue and have people think about how they use services like Foursquare, Brightkite, Google Buzz etc. Because all this site is, is a dressed up Twitter search page. Everybody can get this information.

And while this site is trying to raise awareness about the dangers of allowing geo-locating to Tweet everyone in the world your location, you can be sure some less than reputable sites are doing much much worse.

Or is it an Age thing?
Zuckerberg and Facebook cater to the new hipsters. Earlier I mentioned Facebook CEO Mark Zukerberg talking about his feelings towards privacy. He went on, saying

In the last 5 or 6 years, blogging has taken off in a huge way and all these different services that have people sharing all this information. People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. That social norm is just something that's evolved over time. (Thompson)

And if you look at the curve, I'm sure the social norm is moving in that direction. Living outside of that norm is alienating though. It reminds me a bit of a Fraternity; you're not cool 'till you're one of us. Come join, but there's a price. In Facebook's case, it's your privacy, and the deluge of ads, and shady marketing virals. But once you're in, you're one of the club; you're ok. And if Facebook isn't your Pi Rho, perhaps try another on Frat Row: MySpace, LinkedIn, etc (Like I need to list social networks here). A frat for every type of person. And one day we can all share our drunken sex pics, and our future employers won't care because they're sharing their office bong party pics from last summer, and the Prez is posting YouTube feeds from the Oval office in his pink hart boxers and mustard-stained undershirt with a big Cuban Cigar hanging out of his mouth. Sure there's no doubt that this juggernaut is going to continue RickRolling over all of the world to a point that eventually governments start considering social networking as a potential tap in for legal identification.

I'm old enough to remember computers when the screens were monochrome green, and I was giggling at text based adventure games when they said, "I can't do that!!!" after I typed "Fuck you" into the prompt with all of my ten year old smugness. Maybe because I never owned a computer before 1998, I have some sense of anti-technology curmudgeon in me; a sense that doing things in-person, while at times far more onerous, is the best way for communication. Why? Because I am forced to represent myself physically with all of my conscious and unconscious body language to another person or group under similar conditions. I have a larger vocabulary in person--sarcasm and other subtlties, for example, work as expected (whereas over the net, they're always hit or miss, and rarely interpreted correctly). And if I am to communicate online (which I do quite often), email or direct IM are my weapons of choice. Posting on friends' walls seems silly for me. Why should I care about my Friend A's Friend X (whom I'm not friends with) posting something inane on Friend A's Wall? It's silly to me to broadcast information for one person to everyone.


But I blog and I write
So what should I do with all the other stuff that flits around on the internet with my name attached? I have no intention of taking that down. Perhaps it's more of a control thing. Going back to the idea of compartmentalized self; I know what goes up here on the blog, and on the websites. I control the stories I submit to online pubs, and those that (eventually) will appear under my own publication. It boils back to the notion of the gatekeeper of my information. I like it to rest in my hands, for it to post or fade at my whim, not some abstracted corporation's decision on "what's best for me, or the current social trends." And thinking along those lines, does not the data I control become then more authentic me? By disseminating information under my name knowingly to the world at large, it then represents myself. A company disseminating information on my behalf also becomes a representation of myself, but a representation that I may or may not have intended to exist publicly, thus becoming a taintedself or nonself.

So does that make me selfish to want to try to control the depiction of me to the world of strangers out there [not] looking in my direction? Hmm. But then again, rarely, if ever, is anyone happy about invasions of privacy in other sectors: TSA, for instance now rifles through your luggage regardless, and in some areas have been pushing for full body scans as mandatory. Thanks to the PATRIOT act, lots and lots of people had their calls wiretapped after 9/11. I think just about everyone today has had their social security number stolen at least once thanks to a lost/stolen laptop from [insert just about any company in the world here]. Our names and addresses (both snail and email) get sold to advertisers, who send us gobs of garbage. I could go on, but all of these things are things that generally no one likes. Sure you can make claims that they're protecting our nation and whatnot, but in the long run, we as Americans, in our core, like privacy. So when Zuckerberg starts saying that all this privacy thing is going to the wayside, I'm leery. Especially when we all know that he makes money when more of your information goes public.

So long story sh_rt, I may have a lot of crap out on the internet, but it's my crap. Since I don't monetize this blog, or pay for promotion, my visibility is low as well as my readership, but isn't a smaller more dedicated body of readers better than a swarm of nodding assentors that just jumped over because everyone else was doing the same? I like the internet, especially today's internet for giving me the ability to self-publish cheaply, but I want to do so on my terms. Facebook doesn't care about me; it cares about the money I can generate by spewing me all over the net. I'll find a way to gain my own notoriety thank you very much.

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Hors d'voeures
A spectre is haunting my mind and that spectre is the role of fiction in the world today. Two weeks ago, I touted Transmedia collaboration as one potential breakaway from the tailspin I see occurring in fictive realms, but pure social collaboration (which is the heart of transmedia fiction) doesn't fully sate my appetite or my interest. And while it may be a swell idea, and one that I'm avidly hoping to pursue more actively once this semester is over and I have time to think again, it doesn't fully encompass the full necessity of fiction.

Back in my Ontologica essay, I argued that for fiction to be truly revitalized in today's hyper-visual world, there had to be a definitive reason for text to be text, and not say a movie, play, YouTube Video or Tweet syndication. And in my particular idiom, I've always felt that certain aspects of postmodernism lend very well to building such a relevant need for fiction to be printed text--perhaps not always linear printed text, but largely text with littler or no graphical intrusion beyond formatting and other structural elements.

Postmodern construction, though, is labyrinthine, and while it could transgress into a transmedic enterprise, I'm not sure how easy it would be to find enough people willing to work with the same ontologies for an extended period to make a successful postmodern transmedia project.

Therefore, I've largely kept these two notions separate in my head, and as such, don't expect this essay to attempt to bring those two worlds into collision anytime soon. Everything previous is merely setup.

Meat
So in the spirit of getting on with it, I recently received Ronald Sukenick's Narralogues as an un-birthday present from my good friend Dave. And while logic would say that taking on yet another thing to do right now would be suicidal, I started reading over my lunchbreak at work this week.

In it, Sukenick opens with a bit of an essay setting up the rest of the collection (of short stories) saying that "fiction is a matter of argument rather than dramatic representation" (2). He goes on to say

My point is that all fiction can be profitably regarded as argument. When you define fiction by representation you end up confining it to realism at some level and arguing that fiction, as a form of make-believe, is a way of lying to get at the truth, which if not palpably stupid is certainly round-about and restrictive. My approach frees fiction from the obligations of mimesis, popularly, and most often critically, assumed to be its defining quality. (2)

This of course really sparked my interest, as I've often said before that realist fiction, today carries next to nothing in weight, especially when stacked against more popular visual media. But if we are to repurpose our fiction into argument, then, effectively all bets are _______, and we can give the reader something more to latch onto than just entertainment. Specifically, Sukenick channels the persuasive direction of fiction towards that of defining experiential elements that the reader can then internalize and use to assist in coping with life. He says,

I realized that the pleasure and excitement that I derived from some novels was attributable to the way they helped me understand my experience and live my life. In other words, for me fiction had always been a way to knowledge rather than a way to goof off. (5)

I don't think this is too far of a stretch for any serious reader to recall a moment in a novel, story or poem that has later gone to shape that reader's understanding of life. I thrive on such experience, and perhaps for this reason I am so attached to works of postmodern literature because what they lack is any true sense of mimesis, rather supplanting it with ontological interpretation that forces me to recognize deeper variances in existence than just the surface "known" world we live in.

A quick list of works that have impressed me as such (incomplete, unordered, _____)

• John Barth, "Lost in the Funhouse"
• Mark Danielewski House of Leaves
• Susan Sontag "Baby"
• William Butler Yeats "The Second Coming"
• Allan Ginsberg "America"
• Jorge Luis Borges "The Garden of Forking Paths," "The Library of Babel," "Tlon Uqbar Orbis Tertius"
  
• Ben Marcus The Age of Wire and String

I'm certain we all have our lists, but mine largely revolves around the notion of Plurality and Ontological interpretation. "What If" mantras interest me deeply, and works like those above largely build upon unseen alternatives, endless expansion, and certain collision of the known into the unknown.

And by extension, my Not an Autobiography project stems in this exact direction. Despite the fact that I've long struggled with the question, "who would want to read a series of linked stories told as mock autobiography from voices of different versions of myself, of which none physically exist on this plane?" the project has taught me a lot about myself and my craft as a writer.

So as I circle back to the premise here, the question of can fiction function as argument, I have to say, I'm leaning in the direction of agreement. I'm about half way through Sukenick's stories, and while many of them remind me of Platonic Dialogues, (which Sukenick attributes as "a remote progenitor" of this book), the overall content is both interesting and thought-provoking. While it's not particularly full of flowery description, the arguments presented are both complex and meaty enough to help pull the narrative along.

All definitely food for thought, and perhaps more formal application once I get my head fully wrapped around how you pull it all off without becoming pedantic.

Oh Millennials, Y do we hate UR generation?

For the better part of the last two years, I've been thinking on and off about the nature of the generation following Gen X, Generation Y. As one of the last Gen Xers, I often find myself standing more with one foot in each group than anything. And so when folks bring up this newest generation, which spans roughly from 1980 to 2000, I find myself often simultaneously nodding my head in ascent and dropping it in despair.

Fact of the matter is, Most folks think that Generation Y (or the Millennials, DotNet Generation, Facebook Generation, etc) is at best in distress and at worst hell-bent on the unconscious dismantlement of society as we know it. But do the Millennials really deserve all this bad press?

Without a doubt, each upcoming generation gnashes its teeth against the Old Guard. Musically, Gen X started out throwing bottles and spit on stage with Punk and continued on a path of raging against the machine all the way from Hair Metal to Goth to Grunge, Hip Hop to Gangsta Rap. We tore it up.

And as the Hippies turned Yuppies lost everything when the Big 80s crashed it was the first of the Gen Xers coming out of college that paved the new Internet startups. We've been movers and shakers. Granted, we don't do things the traditional way, bringing about cultural analysts like Richard Florida to publish The Rise of the Creative Class, but we drive change through challenging the status quo.

Now as the Millennials are starting to reach their 20s, and most are in college, the bad press has really swung into force. While baby-boomers hated the fact that Gen Xers didn't care about "proper business attire," and were forced to concede to tattoos, piercings, alternative lifestyles, and more casual work attire, Gen X still got the job done. Gen Y, doesn't seem to have the same capability, or so say the critics.

Mark Bauerlein, author of The Dumbest Generation provides perhaps, one of the most pointed and quantitatively supported argument against the newest generation. He says, "Today's rising generation thinks more highly of its lesser traits. It wears anti-intellectualism on its sleeve, pronouncing book-reading an old-fashioned custom, and it snaps at people who rebuke them for it" (41). Throughout his book, Bauerlein cites study after study showing the steady decline in reading rates for young Americans, with one study showing that teens spend only about eight minutes of their day reading when on average they had more than five hours of daily leisure time (49). These are some startling statistics. But is reading everything?

Take a break from reading, and watch Professor Michael Wesch's, Digital Ethnography professor at the University of Kansas video,A vision of Students Today
Some interesting statistics

• I only complete 49% of my assigned readings
• 26% of them are relevant to my life
• I buy hundred dollar textbooks that I never open
• My Neighbor Paid for class, but never comes
• I will read 8 books this year
• 2300 webpages and 1281 Facebook profiles
• I will write 42 pages for class this semester
• and over 500 pages of email
• I am a multi-tasker
• (I have to be)

These are some fairly striking statistics. And they came from the students. Two things stick out to me:

1. Priorities are shifting away from what is expected of them to what they want.
2. Millennials are less concerned with expectations and more with narcissistic pursuits.

About a year ago, I started laying out the groundwork for an essay on teaching to the Millennial generation. At the time, I was still largely optimistic to the notion, thinking that a lot of what Bauerlein and other critics say about Millennials was more of the Old Guard groaning at their replacements not living up to whatever archaic standards that no replacement can live up to. And in this planning, I came up with several suppositions about Millennials that define their generation:

1. The Millennial Generation is wholly unlike and preceding generation
2. Students don't read or just aren't interested in reading
3. Reading for today's students more often is seen as a chore or punishment
4. Students think the internet holds all of the answers
5. Students have little patience for things that have no direct connection to their situation
6. Students don't look for deeper connection/analysis with with they read.
7. Students fail to see the importance of writing, which leads to a major crisis in the business world
8. High school doesn't prepare students for the necessary critical thinking in college
9. Students have a very poor grasp of grammar, if they have one at all
10. Students have a difficulty assessing purpose to their writing through recognizing a specific audience

I'm generalizing here; obviously exception exists on both sides of the spectrum, but what I'm witnessing after nearly 300 students worth of Millennials is that some darker currents beyond the above suppositions are rising:

1. Passionate disinterest
2. Selective technical apathy
3. Ultra short attention spans masquerading as multi-tasking
4. Unwillingness to excel

Along these lines Bauerlein says,

It's a new attitude, this brazen disregard of books and reading. Earlier generations resented homework assignments, of course, and only a small segment of each dove into the intellectual currents of the time, but no generation trumpeted a-literacy (knowing how to read but choosing not to) as a valid behavior of their peers. (40)

And so, I'm left standing still between two precipices. I can't help but scowl at the passionate disinterest and apathy I see when students don't even bother to try doing an assignment. I don't expect everyone to feel the readings are relevant, or even interesting, but by reading them, at least we can talk about what could have happened to make the reading useful. A room full of blank stares accomplishes nothing, and ultimately it's their loss not mine; I've earned my degree; I know how to put together an essay, how to deconstruct a text, how to apply it to other arguments.

But on the other side, I feel that pull of narcissism. Teh Intarnets!!111! does have that effect on us. Our social outlets, Facebook profiles, YouTube videos, blogs, scattered comments across the net all serve as brand identity. Brand identity for the big ole capital I. The facade of anonymity draws us in, makes us feel cozy and safe, beckons for us to say anything, and one thing Millennials can do better than any other generation is post anything and everything that's on their minds to the net--privacy to Gen Y is a distant meaningless thing to so many young people today--something that a anti-social curmudgeon like myself will never fully understand.

Turning and Turning the Widening Gyre

...the author cannot hear the reader.

For years, Yeats' "The Second Coming" has echoed in my head as the drumbeat of the ontological shift, the slide into the postmodern. Perhaps, this constant [mis]reading of the poem will aggravate some, but it's my battleflag. A battle flag rooted in a British Literature Survey class with Doc Marsden back in 2000. Back then, John Barth was about the coolest thing I'd ever read, and 'epistemology' v. 'ontology' was a war I only vaguely understood. But the visceral image of Yeats' poem--"the widening gyre...the center cannot hold" drove me to imaginings of black holes, to the embrace of plurality's structured chaos, and now a decade later, I still hear the echo of this poem, but it's feel is changing.

I'm teaching a comp class focusing on the death of the newspaper, but it's not too far to see a similar corollary in the literary journal realm. This isn't the first time I've visited the topic, but recently if:Book ran an article on Ted Genoways' essay in Mother Jones recanting "The Death of Fiction?" Barring the fact that the notion of fiction dying is probably the most overqualified argument ever--Barth covered it back in the 60s, and if I were to dig, I'm sure I could go back to the beginning of the written word and find someone who proclaimed "everything that can be written has been written." (But as a thoroughly postmodern aside: Doesn't everyone have to eventually in one of their infinite versions of themselves proclaim that fiction is kaput?)

Despite the tiredness of Genoways' argument, he wrangles some truly frightening numbers:

Last summer, Louis Menand tabulated that there were 822 creative writing programs. Consider this for a moment: If those programs admit even 5 to 10 new students per year, then they will cumulatively produce some 60,000 new writers in the coming decade. Yet the average literary magazine now prints fewer than 1,500 copies.

That's a recipe for a whole lot of letdowns. And while I think it's both sobering and important for all aspiring writers to face such facts, Genoways like many doomsayers, doesn't really give us much hope for change. He concludes:

To pull out of this tailspin, writers and their patrons both will have to make some necessary changes—and quick. With so many newspapers and magazines closing, with so many commercial publishers looking to nonprofit models, a few bold university presidents could save American literature, reshape journalism, and maybe even rescue public discourse from the cable shout shows and the blogosphere. At the same time, young writers will have to swear off navel-gazing in favor of an outward glance onto a wrecked and lovely world worthy and in need of the attention of intelligent, sensitive writers. I'm not calling for more pundits—God knows we've got plenty. I'm saying that writers need to venture out from under the protective wing of academia, to put themselves and their work on the line. Stop being so damned dainty and polite. Treat writing like your lifeblood instead of your livelihood. And for Christ's sake, write something we might want to read.

To which I say, No shit Sherlock. Genoways' solution echoes many others I've seen, and it really does very little to help solve the problem. Ok. We get it. Too many writers writing things no one wants to read, and not enough readers reading in the first place. Personally, I see contemporary realism's inability to compete with visual media as one of the cornerstone problems surrounding today's fiction industry. But my problem isn't necessarily your problem, and to sit here and whine about perceived problems with the industry isn't going to really drive any sort of solution from anyone.

So let's do something.

For hundreds of years, since Gutenberg actually, we've relied on the printing press. But now we have the Internet. And despite what the technological curmudgeons, the Neil Postmans, the Sven Birkerts, might say, our wired world is here to stay.

But it's a young, angry baby. It eats everything in its path. And it grows, oh it grows so fast that you can't keep it in fitting clothes for more than an eyeblink. But it's our baby. And as parents, we are beholden to it, and it to us.

It's time to start modeling, molding, shaping. The Future

Relying on the printing press for anything is increasingly antiquated. You won't find many arguments touting increased reading rates for kids these days, unless such arguments are about reading Facebook walls, fashion blogs, and online news.

Which brings me back to Transmedia.

As the Internet grows, so too do the number of writers trying to make it big. More of us are getting published online, and more journals are either going straight to online only or offering a hybrid between print and online. While print fiction still offers more clout, conceivably this could change. And Transmedia fiction can help usher that change.

With so many new writers emerging onto the scene, and publishers literally buried under a slushpile of [bad] fiction, Transmedia fiction offers perhaps one of the best solutions for our growing problem.

Let's examine its boons:

1. It fosters a community of writers -- As writers, we don't operate well in a vacuum. The more people we have to discuss our works with, the better said works become.
2. As a community, Transmedia groups would build thematic collectives, which would easily cater to a wider audience -- Think about this. I've spent considerable time trying to find literary journals that write what I want to read. It's hard work, especially if you're on a budget. But online Transmedia collectives can easily be controlled by tags and keywords. Looking for some metafiction? There's a tag for that. How about post-apocalyptic salon/day spa drama? There's a tag for that too. Very easily like minded people can gather and produce consistently interesting and tightly focused fiction. This is far harder to accomplish in the print world.
3. There are no boundaries on the internet. We don't have to deal with pretension. An ass-good 14 year old can be giving constructive criticism to captain three-PHD and be none the wiser. The abstraction of the Internet facilitates fierce collaboration without traditional stigmas of race, education, age, nationality, and gender.
4. People like free things, and Transmedia exercises should inherently be Creative Commonsed and more or less free to be consumed. Most emerging writers aren't making money on their fiction anyway (as most publishers just do the contributor copy thing these days), so it shouldn't be a hard leap to make your content available free of charge. Plus somewhere down the road, if/when you do get real popular, I'm sure someone (if not just LuLu) will want to sell your internet-published serialized book. And then you'll have your $20 monthly royalty checks.
   
5. Such communities can operate/become part of your favorite social networking application. Why not have a Facebook group dedicated to writing stories about people with chronic nightmares about having a bad case of Pickle farts?
6. And when Joe Average starts reading these facebook stories, perhaps, he too will join our ranks and churn out his own pickle fart nightmare. Even if Joe's story isn't destined for a Pushcart, it's a lurch in the right direction, a win for literacy.

No, Transmedia isn't perfect. There are lots of potential pitfalls here as well. But the scope of our problem with fiction isn't that it's dying, rather the format we are used to is starting to break down. Too many people are too connected to the Net to be bothered with print reading. Fiction isn't dying, but a change in gameplan is needed. And as I continue to mull over the status of my own writing, and where I want to see myself as an author, more and more the thought becomes--Transmedia is the only way to go.

Reporting that can be lost

This past week my ENGL004 class took a look at Gary Kamiya's "The Death of the News." In it, Kamiya takes on the now "old news" (to steal the aptly bad pun) that the newspaper/print media world is dying, but he does so from a slightly different angle, saying,

What is really threatened by the decline of newspapers and the related rise of online media is reporting -- on-the-ground reporting by trained journalists who know the subject, have developed sources on all sides, strive for objectivity and are working with editors who check their facts, steer them in the right direction and are a further check against unwarranted assumptions, sloppy thinking and reporting, and conscious or unconscious bias.

And so when Kamiya aptly says, "If newspapers die, so does reporting," we're left with a scary thought, or are we?

It's no lie that here in the logorrheaic mire of my mindspace that Kamiya's threat of an anti-reporting distopia becoming "a postmodern world right out of a seminar taught by Jaques Derrida...[where] Nietsche's credo that 'there are no facts, only interpretations' will become our epistemological motto" is one that I would whole-heartedly embrace simply for the sheer interest such an plural version of our reality would bring to me. But then again, good god it'd be hell to win an argument.

But I digress,
Kamiya says that newspapers and reporting are intrinsically linked. And to that I agree, but Kamiya is a professional, a journalist, and someone who knows the industry from the inside. His definition of a reporter is one that is perhaps too specific for "real" world application.

On the beat, reporters to all us gloamish nodes can range from true newspaper journalists in all their monochromatic glory to the tv pundits that irk Michale Lind so much (mentioned in my last entry here). So while Kamiya may be on to something, he's fighting the good fight.

I don't fight the good fight. And I don't think all reporters need saved. Newspapers aside, there's some sneaking shit that needs a severe kai-bosh. And what irks me the most (for the moment) is this whole process of growing speculative journalism.

Let me set the stage.
Wednesday, I turned on NBC to watch the State of the Union at about a quarter after eight, mainly because I couldn't remember if Obama's speech started at eight or nine. I was greeted with a craptacular "pre-game" show for the president's speech. I know this has been going on for a while, but what the fuck? Have we as a population become so incredibly bored that we don't even want to watch some shitty syndicated sitcom from the 90s until the State of the Union comes on? Couldn't NBC find something, maybe the Slap-Chop infomercial to air before Obama took the stage?

Yes, I could have changed the channel. But in my defense, I was only half listening (thank god for that), and I was chasing my daughter, so by not changing the channel, I could keep a lazy eye in the direction for the speech to commence whenever that was supposed to happen.

In my half listening, whatever hack journalist/pundit/guest/whatever happened to be talking began to go into this analysis of Obama's speech before it aired. Now, everything I've ever learned about cutting someone down revolves around the idea that you at least let the person you're attacking get an opportunity to make an ass of himself first.

Instead, I heard this jerkoff pundit going on and on about how Obama's speech is too long, and how the American public does not have an attention span for anything beyond 40 minutes or so. Now, without having seen the speech, which I'm guessing this guy hadn't (I'm sure the president had to release the timing so the networks could set up their scheduling, but I can't see why he'd say a whole lot else about it), how can anyone speculate on whether or not the speech will hold the collective attention of the country? Especially when Obama is relatively well-known for his ability to actually speak in front of an audience (unlike his predecessor). Secondly, the lesser masses of our country, upon hearing that 1. the speech is long and 2. they can't stand listening to something that long are going to take this guy (who has to be both smart and correct because he's on TV) as being generally correct, and thus tune out to the State of the Union.

This is a huge disservice to the American Public. Not only is it advertising a subversive bias against Obama and his agenda, but also it's undercutting our population as being both ignorant and too stupid to be able to make our own decisions.

This sort of journalistic speculation, of course, isn't limited to just the State of the Union; it happens all the time. Think about it. How many times have you heard reporters saying something like "President Obama is expected to announce X, today?" No harm in that. It's objective, and newsworthy, but often what follows is speculation on how whatever X may be will affect us. This, while perhaps ok for some talk show, isn't news.

But that's kind of the problem anymore, isn't it?

The news (on TV at least) has morphed into this monster, where every fact must be vetted through an unacknowledged bias before fed back to us. Can you imagine turning to any news network and seeing only objective stories for more than 15 minutes? Oh wait...that's CSPAN. But no one watches CSPAN.

So as I'm rambling here, let me cull things down to a single point: Kamiya wants to save reporting, but we need to make some distinctions, because the speculative crap on TV is some of that bathwater that needs thrown out. It's like a parasitic Siamese twin to real reporting...you know one of those things that's nothing but a heart, an empty brain case with teeth, no eyes, and a whole lot of hair growing inside your stomach like you're pregnant, but it's your twin, and it's eating you.

But perhaps, thinking back on Kamiya's argument, this is exactly why he he fears for the loss of the real journalists. The newspaper doesn't allow for this kind of inane speculation, as newspapers are generally behind the times, reporting on past events. Their analysis then can be based on objectivity, on some sort of traceable facts.

But it sure would be nice to turn on the State of the Union and not, even if you're half-paying attention, have to hear some jerkoff droning on about how much the upcoming speech is going to suck without any real proof to back it up.

And the speech? Obama's a charmer. I'd be real happy to see just about everything he said happen. But I'm jaded to. We need more than two parties to get any real change in government. I'm looking forward to some good times ahead, but I'm not holding my breath.

The Partisan Rant and Why Paywalls Suck

Backstory

Back around Thanksgiving, right when I was starting to plan out this class theme of News and the Age of Information, I remember hearing that Rupert Murdoch wanted to delist all of News Corporation's holdings from Google and put them behind some kind of paywall. To which I immediately said, "Awesome. If that keeps Joe Average from reading [un]Fair and [un]Balanced Fox News on teh Intarnets, score one for the world.

And before everyone goes off the handle calling me a pinko leftist commie, lemme say this: While I may disapprove of most conservative politics, I have no problem with conservatives. I DO however have a big problem with partisan news labeling itself "Fair and Balanced." You can't be fair and balanced and push a Republican agenda at the same time. And this is a long standing problem (dating back to Walter Lippmann's journalistic revolutions in the 1920s) with news media--they claim objectivity, but party politics always sneak in. My advise: broadcast your bias, and be proud of it; let the readers decide whether you're right or not. Hiding behind a mask of objectivity makes you look like a douchebag when someone (like George Carlin on O'Reilly) calls you on it.

On an increasingly off-topic parallel, Michael Lind posted this about the growing problem of political media pundits on cable news. His problem: "Most of the representatives of progressivism you see on TV are not really progressives. They are what might be called 'Democratists.' Most publicly prominent conservatives are not principled conservatives at all. They are 'Republicanists.' With the problem being more or less not the political spin, but rather the fact that these pundits spend their time defending their respective parties' actions, rather than actually preaching/believing/acting according to their political affiliation.

So perhaps moreso than a lack of journalistic responsibility in being forthright with your political bias, perhaps the pundits, as described by Lind, are the real downfall in newsmedia.

But I Digress

All of News Corp's holdings haven't yet fallen behind the paywall scheme kicked around by Murdoch in November (though the Wall Street Journal is already there). So for the time being, we can still celebrate the relative freedom as net surfers to choose just about any media-outlet-online-news-poison we want. But, as of Monday, this News Corp talk of Paywalls seems to be a growing fad. I caught this article in the New York Magazine about the good old New York Times starting to reconsider its current situation and undo the free state of the newspaper that's existed since 2005 when they realized no one wanted to pay for electronic subscription (the 2005, sorry, charging you was a bad idea letter to the readers is here). So here's their reasoning:

The argument for remaining free was based on the belief that nytimes.com is growing into an English-language global newspaper of record, with a vast audience — 20 million unique readers — that, Nisenholtz and others believed, would prove lucrative as web advertising matured. (The nytimes.com homepage, for example, has sold out on numerous occasions in the past year.) As other papers failed to survive the massive migration to the web, the Times would be the last man standing and emerge with even more readers. Going paid would capture more circulation revenue, but risk losing significant traffic and with it ad dollars. At an investor conference this fall, Nisenholtz alluded to this tension: "At the end of the day, if we don't get this right, a lot of money falls out of the system."

While I understand the need for any business to want to push forward, turn a profit, and stick around, I have a hard time buying into the idea that some sort of "metered system [similar to the one] adopted by the Financial Times, in which readers can sample a certain number of free articles before being asked to subscribe" is the way to go.

When I search for news online, I like to browse headlines. Some days I won't get much deeper than headlines, others, I'll drill through several articles. The second that some form of paywall stops me, I'm gone. News isn't that important for me to buy an account--especially when I know that I can probably find something similar elsewhere, or as a last resort, use my university account to pull it out of a newspaper database from the school's library site. While every news source will have a different take on the news, there are certainly enough out there that are still free. Drop one behind a paywall, and another online paper that's free gets a spike in traffic. I see Salon, Huffington Post, Smoking Gun, and The Drudge Report all making out like kings from this.

Sharing is Caring

One of the big cornerstones of the net today is the ability to share. Almost every site of any import has connectivity links to all major social media outlets (facebook, MySpace, Twitter, etc), in addition to aggregators like Digg. If you block something behind a paywall, you just shut down all the additional traffic you're netting through social media. Why throw away potential readers? That sounds suspiciously like something Verizon would do (damn the customers, damn the employees, worship the profits).

However, all my whining and reactionary thinking against this paywall idea will mean nothing short of ranting unless I offer something up to remedy the situation. One of the best things I learned about whining is that people tend to accept your whining a little more if you try to pair your problem up with a solution. Back in my Verizon days, it united our department, when my boss made us carry around little notebooks that said "issues" on one side and "resolutions" on the other. We couldn't bitch word one until we had thought up some sort of resolution to the problem we had. But with resolution in hand, we had the floor. So, I've gone on and bitched for several paragraphs about this whole paywall idea. Here's my solution: If you want to generate revenue of some sort off of your online news content, and somehow advertising isn't cutting it, take a note from the music industry (and I don't mean those assholes over in the RIAA. I mean NIN, Radiohead, Madonna, Oasis, and all the other musicians who've cut their record company ties and gone solo), and put up a tip jar. When In Rainbows came out in 2007, Wired.com estimated that Radiohead pulled in as much as $10M on their CD, where they allowed fans to set their own price for the album (Van Buskirk). (I payed £10 for my copy, btw.). In any event, letting users contribute what they can when they can, still generates revenue, but it also generates respect and follows along with the sense of "giving back" (isn't that one of the great buzz words of the times?) to something you believe in. Sure, you won't be raking in bucketloads of cash, but for intangible content that people can already get for free, what more can you ask for than a tip?

New York Times, you have some good content. I've used your articles before in essays, but if you ask me to pay, I'll go away, and I won't be the one crying the river. I still have my Slashdot, BBC, and Salon (which I did start reading more regularly as opposed to what my last blog entry said [at the very least, I put its headlines on my iGoogle homepage]).

Somewhere off the Face of the earth

So in Early December, I posted here saying that I won at teh NaNoWriMo. And since then, it's been pretty quiet here on this blog. Sorry about that.

Call it a New Years Resolution, or perhaps a Interesting-challenge-because-it's-also-an-assignment, but my goal is to blog weekly for the next fifteen weeks in hopes that I get back into a more regular swing in updating the currently lacking ramblesnatch in this pitiful blog's existence.

Either way,

Here't Goes:

Between watching my now thoroughly insane (as in Holy-shit-kids-have-way-too-much-energy-and-why-can't-I-have-a-tenth-of-that insane) daughter sugar herself up into a Christmas frenzy (the first such frenzy [being the first year she was cognizant of holiday fun] of several impending frenzies, I'm sure), and trying to ease the discomfort of Sue's pregnancy (apparently all boys are Assholes [my term not hers] in the womb--I'm sorry mom), and revising the Shadowman project (I finished a solid pass just this past week -- W00t), I've been talking and thinking and prepping for classes, which started yesterday. (I just realized: In the above I listed a bunch of stuff, but not anything about work. It was there too; but that's the ignorable bit; it's like sleep, I guess--an interim between the other, more important stuff. Not that work is bad like it was in the Verizon days, but thankfully and blissfully, contracting has been relatively stress free, and thus totally ignorable like the fifth child out of six).

This time around I've picked up two, a Rhetoric and Comp and a Basic Writing. And it is because of the Basic Writing Course that I'm challenging myself to blog regularly, because that's exactly what they'll be doing. Specifically, I've beet talking to my friend Grace a lot about various topics related to my course themes. Most of our discussions have revolved around a mutual dislike towards Facebook (which started out with Grace mocking me for joining fb back in June or July, and ended with Grace saying "see I told you it was Evil" when I quit in early December). We've also spent a goodly amount of time talking about newsmedia and the current shift that's starting to happen between print and online content.

Personally, I never read a newspaper. I've always found them boring, and the size, formatting and layout annoys me, not to mention the cost. However, slashdot, Google News, and for a good long time BBC news have all replaced any sort of need for reading traditional newspapers. Granted, I'd like to pick up some more sources; in researching essays for class, I've found that online content on Salon, The Atlantic, and a couple other places is really top notch. But I am the king of taking on too much, so while I have good intentions, I don't really foresee my news reading circle expanding much (especially in the face of how much I've been lagging in reading fiction).

So with that said, I think online news is the way to go. I'm sure I'll cover my take on the whole Rupert Murdoch/News Corporation vs. Google bit here soon, probably next week, but I think print journalism is dying, and no one is really going to miss it. While I sit far enough into the tail end of Generation X to not fully understand the usefulness and ubiquity of Twitter and Social networking (perhaps because I'm just not that social--I like my cave, and I don't like to leave it), but I do think that them kids with their cellphones and twitter feeds will be getting most of their news from that. With each successive generation we become more attuned to multi-tasking. And as that becomes more of a necessity, doing things like sitting down to read the paper will become increasingly preposterous. More likely, we'll catch a bit of news in a deadspot between text messages, while waiting in traffic on the road, or have it shipped to us, pre-filtered and set up to our desires via Twitter, RSS and all that other fun Web 2.0 stuff that makes teh Intarnets useful to us.