My critique of free web distribution met a lot of resistance, but rather than rehashing the debates of previous decades or arguing for extremes, it might behoove us to stop and take a look around. Literature is not the only form that is struggling to earn money from digital content; movies, television, music, and journalism face the same problem. Everyone wants content to be as cheap as possible for consumers, but we still need to provide artists with incentives to create.
First, there are the models we already have. The pay-per-copy system has been working for a long time and probably isn't going anywhere. Self-publishing will continue to shape the economic landscape and eliminate middle parties (wholesalers, retailers, publishers to some extent) but publishers should not be scorned or counted out. Publishers offer the advantage of polish and promotion, and serve as important purveyors of taste. As more people self-publish, readers--lost in a sea of works--will look for a shortcut to the good stuff. Publishers can help. Of course, self-publishing and distribution can also rely on pay-per-copy and as more people turn to this the role of the publisher may change drastically (perhaps writers will begin to pay publishers more as consultants). Or perhaps we might see publisher subscription models à la Netflix.
Free distribution offers different advantages. A writer might want a larger audience until she establishes a name for herself. Or perhaps her income is coming from a grant or endowment. Free distribution can serve as a gateway or advertisement for other paying work, but the key point is that the writer's funding must come from an external source. Much of eLit is currently being given away, and while that has short-term advantages, it is unsustainable to the industry long-term. However, there are other ways to avoid the pay-per-copy model and still pay writers.
In a fascinating conversation, William Cole pointed out that digital comics are often self-referential and interlinked in a way that suggests we already have popular eLit right under our noses. These have been very commercially successful, largely through the marketing of merchandise. This model requires a very large fanbase, but it's reasonable to think that even if Hunger Games were freely distributed, Suzanne Collins could still make a killing selling mockingjay pins and replica bows and quivers. Applying this model to eLit opens the way for interesting cross-over ideas, like selling an art print from a visually beautiful work, or offering paid copies of the author's notes.
Downloadable content or bonus features, as long as they’re used for good rather than evil, are another option that has already been successful in the games industry. I can imagine a hard-boiled hypertext in which the addition of another character’s point of view, thoughtfully woven into existing content, could add an interesting dimension to the narrative.
Another option is that literature might adopt a model similar to the music industry in that reading and writing might become a more performative act. Works would then serve as an advertisement for paid author talks or readings, similar to how musicians make vastly more money from concerts than album sales.
And of course, there's always the journalism model of ad space, which has also worked for musicians and youtube comedians. This and the related freemium model are possibilities for eLit. Or, heaven forbid, product placement (may it never come to that).
It's important to note that each form seems to be finding its own solutions, and different artists are finding different solutions within the same medium. Jonathan Coulton and Rebecca Black, though both musicians, made their money in very different ways. What works for one person, company, or form may not work for you. But we must assess what readers want and provide them with convenient ways to pay authors.
The MLA recently issued guidelines for evaluating work in digital humanities and digital media.
Institutions and departments should develop written guidelines so that faculty members who create, study, and teach with digital objects; engage in collaborative work; or use technology for pedagogy can be adequately and fairly evaluated and rewarded. The written guidelines should provide clear directions for appointment, reappointment, merit increases, tenure, and promotion and should take into consideration the growing number of resources for evaluating digital scholarship and the creation of born-digital objects.
The fact that this even needs to be stated is ridiculous, but it might be a step in bridging some of the evaluation gaps between the humanities and the sciences (for example, different approaches to co-authorship, conferences vs. journals, etc.) that are used to evaluate scholarship.
Kate Pullinger suggests that we might have things backwards when we talk about the shelf life of digital works and the permanence of print.
In traditional publishing terms, I’m a classic mid-list literary fiction author. At this stage in my career, I’ve written a lot of books, and many of them are no longer in print. The exception to this is my most recent novel, The Mistress of Nothing; the fate of this book was transformed when it won the GG in 2009, Canada’s Governor General’s Award for Fiction. […] But even now, with several translations yet to appear, this book is fading from the market; it will doubtless have greater longevity than anything else I’ve written, because of the prize, but - unless of course the movie gets made - it will have a placid, quiet, life.
[…]
But the opposite is true of several of my digital fictions, and the powerhouse in this field is, as mentioned earlier, Inanimate Alice. IA has not published any new episodes (there are four existing, out of a projected ten) for several years now, well before The Mistress of Nothing first came out. However, the audience for this digital fiction, about a girl growing up in the near future, surrounded by technology, continues to grow and grow.
These are interesting points. Pullinger credits Inanimate Alice’s publisher and its popularity as a teaching tool for children. Whatever the reason, we can always use more thoughtful new media — and more criticism.
Over at the New Media Writing Forum, Andy Campbell started a wonderful discussion in response to my recent post on Scott Rettberg’s history of the ELO. Campbell rightly worries that eLit will not “evolve […] without being exposed to an audience outside of academia.” It’s a legitimate concern, and other eLit writers Christine Wilkes and Alan Bigelow have added sound thoughts to the discussion. Bigelow writes
If we have any hope of encouraging our students to read electronic literature outside the classroom, or our young creative writers to try their hand at this kind of "writing," they must see it has a broader audience, with both an aesthetic future and (for the writers) at least some potential for financial gain, either outright or through jobs in related industries. They can not see it primarily as an art practiced, and favored, by those of us in academia: for a new form struggling to gain its larger identity, readership, and practitioners, the academic world, while a necessary part of the overall strategy, is too small.
Academia, though vital for educating and broadening the audience cannot be the whole picture. There’s a lot of work going on out there and a lot of it isn’t getting the “eLit” cred that it should. Still other work is only tangentially related, but really should be part of the discussion. As advanced as we might hope our field is, eLit is still very young and is changing rapidly; we can still learn a lot from other forms. We can and should be looking around to learn from the aesthetics of digital comics or ask what eLit might take away from the publishing practices of the music industry. There is a lot of interesting work going on out there, whether we’re calling it literature or not.
Many people disagreed with my argument that theory is dictating (or replacing) aesthetics. The solution to this debate is simple: it comes down to a lack of writing about craft. We would all like for there to be more eLit works to discuss, but we are desperately lacking good (recent) writing on how to do it. Some writers protest that their work isn’t demonstrating theory; that’s fine! Write about why you chose that strange syntax, that interesting point of view or strange tense.
And we can always use more thoughtful criticism.
One thing is certain: no matter where you stand, these are questions we need to ask and discussions we need to have. Nodding our heads isn’t going to cut it; we need to face the issues head-on and do the work. There is still much real work to be done.
Mark Marino has posted the transcript from his recent Twitter Netprov fiction, “The Last Five Days of Sight and Sound,” written with Rob Wittig. Each day, Marino and Wittig posted a prompt to help keep participants in character and focused on the general arc of the story. The result was impressive.
Some of my favorites:
iTweetErgo_iAm: “@markcmarino @scottrettberg ELECTRIC LIGHT ORCHESTRA?! What I wouldnt give 2 hear mr blue sky! Alas poor earlobes, I knew them well #l5dosas”
(In response to markcmarino: “ELO's @scottrettberg has joined the play in our netprov! #l5dosas Want to join? Check out http://t.co/OxOXxVjV”)
toritaylorz: “uhhh is it still raining? last thing I remember is LA flooding like it was the end of the world...uhh help...? #l5dosas”
Jerome_F_Salas: “Yanno, if we're gonna be blind but we're hooked into the internet, couldn't they give us a stream of our rooms? #3rdPerson #l5dosas”
scottrettberg: “And I was left in this still point, not quite remember the details of the novel, trying to recall the shade of brown of my sandals #l5dosas”
This fabulous talk by mathematician Richard Hamming reminds us to do good research, ask the right questions, and to work hard and effectively. The talk, from 1986, holds 10 takeaway points that are still valid today across disciplines:
- Drop your modesty; admit that you want to do first-class work
- Prepare your mind.
- Age is important.
- Brains are not enough; you also need courage
- Make the best of your working conditions
- Work hard and effectively
- Believe and doubt your hypothesis at the same time.
- Work on important problems in your field.
- Be committed to your problem.
- Work with your door open.
Luminaris, a beautifully choreographed short film by Juan Pablo Zaramella, tells a love story through stunningly beautiful stop-motion. The cinematography is incredible, and the work took almost 2 years to create due to unpredictability of weather and natural movement of shadows.
(The short is currently restricted, but Zaramella’s web site offers excerpts and other interesting work.–ed)
Ian Bogost reviews the latest game from art game studio Thatgamecompany, Journey, arguing that the game reveals the maturation of an artist. Though thatgamecompany's previous artistic successes, Flow and Flower, carried the conversation of art games forward, they exhibit a certain immaturity that is not apparent until viewed in hindsight.
Bogost’s review doesn’t even indulge the possibility that games are not art. We no longer need to argue this, but many reviews of “art games” still nod to the debate. Journey is certainly a beautiful work of art, and the review is superbly written like a thoughtful book review. If only more game reviews were like this.
Scott Rettberg recently published a history of the Electronic Literature Organization, highlighting its successes and explaining its shifts in focus.
Interestingly, he views the founding of the ELO to be a reaction to the "Eastgate school" and to Eastgate's model of publishing. Rettberg wanted a better alternative to CD-ROMS for sale; he wanted "free, web-distributed hypertext literature." In his own notes in the wake of a 1999 conference, he writes that
More hypertexts need to be free. People like free stuff. In order to generate a popular following for the new literature, we need to work to make it more accessible to readers (I haven’t read any of the Eastgate hypertexts because I’ve been in graduate school. To my knowledge, they are not available at my university library. That is a problem).
Rettberg thinks that work should be free. More broadly, he wanted to change hypertext’s economic model. Eastgate's approach was based on the economic models of print, and while this might not have been the perfect approach, it did set the precedent for authors to get paid for electronic work just as they had with print work. Mark Bernstein was surely aware of the possibility that web distribution could change the economy of publishing. He also warned of the perils of patronage, the risk of returning control of art to the prince and the priest. For electronic literature, patronage is pretty much exactly what has happened.
Rettberg paints an enthusiastic vision of community building. There was a lot of money and they had fantastic parties, but eventually the literary world lost interest and the organization turned to the patronage of academe. In the process, they lost focus on the writers.
While in its first iteration the ELO may have been envisioned as an organization focused on writers and on popularizing e-lit, it was increasingly becoming an actor in shaping an academic field of practice: moving from something more like the Academy of American Poets to something more like the MLA, or perhaps on a more appropriate scale, the Association of Internet Researchers or Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts. This is not to say that ELO was abandoning a focus on bringing electronic literature to audiences and helping e-lit writers to build a community, just that the channels for doing that were increasingly embedded with an academic context.
This transition parallels the overall state of the field: most of the writing is now done as a theoretical demonstration by the scholars who study the writing. Little of today’s eLit is meant to be read by an audience beyond conference reviewers and exhibit curators.
The shift from literary to academic was not the ELO's fault, but it's indicative of a clear shift that has taken place: we're no longer focused on writing. We're focused on theory, and much of the writing is being produced to demonstrate it. While this is not necessarily a bad thing, it is not inviting to groups outside of the academy, or successful in promoting eLit to a non-academic audience.
And why would the writers stick around? They're no longer getting paid for their work. There are certainly some very talented writers doing good work, but the proofs of concept dominate our discussions and attention.
It's easy to think of the ELO and Eastgate as two warring distribution models that can't reconcile how to provide authors with incentive to create, but surely there must be some middle ground in which the works can be easily distributed and studied, but can still provide authors incentives beyond a line on their CV. Free Web distribution has not provided us with the vast audiences some thought it would. The remaining question, as we see in eBook markets, is whether the price point is $0.99 or $9.99 or $19.95.
Mark Amerika tweets an interesting trailer for the Museum of Glitch Aesthetics. I was expecting a portfolio of interesting glitch work, but apparently the site is actually a commissioned work itself, a piece in Amerika's series of transmedia narratives that aims to tell the story of a glitch artist. From the Abandon Normal Devices page:
The Museum of Glitch Aesthetics (MOGA) is the latest work in Mark Amerika's collaborative series of transmedia narratives. MOGA tells the story of The Artist 2.0, an online persona whose personal mythology and body of digital artworks are rapidly being canonised into the annals of art history. The piece traces the life of the artist and his ongoing commitment to a practice of ‘glitch aesthetics’ that leads to the museum of the title. MOGA will feature a wide array of artworks intentionally corrupted by technological processes including net art, digital video art, digitally manipulated still images, game design, stand-up comedy, sound art, and electronic literature. The project will also include a mock museum catalog available in both free e-book and print-on-demand editions.
Glitch deals largely with remix aesthetics, but there's more going on here. Much of JODI seems to deal with anxiety over uncontrollable technology but there is the issue of textuality in code and the conspicuousness of the machine at work. Similarly, generative poetry like John Cayley's or Nick Montfort's work embraces detachment of signifier and highlights the bold line between where the human ends and the machine begins in a way that explores the complexities of human-machine interaction.
Glitches highlight the break in the cyborg mentality, relying on the push and pull of anxiety, departure from the human, and the confrontation of the uncanny. Perhaps this is why so much pleasure is gained through knowledge of the source material and understanding just how it has been changed or corrupted. Perhaps we are quantifying change in a way that will make the remixers and gamers--both fetishizers of power and agency--comfortable in the knowledge that the line between human and machine is clear and controllable.
Joshua Rothman confirms what hardcore gamers have believed for a long time: difficult games are superior.
In the world of video games, difficulty can be a virtue in itself. A game like Angry Birds is just difficult enough to be diverting—and, as a result, only fit for “casual” gamers. Real gamers are like real art lovers. They demand extraordinary difficulty.
Are we talking about cultural sophistication, or are both just a carefully sculpted image for an exclusive club that not everyone is skilled enough to be a part of? I I've written on feminism as a gaming counterculture, and perhaps the rise of the austere, difficult puzzle game is another counterculture to watch. But let's be careful not to confuse difficulty with superiority; there are many other aesthetic merits to consider, and it's easy to substitute "difficulty" for "masculinity" or "heteronormativity" or "privilege."
I've recently discovered the New Media Writing Forum, a "hub for digital writers to share ideas, resources, and discussion." The forum is still young, but the quality of the posts is remarkable (take, for example, this post by Andy Campbell) and everyone there seems to be serious about the medium.
Elit has lacked an online meeting point where writers could come to discuss work, criticism, and theory. I’ve noted a desire for more cohesion as a community, but individuals seem lost on how to find one another beyond the usual cliques.
This endeavor is a good reminder that people want to be talking to each other and are always looking for ways to bring the community together. Perhaps this forum can evolve into that shared space.
The Graduate Center at CUNY has released The Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy (JiTP), which focuses on the philosophy and practice of teaching in the digital age. All materials are open access. JiTP features papers on successful assignments and new learning resources, but the most impressive section is on "teaching fails" to showcase how assignments go wrong when certain variables are not taken into account.
The Love Letter is a simple and fun 5 minute game that reminds us how important uninterrupted reading can be.
March 8, 2012
Stacey Mason
Alexis Madrigal for the Atlantic worries that with so many analog distractions – people, cats, swimming pools, coffee – we will never be able to sit down and read books. Naturally, the only reprieve from an endless bombardment of distraction comes from reading on a screen.
Can you concentrate on Flaubert when your cute cat is only a few feet away, or give your true devotion to Mr. Darcy when people are swimming in a pool nearby?
People who read books on paper are realizing that while they really want to be reading Dostoyevsky, the real world around them is pretty distracting with all of its opportunities for interacting with people, buying things in stores, and drinking coffee.
It's a brilliantly written article, one that leaves you wondering why nobody has written it before now.
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