Late Age of Print -- the video

---

After a series of delays (I hear this is how things go in Hollywood), I'm pleased to debut The Late Age of Print video at long last. It's no "Thriller," admittedly, but hopefully you'll get a kick out of it anyway.

Here's a little back-story for those of you who may be interested. Last fall my editor at Columbia informed me that the Press had begun promoting some of its books using short videos. He then asked me if I'd be interested in shooting one for Late Age. Since I'm not someone who believes that electronic media are out to kill books -- I'm quite confident in their ability to help books out, in fact -- I decided I'd say yes.

I was a little daunted by the prospect of shooting the video, mostly because I'm a methodological writer who's unaccustomed to speaking in sound bites. I reflected on this a bit last December on Differences & Repetitions. In hindsight, that should have been the least of my worries.

In chapter 2 of Late Age I touch on how the campus bookstore at Indiana University (where I teach) was designed by Ken White, the architect who went on to create the big-box bookstore template. What better location for the video shoot, I thought, than at ground-zero of the big-box bookstore phenomenon?

Unfortunately, IU decided in 2007 that it would be a good idea to outsource campus bookstore operations to Barnes & Noble -- about whom I write rather approvingly in Late Age. The long and the short of it is that Barnes & Noble denied my requests to shoot the video there.

I still find it difficult to fathom how a private sector company would -- or even could -- refuse the use of public property for a purpose such as this. In any case, I'm sure I could have complained to the University, but by then so much time had elapsed that I just needed to get on with the shoot.

I settled on the IU Lilly Library, which houses rare books and manuscripts. It's a truly lovely location, though I fear that it may inadvertantly up the "book fetishist" quotient that I try so hard to mitigate in Late Age. The videographer also had me harp on the "books aren't going away anytime soon" theme, which, though appropriate, doesn't quite get at the substance of the book, which focuses on e-books, book superstores, online bookselling, Amazon.com, and Harry Potter.

Anyway, despite all the drama I'm still pretty pleased with the result. I hope you like it, too. Please share it, rate it, and comment on it. I'd love to hear what you think!

Now that I've entered the video age, would it be asking too much for Colbert to call?

Gladwell: Free is pretty expensive

Malcolm Gladwell's review of Chris Anderson's latest book, Free! The Future of a Radical Price (Hyperion), is out in this week's New Yorker. As with all things Gladwell, it's smart and insightful. Above all it stresses the practical and conceptual limits of "free," as in this pithy excerpt about how Anderson misunderstands the economics of YouTube:

So how does YouTube bring in revenue? Well, it tries to sell advertisements alongside its videos. The problem is that the videos attracted by psychological Free—pirated material, cat videos, and other forms of user-generated content—are not the sort of thing that advertisers want to be associated with. In order to sell advertising, YouTube has had to buy the rights to professionally produced content, such as television shows and movies. Credit Suisse put the cost of those licenses in 2009 at roughly two hundred and sixty million dollars. For Anderson, YouTube illustrates the principle that Free removes the necessity of aesthetic judgment. (As he puts it, YouTube proves that “crap is in the eye of the beholder.”) But, in order to make money, YouTube has been obliged to pay for programs that aren’t crap. To recap: YouTube is a great example of Free, except that Free technology ends up not being Free because of the way consumers respond to Free, fatally compromising YouTube’s ability to make money around Free, and forcing it to retreat from the “abundance thinking” that lies at the heart of Free. Credit Suisse estimates that YouTube will lose close to half a billion dollars this year. If it were a bank, it would be eligible for TARP funds.

You can find the review -- which is indeed worth reading in its entirety -- here. Chris Anderson responds to Gladwell on his blog, The Long Tail. Seth Godin (siding with Anderson) chimes in here.

I'm still gathering my thoughts on the subject, though I'm quite persuaded by Gladwell's infrastructural (as opposed to Anderson's artifactual) orientation. I suppose that's why The Guardian recently labeled me a "distribution nerd." Anyway, more to come....

A new CFP from Culture Machine

Call For Papers: CREATIVE MEDIA

Special issue of Culture Machine vol. 11; http://www.culturemachine.net
edited by Sarah Kember and Joanna Zylinska (both at Goldsmiths, University of London)

This is a call for papers and non-papers alike. It is open to artists, intellectuals, writers, philosophers, analysts, scientists, journalists and media professionals who have something to say about the media that extends beyond the conventional forms of media analysis. It is also a call for enacting a different, creative mode of doing ‘media studies’. Taking seriously both the philosophical legacy of what the Kantian and Foucauldian tradition calls ‘critique’, and the transformative and interventionist energy of the creative arts, we are looking for playful, experimental yet rigorous cross-disciplinary interventions and inventions that are equally at home with critical theory and media practice, and that can make a difference – academically, institutionally, politically, ethically and aesthetically.

This creative media project arises out of an attempt on our part to work through and reconcile, in a manner that would be ‘satisfactory’ on both an intellectual and artistic level, academic writing and creative practice. This effort has to do with more than just the usual anxieties associated with attempts to breach the ‘theory-practice’ divide and negotiate the associated issues of rigour, skill, technical competence and aesthetic judgment. Working in and with creative media is for us first and foremost an epistemological question of how we can perform knowledge differently through a set of practices that also ‘produce things’.

‘Creative media’ functions as both a theme and a methodology for us here then. Our aim is to produce an issue ‘about creative media’ by means of a variety of creative media. We are therefore seeking works which are situated across the conventional boundaries of theory and practice, art and activism, social sciences and the humanities. Such works can take a variety of forms – essays on, polemics with regard to, and performances of what it means to ‘do media’ both creatively and critically. They can also incorporate a variety of media, from moving and still images, through to podcasts, wikis and tweets, to creative writing and traditional papers. (And yes, language also counts as a medium.)

Executive summary (of sorts)
We are looking for surprising, inventive and original work on media that does something different, is equally at home with critical theory and media practice, and plays with the medium of the media.

Deadline for submissions: 15 October 2009

Potential contributors are encouraged to contact the editors prior to this date to discuss their possible submissions.

Please submit your contributions by email to:
Joanna Zylinska & Sarah Kember:
j.zylinska@gold.ac.uk & s.kember@gold.ac.uk

All contributions will be peer-reviewed.

****************************************************
Established in 1999, CULTURE MACHINE (http://www.culturemachine.net) is a fully refereed, open-access journal of cultural studies and cultural theory. It has published work by established figures such as Mark Amerika, Alain Badiou, Jacques Derrida, Henry Giroux, Mark Hansen, N.
Katherine Hayles, Ernesto Laclau, J. Hillis Miller, Bernard Stiegler, Cathryn Vasseleu and Samuel Weber, but it is also open to publications by up-and-coming writers, from a variety of geopolitical locations.
****************************************************

Whose search engine is bigger?

Fred Vogelstein over at Wired has been turning out some great material about Facebook over the last couple of weeks. His first piece, "Great Wall of Facebook," and his follow-up interview with company CEO Mark Zuckerberg are compelling in what they portend for the company's future.

The gist of the matter is this: Facebook began as a social networking site, and indeed it very much remains that. However, it's also in the process of re-imagining itself as a new type of search engine, one that prioritizes human social connections over abstract computer algorithms. And it's a move expressly designed to pit Facebook against its archrival, search engine giant Google:

Today, the Google-Facebook rivalry isn't just going strong, it has evolved into a full-blown battle over the future of the Internet—its structure, design, and utility. For the last decade or so, the Web has been defined by Google's algorithms—rigorous and efficient equations that parse practically every byte of online activity to build a dispassionate atlas of the online world. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg envisions a more personalized, humanized Web, where our network of friends, colleagues, peers, and family is our primary source of information, just as it is offline. In Zuckerberg's vision, users will query this "social graph" to find a doctor, the best camera, or someone to hire—rather than tapping the cold mathematics of a Google search. It is a complete rethinking of how we navigate the online world, one that places Facebook right at the center. In other words, right where Google is now.

Two things are intriguing to me about Facebook's foray into search. First, I'm fascinated by Zuckerberg's rhetoric. He describes Google as a tool of the "surveillance society" -- as if Facebook had no interest whatsoever in paying attention to what its users are doing. He also describes Google's approach to search as "top-down," suggesting not-so-implicitly that Facebook's approach is more bottom-up. Why is it that every technology company is the authentic champion of grassroots democracy until the next new hotshot comes along? It's getting old...really, really old. Didn't Apple beat that one to death with Microsoft?

More compelling to me is Vogelstein's discussion of Facebook and Google's respective philosophies of search. Prior to reading his article and interview, it hadn't dawned on me that there could be such radically different search architectures -- much less that there would be a struggle over them. And that make these times we're currently living in all the more interesting.

There's a lovely moment near the beginning of Michel Foucault's The Order of Things, in which the late philosopher shows how living creatures used to be classified prior to the advent of the modern kingdom-phylum-class-order-family-genus-species system. There was a radically different order of things, as it were, and reshuffling that order involved a tremendous redistribution of power throughout society.

Perhaps it's overblown to pitch the impending Facebook-Google showdown in such world-historical terms. All the same, the struggle over how best to bring order to knowledge and information isn't just about one company's desire to triumph over another -- it's about how, where, and among whom power will be dispersed in society.

Worth checking out...

...Lawrence Lessig, responding to Kevin Kelly, explaining why "free culture" is liberal-capitalist, and not socialistic:

http://www.lessig.org/blog/

The comments are especially interesting and fruitfully extend the debate. For my part, I'm not convinced that socialism is "coercive" as much as it is "compulsive," but really that's a side matter....

---

P.S. The debate continues. Here's the link to the latest update from Lessig on free culture, liberalism, and socialism.

On Trilling's The Liberal Imagination

I'm beginning a new project that explores the relationship of religious book publishing to mid-century (i.e., the 20th) liberalism in the United States. What better way to begin, I thought, than to read Lionel Trilling's The Liberal Imagination (1950)? There he makes the controversial claim that liberalism was "not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition" prevalent in the United States at the time that he was writing. That much I expected to find in the book; what I got was so much more -- an education, really, and a glimmer of one of the paths-not-taken of U.S. cultural studies.

One of Trilling's themes is untimeliness, and indeed the term aptly describes his own work. He perceptively anticipated many theoretical developments whose "discovery" most would attribute to English and French intellectuals working decades later. Take his definition of culture, for instance: "Culture is not a flow, nor even a confluence; the form of its existence is struggle, or at least debate--it is nothing if not a dialectic" (p. 9). Sounds a lot like E. P. Thompson to me. Or consider this passage, which almost could have come from Michel Foucault's Archaeology of Knowledge:

Yet another thing that we have not understood with sufficient complication is the nature of ideas in their relation to their development and in relation to their transmission. Too often we conceive of an idea as being like the baton that is handed from runner to runner in a relay race. But an idea as a transmissible thing is rather like the sentence that in the parlor game is whispered about in a circle (p. 191).

Trilling also argues that literature produces ideas, or philosophy, an argument that brings him within shouting distance of Deleuze. There's more: he was anti-relativist, believed in the activity of audiences, and understood well the relationship of knowledge production and social control.

But it's not enough simply to locate Trilling as an unacknowledged forebear of some of our more contemporary theoreticians. It's also crucial to understand his intellectual style. Trilling could say more in a single, pointed sentence than most highly skilled writers can say in an entire essay, maybe even a volume. What's more, he did so with the barest minimum of theoretical terminology or jargon.

So, for example, while it's clear that he drew near to what, two decades later, would become the Foucauldian understanding of discourse, never did he long to coin a phrase to describe self-propagating communication. Trilling insisted that we engage not with catchy theoretical words that one could either "use" or "reject" depending on one's allegiances. Instead, he demanded that we engage with the full substance of his arguments and reasoning.

Is his having done so a cause of the present abandonment of his work? Did Trilling expect too much of us, his readers and interlocutors?

A partisan of liberalism Trilling may have been, but in all affairs of the heart, mind, and politics he seems not to have been an ideologue. This is reflected, for example, in his discussion of literary criticism, where he deftly navigates the Scylla of historicism (or conditionalism) and the Charybdis of New Criticism. Ultimately he upholds the value of both, but in a masterfully dialectical way in which the one exposes the weaknesses in the other, ultimately opening up both to repair.

Trilling worked at a time when academics, for better or for worse, still were able to write "without apology or self-consciousness" (p. 253). There is evident in his work a deference to tradition and a sense of accountability to what others may hold dear, culturally or politically. Yet there remains a boldness to his work, even a brashness, that would seem almost unimaginable in academic discourse today.

In Trilling's worst moments, as in his discussion of homosexuality and the Kinsey Report, the change of tone is a welcome one. But in Trilling's best moments, which are far more numerous, one can register not only the tenderness with which he approached those with whom he disagreed, but also the lack of graciousness endemic to our own critical conversations today.

Remix & fair use...

...a primer, courtesy of the good folks at the Center for Social Media at American University.

---