Let’s Talk About Revolutions (in media)

Image by Pop!Tech via Flickr

I reread this morning Clay Shirky’s great SXSW piece about the media business and i wanted to share some of his thoughts here.  Let me go through the end of the article a bit.  He starts:

Elizabeth Eisenstein’s magisterial treatment of Gutenberg’s invention, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, opens with a recounting of her research into the early history of the printing press. She was able to find many descriptions of life in the early 1400s, the era before movable type. Literacy was limited, the Catholic Church was the pan-European political force, Mass was in Latin, and the average book was the Bible. She was also able to find endless descriptions of life in the late 1500s, after Gutenberg’s invention had started to spread. Literacy was on the rise, as were books written in contemporary languages, Copernicus had published his epochal work on astronomy, and Martin Luther’s use of the press to reform the Church was upending both religious and political stability.

I want to draw the obvious parallel to today’s revolution in publishing and in technology. I belive that just having email and IM has increased the literacy in America (maybe the world).  Not 15 years ago no kids were daily expressing themselves in written words, now they do all the time.  In 1996, i would frequently get emails in ALL CAPS and poorly written.  Now it’s a must-have skill.  But let’s continue with the speech….

What Eisenstein focused on, though, was how many historians ignored the transition from one era to the other. To describe the world before or after the spread of print was child’s play; those dates were safely distanced from upheaval. But what was happening in 1500? The hard question Eisenstein’s book asks is “How did we get from the world before the printing press to the world after it? What was the revolution itself like?”

Chaotic, as it turns out. The Bible was translated into local languages; was this an educational boon or the work of the devil? Erotic novels appeared, prompting the same set of questions. Copies of Aristotle and Galen circulated widely, but direct encounter with the relevant texts revealed that the two sources clashed, tarnishing faith in the Ancients. As novelty spread, old institutions seemed exhausted while new ones seemed untrustworthy; as a result, people almost literally didn’t know what to think. If you can’t trust Aristotle, who can you trust?

I find this same thing is happening with columnist and journalism.  Poor articles just get overlooked or debunked in comments.  The threshhold for well researched facts is higher as the audience is double-checking you every step of the way.  What happened with Aristotle is happenign today with every sports, politcal, and news writer in the world.

During the wrenching transition to print, experiments were only revealed in retrospect to be turning points. Aldus Manutius, the Venetian printer and publisher, invented the smaller octavo volume along with italic type. What seemed like a minor change — take a book and shrink it — was in retrospect a key innovation in the democratization of the printed word. As books became cheaper, more portable, and therefore more desirable, they expanded the market for all publishers, heightening the value of literacy still further.

Sound familiar to anyone? Can you say BLOG or TWITTER – such a simple concept.  Take publishing an article on a web page and shrink it to a blog or 140 characters.  What seems like a minor change has some profound responses.

That is what real revolutions are like. The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place. The importance of any given experiment isn’t apparent at the moment it appears; big changes stall, small changes spread. Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen.

Old stuff is indeed getting broken. Newspapers are gone or going fast.  Magazines are next.  Paper is being replaced by netbooks, iPhones and Kindles.  These devices are embracing different technologies and shorter-form content.  This is the real revolution that’s happening in front our face.  That Time Magazine you have in your mailbox will be a story you tell your grandkids about, “hey kids, get this, i used to walk to the mailbox and pick up a ‘magazine’ that had stories in it written down, printed once a week and sent to me.” and they will look at you the same way i look at my grandparents when they talk about a world with radio programs only and no TV.   Our new world has more content, better content, that is more easily shared and discussed – and it’s a beautiful thing.

Related articles by Zemanta

• This Is Our Media Revolution. Who Will Be Our Manutius? What Our Octavo? (snarkmarket.com)
• Gutenberg was a blogger (trishussey.com)
• The printing press as an agent of change (randomthougts101.blogspot.com)

Michael Jackson Thoughts

As everyone knows, Michael Jackson died last Friday from heart complications in LA.  While i wasn’t shocked by his death, I was amazed by the reaction both by people and the media.  Some of my thoughts:

1. First off, while it’s nice to see such happy thoughts and words coming out of the media and blogosphere, i can’t believe how everyone has sort of forgotten about the past 15 years of Michael Jackson. I mean, multiple child molestation charges with 13-year old boys.  Whatever the cause of the guilt, do you know anyone who would leave their 12 year old with him alone?
2. Some Good Articles: There is a great recount of all those stories listed here in Vantity Fair and Ebert has posted a great article that weighs both his greatness and his fragility in a good article here called “The Boy Who Never Gave Up“
3. Thinking about his legacy, he’s definitely one of the best performers of all time – his dancing and on-stage presence seems unparalleled.
4. While Elvis brought in Rock n’ Roll, i feel that Michael Jackson brought in pop music.  He came to define the 80’s style while adding more production value to music.  To me, he invented the genre “pop”
5. It’s interesting to see how people react once someone dies.  The immediately become forgiven and can easily take on legendary status.  While that’s ok, i wish more people who feel this way while the artist is alive.  Two months ago nobody was saying how influential MJ was. Then hie dies and everyone in the world starts blabbing off about how influential and transformative he was.  Was he awesome? Yes.  But why didn’t people post how awesome he was before? The same thing happened with Kurt Kobain, Johnny Cash, Elvis and others.  As Chuck Klosterman says (who is an expert on his subject having written Killing Yourself To Live), “You’ll hear nobody stating how influential Boy George is, but the minute he dies it’ll come out with how he was able to break down the gender barriers before anyone else”  And he’s right.  In death, people are no longer people, they become symbols.

John Grisham’s Beginnings

There’s a good article in the USA Today about John Grisham.  It’s the 20th anniversary of Time To Kill, his first novel about a young 10-year old woman who got raped, her father who took revenge into his own hands, and the lawyer representing him.  It was an autobiographical story for Grisham and a great book.  However, writing a great book doesn’t necessarily mean it will fly off the shelves.  The article states:

When Grisham finished A Time to Kill in January 1987, it was a stack of legal pads. When typed, the manuscript was 900 pages.

The first chapters went out to a couple dozen publishers and agents. The rejections stacked up.

That April 15, after Grisham returned from his accountant frustrated, broke and about to borrow money to pay his taxes, agent Jay Garon called wanting to represent him.

Wynwood Press, a small company in New York, bought the manuscript a year later and printed 5,000 copies of A Time to Kill — at a length about a third shorter than the original manuscript — in June 1989. Grisham ordered 1,000 himself.  Wynwood didn’t have marketing muscle, so Grisham concocted his own book tour.

“I had this scheme where I would throw a party in my local library and the whole town would show up and I would sell a lot. I have pictures of kids climbing on stacks of A Time to Kill.” But when the party was over, he still owned most of the copies.

It’s an interesting story – especially since we think of him as being so successful.

Slash’s Autobiography

Image via Wikipedia

A few months ago i plowed through the book Slash which is “written” by the Guns N’ Roses guitarist Slash.  I’m a huge fan so i really enjoyed the read.  Here are some interesting things i learned in the book:

• When Slash’s parents got divorced, the first guy his mom started dating was David Bowie. Slash and her would go to his shows with him and just hang out with the guy
• Slash’s mom was a professional costume designer named Ola Hudson. She was quite an artist and tailored outfits and album covers for such acts as John Lennon, Diana Ross and the Pointer Sisters.  He dad also did album covers – for Neil Young and Joni Mitchell
• His mom was also good friends with David Geffen. But when Slash was signed by Geffen’s label, he kept is a secret.  One Christmas, Geffen was eating lunch with Slash’s mom and asked how Slash was and she replied, “you should know, you signed him a few months ago.”  He was floored b/c he had no idea Slash was actually the same little kid that he knew for all those years.
• Slash was really into BMX bikes and at age 12 was considered one of the best riders in the country for his age bracket
• One of Slash’s good friend’s dad was Seymour Cassel, who is an actor (Max’s dad in Rushmore).  He is the one who gave Slash the name “Slash” because he never sat still and was always scheming
• Slash was so messed up on drugs the entire time that most of the success he realized has been forgotten.  For instance, he went to the MTV music awards and didn’t even know he was a nominee.  When they won, he went on stage and didn’t know that it was an acceptance speech.  The whole night was a blur and along the way he left the award in a cab.
• All the members of the band were so messed up on hard drugs that they really couldn’t function.  They had to have a fix before shows to operate.  Slash went to rehab several times and it never really worked until he was long done with GnR
• Alx comes off as a total dick in the book.  They were constantly waiting for him.  He’s arrive late to almost every show.  He wouldn’t show up for rehersals.  While i’m sure he was much more sane than the rest of the crew, he was also the main source of anxiety and stress for all members of the band
• The song November Rain was actually written for Appetite for Destruction but they left it off because they wanted only one ballad on the album and that was Sweet Child o’ Mine.
• Paradise City was written when they were all driving down from San Fran way before they were even getting good gigs and was just a chant they wrote when they were excited to get back to LA.  As the band grew and the egos grew, they never traveled like this again and lost all comraderie.  Reading the book you realize why songs like Welcome to the Jungle, Sweet Child, Paradise City, Rocket Queen never materialized.  They were written at a time when the band was incredibly tight and the lyrics of Alx, and the guitar playing of Duff and Slash were perfect compliments

It’s a good book and really interesting if you’re a Guns N’ Roses fan.  It’s a bit longer than The Dirt – Motley Crue’s autobiography – and it only focuses on one member so it has much more depth.  I recommend it. 3.5 to 4 stars (out of 5).

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Elsewhere USA is a good book

A few months ago i read the book Elsewhere USA at danah boyd’s suggestion.  It didn’t disappoint.  While it wasn’t as good as last year’s Generation Me (which i couldn’t stop blogging about), it did have some good insights.

The point of the book is the strange paradox that is occuring in America.  People used to work and struggle so their kids wouldn’t have to.  Leiseure was something you attained at a certain income level.  Today however, this isn’t the case.  For the first time in history, the more we are paid, the more hours we work.  The rewards for working are so great they make the “opportunity cost” of not working all the more great.  The result is that there is no longer a leisure-class of elites. The rich are working harder than ever.  Now, leisure is something for the poor.  There is now a crazy measure of the income elasticity of leisure and this fundamentally changes how many of us (including me) live.   As it says in the book,

Obviously, this change has affected not just when we work, but also how we play, how we love, how we raise our children – how we live

Some interesting parts in the book are:

1. There’s now a fear amoung the successful that their success isn’t geniune and an axiety that a person’s personal house of economic card is about to collapse. One interesting stat behind this is that while drinking has declined, adult use of other mind-altering substances such as Valium or marajuana has risen to the point where mature adults consume more than teenagers for the first time since these trends were tracked
2. More and more, household income rising and falling has less to do with economic times but more about relationships.  About a quarter of American children experience two or more mother’s partners by the time they are fifteen. Over 8 percent experience three or more
3. Similar to the African areas of Mali and Malawi, America also practices a form of polygamy.  Post coming on this soon….
4. Religion and The Corporate man have been at odds.  A further description below:

In medieval Cathoic Europe, poverty was a virtue and to profit off one’s fellow man was considered evil.  The Protestant Reformation changed all that which led to one-on-one relationships to go and also spiritual insecurity.  This led to working harder and acculating lots of money. Success as salvation was a new incentive structure.  However, the Great Depression, the New Deal, and the trade unionism eclipsed the Protestant Work Ethic in the mid 1900’s.  There was a truce found between expansive corporate America and organzied labor such that a communitarian eithos could reign supreme.

The rift remained though as Protestants valued thrift over consumption, work over leisure, and meritocracy over social connections.  But large organizations like IBM and GM put a premium on teamwork, compromise and being a “company man.”

Today these have been resolved through the redefinition of: leisure is work and work is leisure. Consumption is investment (home equity loan is savings).  Social connectoins don’t indicate nepotism but rather social capital and entrepreneurial skill.  Loyalty is replaced by value (you show your value by calculated displays of disloyalty – displaying offers from competitors).

——-

While it doesn’t offer many solutions, the book is thought provoking and a good read.  I recommend you pick it up.

The Road

Cover of The Road

I just finished reading Cormac McCarthy’s book The Road which is about a father and a son walking through post-apocalypic America.  While a quick read, it’s dark and sad.  I loved the end of the book but going from page to page was a challenge as i didn’t really want to go back to the world they inhabit.  It’s cold, uncomfortable and frightening.  But that’s what makes the book good – it feels quite raw.

While the book was good, the movie looks to be even better as it puts a face and picture to the madness.  And it has an amazing cast of Viggo Mortensen, Charlize Theron, Guy Pearce, and Robert Duvall. Can’t wait to check it out later this year.  Trailer is below:

Related articles:

• The Weinstein Company Tampered With ‘The Road’ Trailer (screenrant.com)
• First Trailer for ‘The Road’ Misses The Mark (screenrant.com)

Daemon is a good Techno-Thriller

Cover of Daemon

I just read a really good book called Daemon by Daniel Suarez (his first novel) about what someone could do if they had amazing control of the internet, a lot of free time and lots of money

Matthew Sobol, the best game designer in the world, has died. With his death, a stunning series of events begins to take place, starting with the deaths of a few programmers, and extending to the endangering of the entire world. Very few people can hope to stop his plan.

The story is incredibly fast.  There are no slow parts.  There is lots of plot, lots of detail and many characters.  It’s similar to a Michael Crichton novel except better. More accurate stories, more realistic, more detailed, more interesting characters.

The book is a cross between The Stand and The Matrix, two of the epics of our time. Like The Matrix, technology plays a central role in this story, and like the former, it about what happens to the people who are trying to cope with the world changing all around them.

This is not a masterful piece of literature. It’s book candy and really tasty.

Portfolio’s Failure

I’ve heard a lot of talk about the decline of print media these days. There were great speeches by Clay Shirky and Steven Johnson at SXSW.  Recently there was news of Conde Nast’s Portfolio magazine shutting down after plowing through $100 million in two years.  Some people have used this as an indication of the flawed model of print, but reading this story from an ex-employee i think it’s more an issue of mismanagement and lack of execution.  Here are some exerpts:

First, let me amplify, the magazine was a failure. It was not market conditions or the general economic meltdown that forced Si’s hand, it was a failure to create something that people wanted to read.

Yet in too many ways to enumerate here, we did not operate in what I fondly call a reality-based environment. In Lipman’s meetings, firings were never firings, stories were never bad or ill timed, mistakes were never made. The air had long been sucked out of that room, and few staffers seemed to believe anymore in the mission of the place, despite a collective desire, and I mean this, to do as good a job as they could do, given the circumstances.

Would the magazine succeeded if it was run currectly?  Who knows, but i do know from past experience at former companies that sometimes too much money is a bad thing as there is no urgency or common goal.  And when you have a leader making decisions that don’t make sense, you can’t help by become disillusioned and discouraged.  That seems to be what happened here.

Time-Traveler’s Wife is a good little book

The book The Time-Traveler’s Wife is a great little book. I found it very easy to read and quite touching. While it contains a guy who time travels it’s not a science-fiction story but rather a love story between him and his wife.

I find that books that take a very extreme or unusual position do a great job of exposing everyday emotions. For example, Nelson Mandela’s book Long Walk to Freedom talks about Mandela’s resolute quest for equality, and his long imprisonment inspired me to keep persevering in the things i care about. Similarly, this story about a time-traveler’s wife who grew up knowing a man bumbling through time and how they structured their life around each other makes me look at personal relationships and see how trivial my challenges are compared to theirs.

A great book and a quick read. I definitely recommend it.

There’s a movie coming out with the same title that stars Rachel McAdams and Eric Bana in Feb 2010. There are some photos of that here:

I also saw that the author Audrey Niffenegger just sold her second book, called “Her Fearful Symmetry” for $5 million buck.  Unlike most authors who sell rights to their next novel off of a summary or description, she had finished the entire manuscript.  The NY Times article about this states:

Ms. Niffenegger had completed a full manuscript. “She really has defied custom and written a spectacular second novel, which is one of the hardest things to do in this universe,” Ms. Graham (Editor of Scribner) said. “She’s not selling it essentially on the success of her first book.”

I’d be willing to give this next book a shot.  It comes out in September.  Anyone heard anything more about it?

Related articles

• Audrey Niffenegger Sells Her Next Book for $4.8 Million (mediabistro.com)
• Gwyneth Paltrow Shares Book Recommendations (justjared.buzznet.com)

Hot, Flat & Crowded

I just finished Tom Friedman’s Hot, Flat, and Crowded.  It’s a good book that talks about 2 things: climate change and America’s decline.   The first items is due to a number of trends: nations becoming more developed (flat) and pulling people out of poverty (crowded) which in turn requires more energy and increases production (hot).  The second issue is that America also faces a crisis.  A emotional, physical and international crisis.  One quote in the book mentions:

It’s like jumping off an 80-story building.  For 97 stories you feel as if you’re flying.  That’s where the world is now.

America is losing its entrepreneurial drive and its status as the premier innovator in the world. Friendman then goes on to describe that America should solve it’s crisis by getting entrepreneurial about green living and green technology and if America solves its problem, this will in turn solve the world’s problems too.

The book also discusses global warming and oil and their interdependence.  Global warming is here due to the amount of carbon in the atmosphere and while people dispute some of the implications of this, it is a fact that we’re putting more and more carbon into the atmosphere.  There’s also an interesting chapter about the oil industry and how the oil-rich countries become increasingly more anti-american and anti-democratic as the price of oil increases.  It also discusses the impact of supplying ultra-conservative Muslim nations with amazing amounts of cash.

It’s worth a read.  Anyone else read it?  If so, what are your thoughts?

Related articles:

• Friendman and Fareed Zakaria one-on-one (amazon.com’s omnivoracious.com)
• Tom Friedman Interview (q-ontech.blogspot.com)
• Ecopreneurs to play a key role in Friedman’s “Hot, Flat, and Crowded” (ecopreneurist.com)