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Meanland: Editors, trolls and lovers

Gwen Harwood’s sentiment about editors – eloquently expressed in an acrostic, has become Australian folklore. While some authors would agree with Gwen, for others it’s not as simple. Nor is it always obvious in this blogging, tweeting, forever-online world, who our ultimate editor might be.

In many areas the editor-author partnership remains unchanged. Editors and publishers work with authors the way they always have: commissioning, editing and publishing work. At the other end of the spectrum is self-publishing including web pages, blogs, twitter etc

Written by Catherine Moffat on 5-12-2011, 3 user comments

The world according to Meanland: the top ten things we covered this year (in no particular order)

Do you recall when Meanjin quarterly and Overland magazine announced (see A joint communique from somewhere in Meanland) their 2010 collaboration, Meanland or ‘Reading in a time of change’? Back then they promised:

This joint project aims to create a constructive dialogue on how we, and future generations, will read. It will explore the challenges and opportunities facing literary culture in the twenty-first century—from digital publishing to copyright, from globalisation to the changing nature of reading. We will explore the new literary realities facing readers, writers and publishers, and reflect on and intervene into the changing nature of reading, writing and publishing—circumstances that, naturally, also implicate both Meanjin and Overland.

... read more

Written by Jacinda Woodhead on 21-12-2010, 2 user comments

The crowd is our domain

In his fascinating Meanland essay ‘The crowd is our domain’, featured in Overland 201, Marty Hiatt responds to another Meanland essay, Cate Kennedy’s popular yet divisive ‘Driven to Distraction’.

In her article ‘Driven to distraction’ (Overland 199), Cate Kennedy critiques contemporary internet culture from the perspective of the creative writer. While not opposed to the internet as such, Kennedy seeks to demonstrate that Web 2.0 technologies and the activities they facilitate (such as social networking, blogging and video-sharing) are rendering us permanently impatient, disinhibited yet isolated and unable to concentrate. Kennedy finds these effects, which centre on the pursuit of immediacy at the cost of profundity, and the conquest of time and space at the expense of substance, to be the inverse of the disposition required for creative activity.

I want to generalise the discussion because I take Kennedy to be (explicitly or not) following the form of a broader argument about the individual’s interactions with her environment, and also because she makes general comments about the function of the writer. ‘The pattern of the thing precedes the thing,’ Kennedy quotes; I want to illuminate the pattern behind her argument, then criticise it, before suggesting how we might begin from different presuppositions that nevertheless remain true to the subversive essence of the creative act that Kennedy and I both hold dear.

The pedigree of the argument is important because it predates the specific technologies and their affects that Kennedy discusses. Its basic, abstract structure is this:

There are many things;

of which I am only one, with limited energies and capacities to attend to the others.

They press upon me and threaten my unity; they want to make me like them, that is, scattered and formless.

Thus I shall do well to seek distance and shelter from them, and I will uphold whatever extends, and oppose whatever reduces, that distance and shelter.

In Kennedy’s case, the ‘things’ are the utterances of private individuals published via Web 2.0 technologies. The unity they threaten is primarily mental; the distance and shelter she seeks are equally mental; and the techniques she wants to employ include physically isolating the space of creativity from the space of internet browsing, as well as refusing the peer pressure that imposes an obligation to open up to the many.

In the past the ‘things’ have been the utterances of individuals published in books, journals, magazines and pamphlets, whose volume and superficiality the writer bemoans. Nietzsche viciously regretted the invention of the printing press, Swift lamented the decline of the English tongue, and Robert Burton called his time a ‘scribbling age’. Juvenal, in his first satire (first century AD), justifies his scrivening by claiming that if he doesn’t use the paper one of the other innumerable poets will waste it anyway.

But the ‘things’ may equally be taken as the bodies of people themselves, amassed in rapidly developing urban settlements, threatening the mental stability of the ideologist, bureaucrat or social critic (who, like Poe, Engels and many others besides, both marvels at and cowers before their agglomeration) just as they threatened the political stability of the head of state, who sought both a built distance and a cultural one.

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Written by Editorial team on 20-12-2010, No comments

Meanland: Abandoning print

Meanjin coversPeter Craven made a grave prognosis in his recent defence of the cultural worth of Meanjin: ‘If Meanjin is taken online, it will cease effectively to exist.’

On Thursday on Drum Tim Dunlop countered with: ‘The sooner magazines like Meanjin engage with the realities of online reading – and pray their financiers give them enough money to do it properly – the better.’ ... read more

Written by Jacinda Woodhead on 15-11-2010, 14 user comments

Meanland: On privacy and self in a networked era

In a recent article in the New York Review of Books, Zadie Smith expressed her discomfort with social media, most particularly Facebook, and the harm she believes it has caused to a generation’s worth of communication:

When a human being becomes a set of data on a website like Facebook, he or she is reduced. Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility. In a way it’s a transcendent experience: we lose our bodies, our messy feelings, our desires, our fears. … Connection is the goal. The quality of that connection, the quality of the information that passes through it, the quality of the relationship that connection permits—none of this is important.

... read more

Written by Jessica Au on 12-11-2010, 1 user comment

Meanland event: Reading without privacy

Announcing a very exciting Meanland event – and the last for 2010 – Reading Without Privacy.

Today, we’re all reading and writing more than ever, on text messages, on Twitter and on Facebook. But has social networking broken down the distinction between our public and our private lives? What are the rules for writing in forms that are so intimate and entirely open? Do we Tweet as ourselves or as representatives of our employers? And is new media helping us work differently or just work harder? Critic Alison Croggon and Jonathan Green, editor of ABC’s The Drum, discuss these questions and more, with Sophie Cunningham and Jeff Sparrow. Chaired by Michael Williams. ... read more

Written by Editorial team on 11-11-2010, 2 user comments

Meanland: These people have something to tell you

You know how you can spend hours drowning in YouTube clips of people hugging sea lions, animals behaving in endearing animal-like (occasionally very unsettling human-like) ways and outlandish songs – and then you glance outside and nine hours have gone by?

To cut a long lesson short: killing time is not all YouTube is for. Here are a few clips I watched over the past day that spurred synapses and propelled neurons and made me examine some assumptions I may have been making about digital media. I’ve provided brief bios to contextualise the individuals (because it helps to know they are professionals). ... read more

Written by Jacinda Woodhead on 12-10-2010, No comments

Meanland: Putting the community back in culture (and not a moment too soon)

The last few Meanland posts have focused on the nature of copyright and how it works and affects reading, writing and publishing in our new settlements on the digital frontier.

Many people feel a distinct sense of impending doom, as though creative and financial control have been wrested from the hands of writers, artists and musicians and let loose on the infinite and unpoliced data cables across the world. But copyright, by its very nature, is extraordinarily restrictive. Currently, for your typical, non-full-time creator, there is no means of saying to another artist, ‘Can I use your work?’ Rather we rely on ‘permission culture’, in which cultural products are monitored and controlled by corporations.

Contrary to what copyright culture and modern capitalism would have us believe, the sharing of culture is the norm for individuals, for artists and for society as a whole. In mediaeval Europe, say, someone would tell a rip-roaring (and doubtless violent and bloody) story that you remembered and retold when you travelled to your next village. And maybe you retold it with some slight embellishments. From its earliest days, human cultural history was dependent on the oral tradition, which transferred culture between generations and communities. ... read more

Written by Jacinda Woodhead on 23-09-2010, No comments

The perils of blogging

My name is Mark William Jackson and I was a compulsive blogger. It has been eight weeks since my last post. At my worst I would spend up to two hours per evening posting, responding to comments and checking statistics. If I wasn’t in my dashboard I was checking my email to see if anyone had left a comment. I was obsessed and I had to stop. I started blogging as a way of promoting my poetry but the blog is a wicked beast in the hands of an addict – by the end I was writing poetry to support the blog.

It has been well documented (usually by bloggers) that a blog, along with facebook and twitter, are essential tools for the aspiring writer. Blogs are a cheap and easy way to get your work out to millions of potential readers. Start a blog and scream ‘death to the publisher infidels, we don’t need you anymore’. But, herein lies the danger, when the blog becomes the product instead of the marketing tool. ... read more

Written by Mark William Jackson on 20-09-2010, 20 user comments

Meanland: Regarding the very modern ebook machine thing

Nick Hornby and his booksAt the conclusion of his column in the July/August issue of The Believer, Nick Hornby – a popular novelist with an aptitude for imparting his reading habits – promised: ‘In next month’s exciting episode, I will describe an attempt, not yet begun, to read Our Mutual Friend on a very modern ebook machine thing. It’s the future.’

The future, the one that used to be around the corner but now

Written by Jacinda Woodhead on 16-09-2010, No comments

Bookless shelves

Albert Camus wrote that the only serious question is whether to kill yourself or not. Tom Robbins wrote that the only serious question is whether time has a beginning and an end. Camus clearly got up on the wrong side of bed, and Robbins must have forgotten to set the alarm. There is only one serious question. And that is: Who knows how to make love stay? Answer me that and I will tell you whether or not to kill yourself. – Tom Robbins

Martin Hughes and Zoe Dattner interviewed Richard Nash at the Wheeler Centre and replayed the interview on RRR’s Max Headroom on 22 July 2010. Due to the miracle of modern technology, I listened to it the other day. ... read more

Written by Clare Strahan on 8-09-2010, No comments

Meanland: Doctorow on Copyright vs Creativity

Cory DoctorowCory Doctorow spoke in Melbourne on Thursday night as part of the Meanland and Melbourne Writers Festival ‘Big Ideas’ lecture series. For those unable to attend, I have transcribed below as much as I could from my indecipherable notes on the lecture, ‘Copyright vs creativity’.

Rule number 1: If there’s a lock for something and you haven’t been given the key, it’s not for your benefit. ... read more

Written by Editorial team on 6-09-2010, No comments

Meanland extract – A Gutenberg moment?

The arrival of the iPad in Australia has been greeted with everything from quasi-religious reverence to cynicism. The Steve Jobs camp has largely been focused on the language of revolution – a savvy if slightly hubristic move from the Apple marketing department. ‘It’s already a revolution and it’s only just begun,’ the voiceover in the commercials declared, with Jobs himself calling the iPad ‘a truly magical and revolutionary product’ at the launch earlier this year. If ‘revolutionary’ has become Apple’s key selling point for the masses, then drawing parallels with the invention of the Gutenberg press comes a close second, especially for winning over aficionados of print. Even Jonathan Green of ABC’s Drum admitted ‘This could be something of a Gutenberg moment, a technical innovation that will revolutionise how we communicate and distribute ideas.’ ... read more

Written by Jessica Au on 15-07-2010, No comments

On copyright and Australian cinema

The Meanland essay in Overland 199 is written by author, SPUNC President and Wet Ink fiction editor, Emmett Stinson. ‘The pirate code’ delves into the underbelly of copyright during the digital revolution – and comes to some surprising conclusions:

Right now publishers are abuzz with discussions of ‘book futures’ and the digital revolution, but there is still an almost complete uncertainty surrounding even the most basic issues. What, if any, devices will become standard for electronic reading? How will books be distributed? What formats will be used? A recent stand-off over pricing resulted in all of Pan Macmillan’s e-book titles being temporarily unavailable on Amazon’s website, demonstrating that the industry can’t even agree on what digital books should cost.

... read more

Written by Editorial team on 29-06-2010, 1 user comment

The incalculable cultural significance of The Library

Library memories

When I think back over my childhood, and how I spent time, I remember libraries. For a long time I lived in a country town, and during school holidays, the wait between the return of the mobile library seemed endless. Then it would return, I’d read the books in a couple of days, and the long wait would begin anew. In my recollections, I read everything in that van, except the Mills & Boon and Barbara Cartlands.

At school, primary and secondary, the library was my one constant, reliable friend, and the librarians appreciated me in a way, I felt, that fellow classmates did not. They went out of their way to foster my reading habits. We would exchange ideas, they would recommend books – they even purchased books with individual readers in mind – and would call parents if they were concerned about reading appetites. This relationship changed in university, but I was still completely dependent on the library for my research. ... read more

Written by Jacinda Woodhead on 24-06-2010, 1 user comment