The first review of The New Media Reader has been published at Electronic Book Review. The author, new media artist Jeff Parker, has a number of interesting things to say, but this is my favorite:
If there is a bound codex that writers of hypertext and new media artists have been waiting for, The New Media Reader is it.
I’ve (finally) put online an essay I wrote with Brion Moss a little while back — “The Impermanence Agent: Project and Context.” It was originally written for a special issue of PAJ, and then revised and expanded for Cybertext Yearbook 2001, and now it’s had another small revision. Along the way it’s picked up a couple nice sidebars by Adam Chapman, and some of the illustrations have been revised as well.
Last Fall I got email from someone who’d taught this essay, and I was intrigued to hear about some of the student reactions. Here’s part of the email:
The background: most of my students are in CS or HCI. Some of the major issues we discussed in class were the differences between an agent as a research product vs. agent as cultural artifact – people were intrigued by how you had set up your agent to make particular conceptual points, that wasn’t something previously in their repertoire and they thought it was an interesting idea. Critiques of agents sit well with my students (they had read some cultural critique of agents before), so they were interested in your critique and mused about various aspects of it. They also liked the idea about relating CTP to PD and we talked about that quite a bit.
The biggest effect your article had, though, was that one of my more technical students said, “Why is he talking about all this personal stuff in the paper? Why doesn’t he just get to the point and tell us his results?” which led to a long, interesting, and very fruitful conversation on disciplinary differences in communication, why artists/writers/cultural critics think personal experience is central in knowledge vs. why scientists generally don’t, what are the pros and cons of each aspect, why each might look silly from the other’s point of view, etc., and how this leads to problems in interdisciplinarity.
If you live in the U.S., I urge you to tell the EFF your story. What kind of story? One that can help their case with the Librarian of Congress that exceptions need to be made in the DMCA for certain legitimate uses. I just told them my story about DVDs I bought in the UK, though the topics on which they seek stories don’t all involve globetrotting. For example, they also want to hear from people who’ve encountered “DVDs with promotional material you couldn’t skip.”
I got an email this morning which said, in part:
I read your most recent post, and am sorry the person e-mailing you was so hostile. It got me to wondering whether you think that all subscription schemes on the Web are — well — not the way to go; as they are not all the same. What of those, for example, that offer some content for free, but make more articles or features available to paid subscribers? Then there are the scholarly publications which are made available online as well as in print, and often only to people who have paid a membership fee; but I do understand that those are different in reach and purpose from the Web publications you’re concerned with in this post. Nevertheless, this is yet another Web publishing paradigm that involves money in some way.
Here’s part of my response:
Right now we mostly use the hypertext network for disseminating articles that could pretty much appear on paper. But what people like Ted Nelson envisioned was that we’d have a hypertext network in which link-following was not like tracing a footnote, but like turning a page. We’re starting to see some of that emerging on the Web now with thing like weblogs – reading as a process of following links between many disparate things, and writing as the process of making them.
Things that are subscription or micropayment based don’t prevent the kind of reading and writing that Nelson envisioned. They just restrict it to those who can pay. And that leads us back to what I was talking about in my email.
I actually wrote a whole essay about this (and some related issues) a while back. If you’re interested, it’s at: http://www.intelligentagent.com/archive/spring_linking.html
What I should have remembered to say in my response, but didn’t, was that we do have something going for us as we resist the pay-per-viewing of the hypertext network: the fact that people are accustomed to a very different network, more like a library. This unspoken assumption will work powerfully against those who wish to move the Web toward a different model. I believe that we who are “content providers” in the world of new media should be working to reinforce this expectation of a library — not break it down. Every time we participate in a pay-per-view project on the Web (whether as contributors or subscribers, and whatever the model) we’re working to break it down. I should also have mentioned that the article linked above is very much focused on things that are like documents, and not on things that are more like performances and games — which don’t admit the same types of interlinking, and the experience of which is probably not best thought of as “reading.”
Even with my forgetfulness, it took me a little bit longer to write the response than I expected, because I found that Intelligent Agent had reorganized its archives, and so the old URL I had didn’t work. (After finding the web version of the article again I also corrected the link in the “Books and Articles” section of this page.) I was excited to read, while looking for the article’s new URL, that Intelligent Agent is resuming publication. IA was one of the best new media publications of the 90s — focused on new media in the arts and education — and it should have a lot to offer our rapidly-aging decade. Here’s hoping they don’t choose a model of web subscription. (Perhaps the fact that they’ve become a non-profit organization is a positive indication in this regard.)
I was recently invited to contribute to a subscription-based Web magazine. Here’s part of the response I sent:
[Your magazine] sounds very interesting. Unfortunately, I’m one of those dinosaurs who’s still bothered by the idea of subscription stuff on the Web. I still imagine a hypertext network in which link authoring and link following are integral to reading and writing. If the network becomes largely subscription based (or micropayment based) then we’ll be restricting writing and reading to those who can pay – giving up on the dream I grew up on in public schools and libraries (of people being able to read and write at all income levels, or even as children with no money to spend). I know it’s a dream we haven’t always delivered on as a society, but it’s still an important one to me.
In any case, I very much wish you well personally with [your magazine], even if it’s the sort of thing I don’t feel I can support in general. It sounds like something I’d otherwise be excited to participate in. And I understand that the other income models we’ve come up with for the Web are no better (and arguably worse). I consider it one of the biggest puzzles we face as a field.
Here’s the response I received this morning:
> we’ll be restricting writing and reading to those who can pay –
> giving up on the dream I grew up on in public schools and libraries
Publishers have always gotten paid. Your call amounts to relegating writing, and the Web, into a hobby for the leisure classes and the state-supported academic nobility.
As it is new years day, I won’t write any more; beginning the new year with fury would be a bad precedent.
I wrote:
> Publishers have always gotten paid.
Right. And in the world of libraries and bookstores the need for multiple copies meant that the different copies could be available in different ways – some for pay by the individual, some purchased by the society to make available without individual pay. The puzzle now is how do we find a way to (1) support writers and publishers as well as (2) preserve the dream of the public school and library. It’s a puzzle because we don’t need multiple copies on the network.
> Your call amounts to relegating writing, and the Web,
> into a hobby for the leisure classes and the state-
> supported academic nobility.
My call is to continue to search for other models – because micropayment and subscription foreclose the idea of a library. My desire to write came up while spending most of my elementary school afternoons at the library. The more I read, the more I could read – I wasn’t using up my reading budget. I don’t want to contribute to creating a web that would foreclose this possibility for future kids.
> As it is new years day, I won’t write any more; beginning
> the new year with fury would be a bad precedent.
I’m sorry to hear that my position evokes fury in you. Yours does not evoke it in me. I really do think this is a puzzle, and that well meaning people can take different positions.