:: The U in publishing ::

Wednesday, April 30, 2003

So last night's experience with being able to instantly post pictures while on the go (or more likely, sitting in booths at a couple of bars), as well as some conversation sparked thereby, made me think about the whole landscape of, for lack of a better word, publishing (1). There's a vast spectrum of creative ease, with novels, epic films, and symphonies on one extreme, and quick little snapshots, moblog entries, and classroom rubber-band music on the other. Academic papers lie closer to the former extreme, and conventional (2) blog entries closer to the latter.

I don't favor one over the other. Certain artistic mediums foster spontaneity, others comes close to quashing it utterly. Some allow for polish and refinement, others for conditions salubrious to amateur and sloppy work. Both have merits in spades.

What really fascinated me however, is the barrier-to-entry curve for publishing. At the more time-intensive (with respect to the creative process) extreme, one needs a major press, media conglomerate, or truly sizable reputation with which to finance and distribute one's work. 180 degrees from that, one needs cutting-edge technology and some modicum of technical savvy. The barrier of deeply-entrenched and traditional mass-distribution networks and the barrier of highly-priced new technology stem from different sources and are quite qualitatively different, save for their mutual ability to preclude themselves from accessibility to the masses (ironically, the very same audience they target). The curve is U-shaped.

It takes less effort to "publish" a blog, for instance, than to do the same with a moblog, even though the creative process behind a conventional (3) blog is more time-consuming, because anyone with access to the internet (i.e. everyone with access to a public library, i.e. almost everyone) can have one hosted for free, as opposed to needing a special phone, wireless plan, and back-end software. Increase the creative scale, to the extent of a full-length novel for instance, and potential outlets dry up faster than a small Utah town on Sunday. Similarly, recording your bedroom rendition of "All along the watchtower", compressing it into an MP3 on your computer, and uploading it to mp3.com is fairly easy, but trying to stream that impromptu drum circle in the park live over the internet is a real bitch. And we all know how easy it is (4), at the polar opposite of the realm of creative effort, to have years of intense and original musical effort snatched up and pressed by a major label.

In time, advances help to extend (e.g. moblogging didn't even exist before last year) and flatten (e.g. it is cheaper, in real terms, to produce a record than it was 30 years ago; uploading pictures instantly from your phone to a website will be commonplace and cheap in a year or two) the curve, but those seeking the edges will always find it more difficult.

And that's all I have to say about that for now.

(1) Point-to-point transmissions follow a similar pattern (a formal letter vs. a telephone conversation vs. an email vs. and SMS message), but I'm going to stick to broadcasts. This also refers intrinsically to the ease not only of creation, but also dissemination - it's entirely within most people's reach to sit down and write a genuinely-decent 8-page essay for a class, or create a somewhat-catchy ditty on their aunt's guitar. The time and effort required to make such material easily and readily available to others is another matter. It is to this confluence that I will henceforth refer.

(4) it's not easy

Posted by morland @ 04:34 PM

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