Writing and the Digital Life

WDL has moved to a new address

The WDL blog has moved to a new address. It is now on our server at DMU and will soon disappear from this site so please change your bookmarks and subscriptions asap. You will find that it looks rather different and is still being designed as we get used to Movable Type, so please bear with us.

The new url is http://www.hum.dmu.ac.uk/blogs/wdl/
Atom is http://www.hum.dmu.ac.uk/blogs/wdl/atom.xml
RSS still being set up.

Most of the current WDL writers have moved with us and we have two new writers - Randy Adams and Maria x. Look out for their first posts soon.

Meanwhile, to find out what a splog is, visit

http://www.hum.dmu.ac.uk/blogs/wdl/2006/04/splog_poetry_1.html

Myspace - creative space or Hobbesian morass?

The ever-interesting Nicholas Carr adds his $.02 to the increasing controversy over MySpace. He complains that:

When I look around MySpace I don't see much that's "strange and wonderful" - or "deeply disturbing," either. I wish I did. What I see is a dreary sameness, a vast assembly of interchangeable parts.

Of course this is not surprising - not everyone has the skills to express themselves in a creative and interesting fashion and if they don't, of course they will fall back on pre-digested tropes and the 'content' that requires the least effort for the largest potential effect - the display of their own bodies. But the interesting point I feel is that at least these people are being encouraged to try to express themselves and that this may at least encourage and enable a small minority of those that try to hone and refine their skills and become genuinely creative (or at least more self-aware).

English teachers have tried to encourage this sort of thing with diaries and self-reflective fiction for years but this arena (unlike the classroom) has peer pressure behind it and offers the producers the potential for peer reinforcement if they can produce something compelling.

Not to say that there aren't considerable dangers as well, of course!

More on writers and bloggers

No time yet to summarise yesterday's events, but I just want to follow up on my last post. This morning in the pool I met Halley Suitt who writes a blog called Halley's Comet and is doing some very interesting work . We had an intriguing conversation about the gulf between bloggers, who are writers often coming from non-literary backgrounds and with no involvement with the publishing world, and writers who may wish to become bloggers but may be weighed down by the very literary background which in the past has supported them. (well, we didn't actually say that, but that's how I am interpreting it.)

We were then joined by yet another escapee from the AWP conference, someone who has been attending it for years but finds it bogged down in ego and tradition, and who also wished she had gone to  SXSW instead. My first thought was that maybe we should take the news to next year's AWP and give it another whirl, but actually I think I'd rather organise something myself and bring everyone together. Spring 2007 seems a good slot to aim for.  Watch this space for 'when two worlds collide'!

Where writers and bloggers don't meet

I've arrived in Austin, Texas for SXSW Interactive and guess what - the Associated Writing Programs conference is going on right next door at the same time. I was just chatting with one of the AWP delegates and she told me there isn't much at all going on there about digital writing - maybe they should come over here :)  I did a panel on digital writing with trAce at AWP way back in around 1999/2000 and I know Web Del Sol and the ELO have also presented there, but maybe it has subsided back into print now. Was anyone there who can report on that? Anyway, at SXSW there's lots of discussion going on about new media and writing of all kinds. More on that soon, along with my final report on ETech, which has been somewhat delayed due to spending a day travelling from San Diego to Austin.

Is it me, or is it Movable Type?

Can anyone help on this? I have been using Six Apart's Typepad  for blogging for the past two years and have been very pleased with it, so I wrote a grant application to buy a copy of Movable Type   'the premiere choice for weblog power users', to install on our brand new Faculty webserver (purchased according to MT's spec). We were excited to get the grant and installed the new server and software in early January, since when we have been experiencing endless difficulties and now, almost 2 months later, we are no nearer to getting it up and running. The whole thing is hugely frustrating.

The development team includes myself, not a programmer but a very experienced Typepad user, plus our Systems Manager, who specialises in php and perl, and a web developer colleague with whom I have worked for several years on Cold Fusion based applications. No novices, I hear you say. So why can't we get any of it working properly? And why is it so difficult to get appropriate MT support? Their helpdesk people are friendly and prompt, but we seem to be going round in circles. And they will only allow one of us to have a helpdesk password, so either I hand over my private passwords to the team, or everything has to go through me.

My biggest grouse is that I had thought I was buying a product something like Typepad. Instead, I've got an empty shell which has to be customised with various bits and pieces from numerous different plugin designers, most of which bear little relationship to the  functions I liked so much in Typepad, such as Typelist, Design, Themes, Layout etc. Furthermore it seems to require a great deal of template design from the users themselves, and since we bought this in order to show colleagues and students how easy it is to blog, I'm somewhat depressed at the idea of having to train them all to use html templates. We have no  money to pay experts to disentangle the situation, and anyway we rather resent any idea that we should have to buy in expertise when we already have plenty of skills at our disposal. So what shall we do?

This was certainly not in my imaginings for our wonderful new faculty blogosphere :(

Yours, demoralised and fed up with Movable Type

Blog civility vs listserv civility

There's a row brewing in the blogosphere at the moment which might benefit from a look back to the listserv past, and since this blog grew out of a listserv and is still operating across those two worlds I'm curious to hear what you think about this issue. It all began with an argument between Mena Trott (co-founder of Six Apart software, upon which our blog sits) and Ben Metcalfe which occurred recently at Les Blogs, a blogging conference in Paris. Follow those links to read both sides.

As a result**, Nancy White is convening a panel at SXSW to discuss Blog Civility. Nancy and I both go back a long way and years ago when trAce first began I used to regularly visit Nancy's site to learn how to manage online community. She also interviewed me in 1999.

I'm very interested to see that the discussions going on then are now being revisited via new technologies with different kinds of functionalities such as those used at Les Blogs. if you have time, check out the Les Blogs incident and post a comment with your views on it, especially in relation to listserv issues. To be honest, it looks pretty calm compared with the flame wars of yore! Not to mention the Rape in Cyberspace at LambdaMOO and various other cyberconflicts. But then, the world is changing and civility is a much hotter public topic now than it was 5/10 years ago. What do you think?

**correction: as Nancy points out below, this panel was organised quite a while before Les Blogs.

The economics of non-commercial blogging

Has anyone come across any figures on what people can expect to make if they put ads on their weblogs via Google, Yahoo or others these days? I only have one data point - a blogger with several hundred readers a week made $25 over the period of a few months. Surely by now someone has produced some kind of chart or database (or academic article?)

I don't believe most bloggers do it for the money but it would be interesting to know whether they make any noticeable sums at all...

Dying and the Digital Life

Recently I was listening to a webcast of Hubert Dreyfus, professor of philosophy at UC Berkeley (Nihilism and the Internet). Dreyfus wonders if the anonymity of the Web leads to nihilism. We have discussed here, the pros and cons, and for that matter, the levels of anonymity in the use of email list vs. blogs. It seems clear that email, text messaging and blog posts have become much more popular and anonymous tools than telephones because they alleviate the need to actually communicate with another human being in person with all the accompanying anxiety and misinterpretation.

Not long ago, on another list, in another digital galaxy, a regular member revealed that he had had a stroke. He mentioned his sudden dizziness, headache, numbness and partial paralysis in his lower arm and hand. It appears that he has recovered and is past the incident.

It occurred to me . . .what would have happened if he had actually died of that stroke. In these virtual communities, with these anonymous relationships, there are infinitely more than six degrees of separation, there are no phone numbers to call, no relatives or neighbors to ask, no one on the list would have known, and the member would have disappeared in the cyber ether, never to be heard from again. Think of it. Now that is despairing!

As the use of a news aggregator protects us from news and information that we are not interested in, or simply do not want to confront, the inherent selective, discriminatory characteristics of digital life also protects us from the patently unsavory aspects of human to human contact, including death. Is the digital world then, a solipsistic construct, an elite heavily walled community peopled only with "safe" citizens and "acceptable" ideas? 

Talk at the Café Scientifique, Leicester, UK, Tue 8th Nov, 7.30pm

I'm giving a talk at the Café Scientifique in Leicester, UK, on Tuesday 8th November, at 7.30pm. Please do come along. I'll be talking about transliteracy, blogging, Web 2.0, and my book Hello World. More information at http://www.cafescientifiqueleicester.com/ Hope to see you there.

The Rebirth of the Author

An interesting piece on CTheory by Nicholas Rombes entitled The Rebirth of the Author which puts forward the idea that Blogging is very much living proof that the Author is far from dead. Not so long back some new media theory was championing hypertext as working proof of the truths of post-structuralism (Landow et al) and now it seems it can disprove it too!

http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=480

He also has some interesting things to say about academic writing and the nature of authorship and digital technology.