WDL is a collaborative transdisciplinary blog about the impact of digital technologies upon writing and lived experience. We talk about writing and reading in the context of 'new and old' media, transliteracy, craft, art, process and practice, social networks, cooperation and collaboration, narrative and memory, human computer interaction, imagination, nature, mind, body, and spirit.
Podcast audio of Bruce Sterling's stirring closing talk at SXSW 2006. Sterling currently lives in Belgrade but Austin is his hometown and this is one of those speeches you can only give in your hometown. It's a passionate and angry view of the US from the outside. (thanks to the SXSW Community Blog)
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'!
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.
