Is the internet really good enough?

Ness Rowlah said:

It's often not about the quality of the writing - being a good weblogger
is also a matter of "web style". Short paragraphs, good headlines, the "conclusion" up front and so on.

Reading from screen is different from reading a newspaper article or a book. Many either
do not know this or make no effort to change their writing (just look at the replies above -
which ones are you going to bother reading?).

Only if the writing and subjects covered are exceptional (like K-P and blissblogger)
can you get away with a different style on the web for long.

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But that's not a matter of style so much as presentation: and I do pretty much, and quite self-consciously, stick to those criteria. Quite early on, Penman told me that he wrote in a different 'tabloid' way on the net: capital letters, short paragraphs etc. I've tried to stick to that ever since!

The fact that I was a professional writer years before I was a blogger (it's OK, I've managed to give it up now ) shall not deter me from noting the mutual masturbation of professional writers on this thread .

Blogging's not about the pro's, nor was it ever. The heart of blogging has always been people doing it for love: enthusiastic amateurs participating in networks of relationships. The great excitement of seeing the pros doing blogs is that their fanaticism shines through, just as the principal disappointment of pro's blogs is their occasional need for magazine-style subbing -- a malaise from which Marcello's longer pieces sometimes suffered. That's why "blogging" has gone back to the forums -- bloggers have sought out better social networks. The values and yardsticks of print-centric auterism grate a little when applied to blogging.

But to go back to Matt's original point: I don't think it's about whether the Internet is good enough (though of course it isn't, never can be). It's about whether one's human relationships, whether purely online or translated into the real world, are good enough. For me, as a busy parent, blogging has helped provide as many human relationships on and offline as I can handle, so it's all good over here.

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You will note that this is not a defence of bad writing (or a value judgement about word rates).

WOEBOT said:

Presumably everyone has found Mark's post here:
http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/archives/005497.html
which i thought was excellent

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Yes, the K-Punk nexus has grasped the concept of blogrolling and network effects as a mechanism of value in the economy of attention better than anyone.

I suspect it emphasises the value of human relationship as a product of those network effects less than I would like .

However, I'm totally in agreement about the need to revitalise the Tory party as a means of opposing Kapital. I start my new role at central office in two weeks. We begin bombing in five minutes.

||| Quick Side Comment |||

Interesting how the K-Punk nexus' decision to refuse to interiorise the network within its blog, by getting rid of comments, actually made the blog a more valuable node in the network?

I never take any notice of criticisms that my pieces are "too long." From my perspective it's like saying I'm living too long.

mark's right in many ways and so's paul; mark especially on the point of editors perhaps not being such a great thing when you look at contemporary mass media. the only thing i have a problem with is the way the mediocrity mark underlines can be elevated to such an absurd degree in *either* sphere - pro-print journalism and blogging are equally guilty here. i'd just contend that both facilitate different kinds of mediocrity; in the mainstream media it's represented by the cult of the snide middlebrow hack, in blogging it's the equally snide and arguably more snippy and sneery blogger who writes for other bloggers and thinks this somehow makes him superior to anyone who doesn't accuse people who dislike MIA of being acolytes of oswald mosely or those of us who don't see much point in crowbarring references to badiou into the works of terrah danja (substitute any grime producer/mc and any philosopher here and it'll work just fine). and meme, you sarky bugger, you're one of my exceptions, so you can fiddle with whomsoever you like as far as i'm concerned. we're very liberal round these parts

you can fiddle with whomsoever you like as far as i'm concerned. we're very liberal round these parts

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The exact words which Amanda Platell mouths to me in my dreams...

someone please ban this man!

(or maybe i could resurrect my money-making idea for a range of "inflatable companions" based on music critics and instead give them the heads of bad tv presenters/right-wing wannabe dominatrices - orders mailed out in the strictest confidence in plain brown paper wrapping)

mmm...with those 20-inch stilettoes...who needs acupuncture?

Y'know, I was going to post here about how a blogging friend of mine (who started out in print journalism and has been on radio as well) is trying to drag the Torstar Corp. into the 21st c. by getting them into blogging, but after Rachel's reveries all I can think of is a certain big-eared northerner whisking me away in his blue police box.

Damn.

Thanks to all for explaining the whole media situation. I don't think there's a 'right' way to blog; good writing is good writing - though I'll admit that sometimes brevity wins out, if only because people can't be online 24/7.

stelfox said:

the only thing i have a problem with is the way the mediocrity mark underlines can be elevated to such an absurd degree in *either* sphere

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's true. I don't bother with many blogs these days, just the obvious ones, people I've met and friends of friends. Too much tosh everywhere.

stelfox said:

crowbarring references to badiou into the works of terrah danja

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I blame Bat. Often copied but never equalled. As I have found out .

stelfox said:

and meme, you sarky bugger, you're one of my exceptions, so you can fiddle with whomsoever you like as far as i'm concerned. we're very liberal round these parts

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You're too kind. Your idea about inflatable music critics has me reaching for the lube and the kleenex...

I never take any notice of criticisms that my pieces are "too long." From my perspective it's like saying I'm living too long.

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and

I don't think there's a 'right' way to blog; good writing is good writing - though I'll admit that sometimes brevity wins out, if only because people can't be online 24/7.

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Agree. There is no right way of writing (whatever works for you is right) and
there is nothing wrong with writing long pieces for online consumption.

If you go with the "I am a superb writer of wit and intellect; and only want readers who can be bothered to read my 1000 word masterpiece formatted as one long paragraph (with my challenging point right at the end and wasn't "On The Road" overrated anyway?) --- and I don't care if its effing unreadable that will sort out the lesser readers"-school, that's fine.

But don't expect the random reader who sees your masterpiece
to stop by for more than two seconds - before moving somewhere else.
That's how most people "read" on the web.

Why are you writing in the first place?

If you are writing for yourself it is useful to be able to switch to a web style,
if you are writing for others then why not make sure they have a chance of reading it?

Keep your style and keep it long - but make sure it's readable
for the web-punter on the other side of the wire.
We punters simply READ differently when reading from screen.

---------------------

The book is still a winner - the right price, no DRM,
user-friendly and it is fit for all styles of writing.

Nielsen was wrong when he predicted that super-dpi screens would be common by now;
instead we've got LCD which makes reading of screen material even harder.

The Lomov tangent -

Haare from Finland - free MP3 pieces at http://music.download.com/haare/3600-8622_32-100397856.html
(It might be a one man band, if anyone has more info on Haare I wouldn't mind).

Ness Rowlah said:

The Lomov tangent -

Haare from Finland - free MP3 pieces at http://music.download.com/haare/3600-8622_32-100397856.html

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Great thanks. I kept checking back in on this thread hoping a link would come up.

If it's of any interest, a friend flicked me a link to a bunch of free MP3s by Dublee. It's in Japanese, but the links are clearly marked. He's recently released something on disc with... bah, fuck knows, but it's on the Kompakt MP3 shop, so someone affiliated. Sorta older Vlad Delay biting, but interesting enough.

Other faintly amazing stuff in this vein is a Mexican net label called Filtro. Mainly that first release.. zillion mixes of a real nice ambient track covering all the contemporary nerd subsubsubsubgenres.

Should start another thread...

Rachel Verinder said:

I never take any notice of criticisms that my pieces are "too long." From my perspective it's like saying I'm living too long.

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I wouldn't say they were too long: they're just not ideal for 'screen reading'. But that's OK, like the woman you saw on the train reading CoM, I print out the very long ones ...

As for Paul's point on closing comments: I think that has turned out to be right. As Luke noted at the time, the effect of comments is to depress inter-blog interactivity. It speeds and heats things up too much. Plus, there just does seem to be a point - Infinite Thought reached it recently - where malign time-wasters so dominate the space that it becomes a platform for their resentments and little else.

The professional-non-professional writer thing is a bit misleading; Dave's right, there's mediocrity in both fields (I'm not into lo-fi amateurishness in writing any more than in music!) but surely such mediocrity is far more unacceptable from paid so-called professionals. The reason why I don't bother trying to get stuff published in the mainstream media any more is (1) it involves a kind of meta-work (hussling, pitching etc) that is worse than actual work and (2) the pressure to conform to what mags project as the interests of their demographic acts as a virtual policeman, an internalized censor, that determines what you write and think even before you produce it (a bit like Jon King saying that in the post postpunk period accountants became like the extra member of the band).

Even when there's one good article from Simon in them, it's better to read them in the shops, because you then don't have to clutter up the house with boring drivel on the Band and Bob Dylan etc etc.

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Another tight bastard ;-)

Reading whole articles "while browsing" seems to be acceptable here in England
(at least in the WH Smiths in and around London),
back home in Norway it isn't (some security guard or the kiosk owner
will come over if the reading session is starting to get too long ("this is not a library") -
although things might have changed since I moved over here almost 8 years ago).

Useful - I read the whole article on the recording of "Never Mind The Bollocks" in SoundOnSound
a few months ago and didn't have to carry a hundredandfifty pages of new synths back with
me home. Chris Spedding did NOT play guitar on NMTB - this the word from the producers/engineers;
the Pistols could actually play their instruments (well Sid hadn't joined yet).

I used to agree with Stelfox about the power of print, but I just couldn't care less now. All I know is that I'd rather flick through blogs than EVER go near The Wire - this is the same magazine that gave full marks to Maurizio Bianchi's early tape reissues - how the hell am I meant to trust the critical faculties of any organ that would gush such garbage?

I personally reckon the West Country Blogs are the dog's. I would read anything they have to say, regardless of whether or not I like the music / bands / comics / films / whatever they're on about. Whereas I wouldn't pay 2p to pick up 'Mojo' or 'Uncut', even if Throbbing Gristle were on the cover.

The reason why I don't bother trying to get stuff published in the mainstream media any more is (1) it involves a kind of meta-work (hussling, pitching etc) that is worse than actual work and (2) the pressure to conform to what mags project as the interests of their demographic acts as a virtual policeman, an internalized censor, that determines what you write and think even before you produce it (a bit like Jon King saying that in the post postpunk period accountants became like the extra member of the band).

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As many fellow "pros" pointed out to me after the fact, if you wish to embark on a career as a freelance (music/anything) writer then only about 10% of your time will be devoted to actual writing. The remaining 90% will be taken up with pitching, ringing editors and PR nincompoops, trying to get anyone interested. I thought: well I have to do "pitching" of a different kind during the day, why should I have to use up my "free" time doing the same thing? And it doesn't pay enough to justify jacking in the day job.

I'm inimical to the concept of a "web style" for the same reason that I stopped doing the freelance writing; because I wasn't writing what I wanted to write, but somebody else's non-aesthetic/pie chart-driven concept of what I SHOULD be writing. As I say, why should I be expected to apply the same "principle" to blogging when I don't even get PAID for doing it? This is just another manifestation of the faux-Kapitalist pseudo-Marxism (much beloved of post-war moneyed Labour, see Richard Heller, David Hare et al) which dictates that either we do things for The Market/The Common Good (where's the practical division?) or else it is self-indulgent, solipsistic and worthless, i.e. it cannot be made into a docile, servile Kapitalist tool.

That having been said, I have developed my own "web style," if you want to call it that, very naturally, and it is immediately recognisable without necessarily having to signpost it. The moment you start to think about developing a "web style" before writing is when you shoot yourself down in flames. Just as the amateurist ethic can beget either Tallulah Gosh or Drenching-Pleasure Improvers, then the blogosphere will give us a ton of angsty, cuddly pink glop, or gorgeous, acidic and purposeful writing. As far as the one paragraph monument approach is concerned - well I'd take WG Sebald over Nick Hornby any day.

I wholeheartedly agree with this.

The reason I'm free to follow my own lines on k-p is that it is not subject to the demographic censorship of either academic publishing (which because of the Research Assessment criteria must now be at least as restricted and hidebound as universities in the old Soviet Union) or the pop-cultural press (which as we've all noted, imposes its own highly constrictive protocols). The alternative to producing within these tramline-determined conditions of artificial stupidity is not necessarily solipsistic expressionism - the best blogs are those which explore conceptual and thematic consistencies - the worst are those which either badly reproduce the format of existing media or those which function as repositories for ego-whine (cf Infinite Thought's attack on blogs-as-diaries)

What is abundant on the web is what is lacking in the Gutenberg galaxy: SPACE, in both a literal and a more abstract sense (i.e. space as a zone of potentialities). I don't think people are anything like positive enough about a cultural situation in which you can publish your own work to a genuinely global audience without the intervention of middle-men of any kind; google and technorati etc facilitate the production of networks ... middle-men want us to think that anything that doesn't pass through them is solipsistic and irrelevant; that is what the 'de-punking' of culture has amounted to - a re-claiming of the role of the authorization of culture by the 'middle mass, vulturous in the aftermath'.

I think there's another important dimension to this, which is effective anti-capitalist strategies. Participating in a web network - either by producing or consuming - in which the main aim is not profit - indeed in which no money changes hands - is already, in and of itself, engaging in anti-capitalist activity. One of capitalism's most dangerous secret weapons is its claim that only those things which make money have value (equally pernicious is the claim that ONLY things which make money are valuable). It is not as if those of us who produce 'get nothing' from the work - it is just that what we receive is not financial. But the idea that this is somehow lesser than money is capitalist ideology through and through. Surely being part of a cyber-collectivity is much more important than making a few quid.