Continuing on the thoughts of yesterday’s post, I’ve recently read Clay Shirky’s speech, “Gin, Television, and Social Surplus.” You can read a transcript of it, or watch a video. I highly recommend checking out one or the other and coming back here. I’ll wait. For the lazy, here’’s a choice bit that explains much of it:
If I had to pick the critical technology for the 20th century, the bit of social lubricant without which the wheels would’ve come off the whole enterprise, I’d say it was the sitcom. Starting with the Second World War a whole series of things happened–rising GDP per capita, rising educational attainment, rising life expectancy and, critically, a rising number of people who were working five-day work weeks. For the first time, society forced onto an enormous number of its citizens the requirement to manage something they had never had to manage before–free time.
And what did we do with that free time? Well, mostly we spent it watching TV.
…
And this is the other thing about the size of the cognitive surplus we’re talking about. It’s so large that even a small change could have huge ramifications. Let’s say that everything stays 99 percent the same, that people watch 99 percent as much television as they used to, but 1 percent of that is carved out for producing and for sharing. The Internet-connected population watches roughly a trillion hours of TV a year. That’s about five times the size of the annual U.S. consumption. One per cent of that is 100 Wikipedia projects per year worth of participation.
Pretty cool, huh? I think Clay is describing the underlying force behind the New York Times article from yesterday. The cognitive surplus is leading to many people using the time formerly soaked up by the one-way media to create things themselves, and to share them. Which causes a glut in the choices for actually consuming, and results in the paradox of choice. Making things collaboratively like Wikipedia makes us happy, but having all those other options makes us unhappy. Another paradox, of sorts.
Wikipedia is a bit of a different from, say, writing fan fiction, because Wikipedia has a core usefulness that is more broad in appeal. You could say that Wikipedia provides a clear benefit to society, whereas the benefit to society of more fiction, or more music, or more photography is less readily apparent. I’m not saying that your X-Files/Evil Dead crossover fanfic doesn’t provide a benefit. I just think it’s harder to make the case for it. I’m not going to do it for you, anyway.
The real mind blower here for me is this idea of thinking about the cognitive surplus–not thinking about it as leisure time, but thinking about it as hours spent thinking. That surplus has always existed, but something about the Internet has provided an entirely new means of tapping into it. Sure, some have chosen to express their surplus by launching flame wars over which Doctor was the best (clearly the 7th), but I think Shirky is right in pointing out that this is all embryonic still. We’re going to see some amazing things soon. What forms will they take? My thinking along these lines before was limited to the idea of crowdsourcing, but I’m starting to see that it’s so much more than that. I really need to read Shirky’s book, Here Comes Everybody.
What problems can we solve using the internet and our cognitive surplus?
Charlie Finlay said in the comments on the last post that, for the past several years, every SF novel he’s read has seemed this way, which is why he’s trended towards fantasy. So I put some thought into what SF novels I had read recently.
The Execution Channel was the most recent one. Holy smokes, was this depressing. So it fits the bill. Postsingular seemed a lot more upbeat. In fact, it was the first near-future SF anything that I’ve read in a while that didn’t mention terrorism. So I haven’t really noticed a trend of depressive elements in my most recent reading of novels, but then, I don’t read a lot of SF novels.
I do know that Gordon has been talking about getting a lot more stories about death for a while now. Maybe I’m just now starting to see those stories being published here and there.
It’s odd, because I’ve spent the past couple of years kind of obsessed with death and the afterlife, and now that I’m coming out of that obsession and starting to feel better, I find death all over the place in my reading. Was it that common of a theme before? Not sure. I don’t remember it being so, but it’s probably a matter of my changed perspective as much as anything else.
Some questions.
1. Does anyone know how relatively optimistic the SF published in China is?
2. I don’t read Baen’s–are they more upbeat?
3. Do you think British writers have been more prone to depressive stuff since their own terrorist attacks recently?
4. Is there a need for upbeat SF? Not necessarily more positive, but maybe less, well, grim?
Jason Stoddard has asked “What do you Hate Most about SF Short Fiction?”. I must say, I was disappointed with the responses. There’s no consistency among the comments, just like there’s no consistency in the tastes of any large, diverse audience. I haven’t gotten to read the Something Awful responses yet, but I am looking forward to seeing if they are more useful to me as a writer than “Put in more robots” and “too much character development” (a comment quickly followed by someone complaining about too little character development).I kind of hoped a pattern would emerge, that we would diagnose the problem that everyone is so sure is there, because of the numbers. We’re like doctors huddled around a comatose patient we believe to be dying because of the monitors, each shouting their own diagnosis. We’ll never come to any kind of conclusion because it’s all a matter of opinion. And you know what? I’m sick of opinion. Give me information, stories, humor, not opinions. Anything but those. Everyone has one, and everyone is always wrong.* As an aggregate. Being sick of opinion probably means I am suffering blog burnout. Anyway–
What I am beginning to hate most about short SF is its incessant need to talk about itself. If I put half as much energy into talking about it and thinking about it, I probably would have gotten a damn novel written by now.
I’m just going to shut up and write now.
*Exceptions made for Nick Mamatas and David Moles.
(Warning, the below is poorly thought out and written hastily. I will write more later this week.)
Doug Cohen has recently launched a subscribe to a SF magazine drive via his Livejournal.
I have a suspicion that telling the SF writing blogosphere to subscribe to short fiction magazines in an effort to save short fiction is like instructing a bunch of buggy whip makers to buy buggy whips to save the buggy whip manufacturing industry. I know Doug means well, and I don’t mean this as a criticism of him, but I am very doubtful that telling a small group of active online fandom to subscribe to magazines will make a bit of difference in the general decline. I’ve been just as guilty
The gorilla in the room that we rarely acknowledge is that nobody wants to read short fiction. If they did, then there wouldn’t be this mess. I’ve heard and read hand waving about the changes in distribution models, but honestly, I don’t buy it. In this day and age, if you have a burning desire to read science fiction short stories, you can Google up a magazine in less than a second.
Do I think that the public could be marketed towards to encourage the reading of more short fiction? Maybe. A good marketing team can sell just about anything. Do I think anyone has the money to back a large campaign like this? No. SFWA would be the only organization that I could see such an initiative coming from, and they’re a massive joke; an organization dedicated to internal politics and rumormongering more than the decline and collapse of the industry around it.
There is no solution. The public’s interest has moved on. If you’re a writer, go write video games, movies, television, or books, in that order of popularity. That is where the public’s interest is right now, and if you don’t like it, then I’m afraid that you should probably get used to the idea that short fiction is a small, niche hobby of little importance. I’m fine with that. I find that I enjoy writing it, and that’s enough for me. Short fiction for me is a way to learn writing, but I won’t regret leaving it behind if I were to crack another (more popular and better paying) medium, or find some amalgam of several of my own.
I don’t support the record industry for its failing business model. I don’t think the SF print magazine world deserve special treatment either. I do, in fact subscribe to quite a few magazines. But it’s not out of any effort to save them from the dustbin. There’s plenty to read online, and will be as long as weirdos like me keep writing it.
I’ve been around and around the funding models for online magazines in my head. I’ve concocted the most ridiculous Web 2.0 models for online publishing that you can imagine. But none of them will work, because there’s no evidence what-so-ever that there is enough public interest to justify the building of such a thing. Every model fails, because there just aren’t enough people interested in reading and supporting a magazine monetarily for it to even sustain itself. Don’t quote Strange Horizons at me, either. Their fund drive doesn’t seem to be doing too well this time around.
Hi! My name is Jeremiah Tolbert, but you can call me Jeremy. I am a fantasy and science fiction writer, photographer, and web designer living in Northern Colorado. I am currently starting a new job and cannot take freelance work at this time. Drop me a line if you have any questions or comments. I love hearing from new people and I now have a lot more time to chat.
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I forget where I got this, but I think that it’s the level of quality I’d like to see in more book trailers online:
Having Tim Curry as a narrator is probably outside of the range of what we can afford as SF/F writers, but still. Let’s go over what makes this awesome:
Located 15 minutes south of Fort Collins, Coyote Ridge is a natural area consisting if a couple hundred acres of prairie. A trail runs from the road up across several ridges. Today, I walked to the base of the second ridge before coming back. I’ll make the full hike to the end [...]
Pretty cool, huh? I think Clay is describing the underlying force behind the New York Times article from yesterday. The cognitive surplus is leading to many people using the time formerly soaked up by the one-way media to create things themselves, and to share them. Which causes a glut in the choices for actually consuming, and results in the paradox of choice. Making things collaboratively like Wikipedia makes us happy, but having all those other options makes us unhappy. Another paradox, of sorts.
