Sue Thomas

Bruce Sterling: Eighteen Challenges in Contemporary Literature

I seldom import whole blog posts but this is so good and so very sensible that I'm including all of it. It's from Bruce Sterling's great blog Beyond The Beyond

Eighteen Challenges in Contemporary Literature

1. Literature is language-based and national; contemporary society is globalizing and polyglot.
2. Vernacular means of everyday communication — cellphones, social networks, streaming video — are moving into areas where printed text cannot follow.
3. Intellectual property systems failing.
4. Means of book promotion, distribution and retail destabilized.
5. Ink-on-paper manufacturing is an outmoded, toxic industry with steeply rising costs.
6. Core demographic for printed media is aging faster than the general population. Failure of print and newspapers is disenfranching young apprentice writers.
7. Media conglomerates have poor business model; economically rationalized “culture industry” is actively hostile to vital aspects of humane culture.
8. Long tail balkanizes audiences, disrupts means of canon-building and fragments literary reputation.
9. Digital public-domain transforms traditional literary heritage into a huge, cost-free, portable, searchable database, radically transforming the reader’s relationship to belle-lettres.
10. Contemporary literature not confronting issues of general urgency; dominant best-sellers are in former niche genres such as fantasies, romances and teen books.
11. Barriers to publication entry have crashed, enabling huge torrent of subliterary and/or nonliterary textual expression.
12. Algorithms and social media replacing work of editors and publishing houses; network socially-generated texts replacing individually-authored texts.
13. “Convergence culture” obliterating former distinctions between media; books becoming one minor aspect of huge tweet/ blog/ comics/ games / soundtrack/ television / cinema / ancillary-merchandise pro-fan franchises.
14. Unstable computer and cellphone interfaces becoming world’s primary means of cultural access. Compositor systems remake media in their own hybrid creole image.
15. Scholars steeped within the disciplines becoming cross-linked jack-of-all-trades virtual intelligentsia.
16. Academic education system suffering severe bubble-inflation.
17. Polarizing civil cold war is harmful to intellectual honesty.
18. The Gothic fate of poor slain Poetry is the specter at this dwindling feast.

'Transliteracy: A Unifying Concept', University of Nottingham, 6pm 28 May 2009

I'll be speaking about transliteracy on Thursday 28th May 2009 as part of the Generation Net: Arts and Culture in the 21st Century lecture series at the University of Nottingham.

Room A18 (Arts Graduate Centre),
Trent Building.
6pm to 7pm followed by wine and nibbles.
Admission is Free.
All are welcome.
To book a place email Iain Smith

Experimental Peer Review & Funding: We don't need people to take risk; we need people to manage it.

For a couple of years now Toby Moores and I have been trying to set up a project we call Open Source Thinking, based on Toby's desire to share failed and mis-directed projects with others who might be able to run with an idea that did not work the first time around. Here's a link I gleaned from Alex Pang to a similar topic - Eric Weinstein, mathematician and hedge fund manager, talking about The Importance of Risky Research. He suggests that science can learn from finance by applying methods of shorting, not to money, but to ideas and propositions.

Applied to science, shorting could reveal what the senior people actually think of the juniors. If you want to short somebody, and you do the calculation of what happens should their ideas take off, it can be frightening. It's not like losing an even-money bet—it's being on the hook for an unbounded negative experience. Imagine Erwin Chargaff shorting Watson and Crick on what he called their "extreme ignorance" in 1952.

So, asked the interviewer, should journals and funding sources should be more willing to take risks on young scientists, even if they might be wrong? Weinstein:

We don't need people to take risk; we need people to manage it. There are lots of seductive dumb ideas. If you start swinging at all of them, you're going to bankrupt yourself. The important thing is to assemble an ideas portfolio. That way, whether they mostly work and occasionally fail spectacularly, or rather mostly fail and occasionally work spectacularly, you are giving young people and their risky ideas room to work.

Makes a lot of sense to me, but achieving it would require a radical buy-in from academia and I just don't see that coming any time soon.