inkwell.vue.400 : State of the World 2011:
Bruce Sterling and Jon Lebkowsky permalink #68 of 156:
Bruce Sterling (bruces) Fri 7 Jan 11 02:14“Abundance breaks more things than scarcity,” as Clay Shirky once abundantly said.
I used to be involved in the paper fanzine scene, so I was never much daunted by the supposed “barriers to entry” in publishing. If you ever read a “slush pile” for a traditional publisher, you became instantly aware that there were legions of people writing – even intelligent and hard-working people – whose writing just didn’t deserve any attention from publishers. It was no use making that stuff widely public, because only twenty people would read it – and they’d be the guy’s relatives, who would think, “Wow, my cousin, the published writer!”
Now we got blogs (for the time bein). The “writing” there is not what blogs have ever been about. The writing doesn’t much matter in blogs; the blogging matters.
The writing in my own blog isn’t much good. My blog’s ‘writing" consists mostly of wisecracks, sarcastic complaints and You Go Girl. It’s the LINKING that is important in a blog, not the “writing”. The screen-size snippets of prose are in a supportive position to the work of the blog as an entity on the Internet. Nobody goes to my blog to read Bruce Sterling’s sparkling prose. They just whip through the updated torrent of eldritch curiosities there. “My cousin the Augmented Reality guy.” “My cousin the Design Fiction guy.” Nobody reads all of it; my blog is like a cigar-box full of pinned, still-living bugs. If they find something hip they haven’t heard about, then they click on that and vanish. Sometimes they link back to it.
If I stopped performing that blog, everything in it would swiftly linkrot and die. Nobody’s gonna read that blog in 20 years, although I wrote books 20 years ago that are still read.