Is LeVar Burton gonna have to choke a bitch?
"Every renaissance comes to the world with a cry, the cry of the human spirit to be free."
Good point, Anne. chak has also noticed that at first, more often than not, that cry is simultaneously misinterpreted and disregarded by those who fall within its radius of influence. Perhaps the best example of this phenomenon in modern history is the birth of Jazz which coincided with the birth of both the 20th Century and Louis Daniel Armstrong. While many today acknowledge Pops' place as the bestest to ever do the damn thing, his early steps towards greatness (much like those of his chosen art form and the century he lived through) went largely unheralded. True luminaries don't just get ignored though, they usually receive a face full of derision and ridicule for their troubles... and they wouldn't have it any other way.
Many American 'musical scholars' of the late 19th/early20th centuries busied themselves searching for the 'next big thing' in music, or more specifically... the next Mozart, Bach or Beethoven. They reasoned that the arrival of these sorts of musical giants - the kind of characters who literally change the way people think about musical expression, could be measured cyclically with some regularity. Comparable to the ongoing search for the next Dalai Lama or American Idol, these aging, grey bearded fellows locked away in their Fortissimo Of Solitude weren't totally off the mark. In fact they were onto something pretty solid. They were just looking in the wrong place. As they futzed about, sorting through the emerging classical composers of Europe and portending the death of 'cultured' music, Satchmo cooled his heels at establishments like Pete Lala's and the Funky Butt where he was most likely first introduced to musical giants of the day like Joe "King" Oliver. In every way possible, Louis Armstrong was invisible to these so-called scholars which is part of what allowed him to develop and express the gift he was bestowed with in such a way that he transformed the global musical landscape forever. As our neighbor Ray-Ray so wisely said after a long day in an exterminator's jump suit, through a mouthful of Funyons... "Mang I'm tellin' ya chayk... some bastards you JUS' CAIN'T KILL" Ray-Ray is money with that shit too, so we tend to pretty much pick up whatever he's puttin' down.
Look around today and ask yourself.. who are the current 'scholars' looking for the 'next big thing.' Who is proclaiming the 'death' of various things/ideas/people. Who are the antiquated has-beens trying desperately to kick over the right rock before someone else does, merely to say they were the owner of the shoe that made first contact? What are they missing? Does it even matter? When was the last time you heard someone mention Bix Beiderbecke? Exactly. How about Pointcast or Flooz? Exactlier.
It is within this generalized and malleable milieu that we find ourselves contemplating the ever evolving relationship between human beings and the word. So much emphasis is placed on media like music, film and/or games in our digitally deliverable era that sometimes it's easy to forget... none of these other forms of entertainment would be possible without the mighty word. So perhaps it's a little strange that it took as long as it did to get to where we are now. Perhaps not. Regardless, it seems to chak that the 'next big thing' those wizened veterans of the information age are completely missing is, once again, right in front of their truculent, myopic faces.
Ever since TheProject.html pissed up an FTP rope, the word has been free. It just took us silly sheeples a couple of decades to wake up to that fact completely. Before 1990 or so, words mostly existed in a controlled form... inside a book, magazine, newspaper or software program you paid for and owned physically. You could also see them on places like signs, bumper stickers, t-shirts, 7-11 superhero-themed Slurpee cups and the like. But the word wasn't YOURS to do with as you pleased unless you were a bohemian scribe jotting haiku onto coffee shop napkins and leaving them behind for others to enjoy. (Please stop doing that, by the way... it's really annoying.) Indeed, even the working writer was confined to the physical space, which really wasn't so bad. Things were simpler then. Times were easier on the brain in many ways because if you regurgitated a few inches for your local bird-cage lining supplier, that's where the words you wrote stayed. These days, those same inches are ctrl-c/ctrl-v'd all the way around the globe and back again in the time it takes to ask 'Can you email it to me?' Those who write and publish words no longer control them or even have the most influence over them. This is the era of The Reader and more broadly, The Consumer. Those who consume the content control it, which is a complete reversal of how things have been done since... well... forever.
This turvey to the status-quo's topsy will take another couple of decades to sort out at least, but the upshot for the consumers of content and specifically written words is that the content now bends to their will effortlessly. Copyrights and walled gardens be damned. Damned we say! Don't like it? Tough. It's the same as not liking earthquakes or oxygen. Remember Ray-Ray's maxim. Shit's done changed and like any change there are both positive and negative takeaways, depending on your perspective. Maybe THE biggest positive wave inside this sea change is the rekindled love affair between human brains and the written word. And as with any other online love connection, it tends to spill over into the 'real' world. Much like consumers of ostensibly 'pirated' material are quickly being recognized as ALSO being great consumers of physical media, those who enjoy plowing through the binary breakers of words available online tend to be voracious readers IRL as well. That means that traditional book sales of all literary flavors are booming.
Sure you can point to the explosion in the YA fiction space but that's just one piece of the puzzle. chak has never even picked up a Harry Potter book but we give full credit to not only authors like Ms. Rowling but also the publishers, marketing departments and distributors who helped to make her breakout series (and others) such a wild success. But think a little deeper... when did the first Potter book hit the shelves? 1997. What other worldwide phenomenon hit its stride and roared into the zeitgeist like Lion Force Voltron that year? The intertubes, kid. Bloomsbury, Rowling's publisher in the U.K. didn't even have a website until `98. But personal web spaces like Geocities, Tripod and Angelfire were already booming. Hundreds of thousands of these transformed into a virtual promotion engine for this (already) ferociously popular character/series. It was one of the first examples of a fan base coalescing online and utilizing the energy of enthusiasm for a product as a commodity amongst themselves, rather than taking it piecemeal from an approved source, one message at a time. It was, in a word, electrifying. Even those who weren't on board the train felt the rumble as it hurtled through the public consciousness like a coal fired bat out of Mordor. Suddenly people of ALL ages were proudly tucking books into the crook of their arms as they went about their day, to let others know they were fans. This particular printed volume had become something akin to a status symbol. To be fair, many derided this series as nothing more than a poorly written rehash of "tired cliches and dead metaphors." That sort of petty sniping, of course, completely misses the point. These books were not literary triumphs by any stretch of the imagination but so what? With the benefit of hindsight, Rowling can (literally) afford to laugh off criticism, literary or not, as... well... hogwash. Much like Mr. Armstrong, she flourished in the face of being judged prematurely by those who either didn't understand her talent or simply wished she would go away. As most reading these words are already aware, the film adaptations will be with us well into 2011 and probably beyond. Never ones to miss an opportunity to milk a cash cow dry, the mainstream film industry is still riding that train that pulled out of the station more than a decade ago. The franchise has created thousands upon thousands of new incomes and has been a financial boon for hundreds of thousands more. All of this stems directly from the fans of one writer who realized that suddenly THEY controlled the word and could do with it as they pleased. Collectively, much like their heroes between the pages, they linked arms and marched forth against the forces of chaos and entropy with their freshly minted power supporting and guiding them. Reading, and by extension, the word... would never be the same.
Much less attention was given at the time, to the more nefarious practices made possible by this same revolution of consumption. That's mostly because the twin dervishes of the digital era - bandwidth and processor speed - had yet to really bulk up to their current formidability. However, the seed had been sown and while Potter Moms busily registered new Evite accounts to organize wizard themed parties for their precocious, wand-waving enfant terribles - others (mostly on Usenet and IRC) were mulling the possibilities of how books could be consumed ONLINE and preferably for free. They worked quietly, amongst themselves, the polar opposite of the public facing fan communities attached to one particular ad campaign or another. They had also realized, fully, that they now controlled the word and had begun planning a jailbreak the likes of which probably sent Henry Houghton spinning in his modestly marked grave. The fans had done their job. They backed their M4 Sherman tank through the outer wall of Stalag Luft III while this new, nefarious bunch used that breach of security to slip in and affix TNT to the already weak foundation. The shrapnel from that baby-go-boom is still hitting unsuspecting individuals in the face daily and not just in the publishing world. The FREE word is still causing all KINDS of consternation and the bitching ain't gonna end any time soon.
Consider Reading Rainbow. Outside of the R.I.F. program, which chak is old enough to remember, Reading Rainbow is by far the oldest and most successful nationally recognizable push to advocate reading among school age kids and young adults. Or at least.. it was. R.R. was just canceled due to a lack of funding as well as a noticeable shift in public policy towards educational programming focused on reading. R.R. was all about getting kids excited to read and driving home the aspect of limitless adventure and wonder while one is absorbed in a good book. That's why we loved it so much. Plus the theme song rocks and LeVar Burton is the freakin' MAN. Seriously... the main reason this show stayed around for so long was a combination of its knowing simplicity and the ebullient appeal of Mr. Burton. He wasn't afraid to get down on the level of the kids he was speaking to but it also never seemed too trite or forced. So, while we're sad to see the butterfly flitting up into the sky a final time... we have to ask ourselves, is there another unreferred to reason that the Rainbow melted away? Who turned off the sprinkler? Frankly, we blame Skittles, but then again we tend to blame them for everything. We can spot pieces of Stalag Luft shrapnel in LeVar's heart. They took a while to work themselves in there good, but it finally happened. Again is this a good or a bad thing? We reject the characterization out of hand and merely see it as being an inevitable consequence of the word sidling up to its newfound masters. Perhaps Reading Rainbow reached the goal it set out to accomplish. More people and especially young adults are reading more than ever before. Any way you slice it, R.R. had a good run and we'll have it in syndication for decades. Also, LeVar... you're welcome to kick it with us and Ray-Ray any time you want. We've got a whole bag of Funyons we haven't even opened yet. Better b.y.o.b. though. Ray-Ray freaks out if you drink his beer.
So what's the X factor driving this decided uptick in the popularity of the written word? Why did it take so long for the little bastards to make if from the work camps to the open pastures of interwebz freedom? It didn't really. It just took us a while to notice them building up around us. Like a motley band of settlers cascading across the continental divide looking for gold and new opportunities in an unspoiled wilderness paradise, words found their new environment to be particularly inhospitable and therefore set about founding their own settlements, simultaneously making friends and starting wars with the natives, and generally speaking - just fucking shit up. We don't even mean that in a pejorative sense. Society and mankind NEED to have their shit fucked up every so often to inspire growth and to promote maturation of the species as a whole.
For a super example of how the free word is still messing with peoples' heads, please see the current and typically useless debate over "RSS vs. microblogging." The most noticeable sign that the people having the debate haven't quite wrapped their brains around the true implications would be the insistence on framing the debate as "RSS vs.microblogging service X" where X = whatever the most popular service at the moment happens to be. Another curious aspect of the word being free manifests itself in the mad rush to spew out AS MANY words as possible on an hourly basis. Not only are professional and amateur bloggers often forced to file before they even have a chance to consider the basic efficacy of what they've just written.... millions of microbloggers fart out every thought that crosses their keyboards with zero reflection given to the content of those thoughts. Sure there are exceptions but they are few and far between. For every Hot Five or Hot Seven there are a billion cold fish flopping around on the deck, gasping for artistic oxygen they simply can't master. But from that mass of scaly, wall eyed word junkies a certain kind of inevitable force of nature emerges. Every time the net gets dragged across the ocean floor, more of the frisky buggers come flooding in. By their sheer force alone they prove that the word is free and in the hands of those who will do with it as they please, when and where they choose to do it. That reminds us, we need to take Ray-Ray fishing soon. Something tells us he's a natural.
We digress but let's really beat this fish analogy to death before we fillet it and fry it up. Arguing about RSS being 'better' than microblogging (or vice-versa) is like a swordfish arguing with a sardine about what kind of wine they would prefer to be served with. Really it's a matter of taste. One need not make a choice at all. It's just that certain people have a strong affinity for a good rosé and others will opt for a chardonnay. You're perfectly free to drink whatever you want, or not, and you most likely WILL depending on what day it is, what kind of mood you're in and what is currently available to you. The balance of the ocean ecosystem ensures that a healthy swordfish community will in turn translate into a richer environment for sardines to develop in. The grapes that go into a rose' don't exist in a pink-tinged vacuum. They would not be as well suited for their end product if there were not a plethora of grape varieties cultivated lovingly across the globe. So it is with the free word online today. Without the ubiquitous nature of RSS, would microblogging ever have blown up so big? Without microblogging going off the chizain, would RSS have lasted as long as it has? Both questions are certainly valid, yet ultimately extraneous because we can see that there is an obvious interdependence of the two. Each makes the other stronger, better and a more viable options going forward. We're not the first to point this out, but it bears repeating as so many of those involved in the public discourse seem to be enamored of the notion that they must pick one horse in the race and ride it to the end, to the detriment of all others crammed into the starting blocks. The control of digitized content, specifically the word, is not a zero sum game. A microblog entry does not pull 140 words out of the RSS-sphere. It ADDS them to the entire ocean of words that both formats utilize so well.
In the same way Louis set the note free inside the beat, the digital revolution has allowed a RenaSSaince of reading to occur over the past decade or so. At first it was mostly visible via the explosion of popular YA lit books which inspired people of all ages to think of reading as cool again. Now we can feel its tendrils of influence reaching into the way we live our lives minute to minute, connected to one another in a virtual sense.. by none other than the free & mighty word. Whether it's a novel, a blog post (micro OR macro), an RSS feed, a FriendFeed, an email or an online version of a newspaper article, humans are not just READING more than ever before, we're fetishizing the written word like it's going out of style and nothing could be finer. If RSS AND microblogging both winked out of existence tomorrow it wouldn't matter a bit. The old prison walls that used to hold the word in are long since demolished by the freedom fighters who seized the moment so many online moons ago, ensuring that we would all benefit at some point. The same goes for other mediums of course. The corpses of Napster and The Pirate Bay are nutrients to the soil of innovation. Their days of glory and eventual waning of influence were essential to move the marker forward. Long before media outlets, both on and offline, think to proclaim the 'death' of any given service or site, many new and improved options have sunk their roots deep into the true soil of the web. The cycle doesn't slow down, it only speeds up. This means that the more you see/hear a megabrand mentioned by those speaking for massive media conglomerates and/or the rareified circle of online taste-makers, the closer it is to becoming irrelevant. There are very occasional exceptions to this rule but in each case, the community in question has taken some sort of drastic measure of protection against this or has enjoyed the benefit of a loophole or fluke that was lost or not available to others. After all... WWTDD?
Lastly it's important to point out that the corporate entities who once controlled the word with an iron grip were among the first to figure all this out. Nothing we just typed is a new thought and we're quite aware of it. The most obvious way of dealing with this conundrum for these behemoths of the business sector was and is to pick their poison. The wave is gonna keep crashing on the shore of commerce no matter how tall you build the dike. Better find a good wave to ride the sucker in on and minimize the damage as much as possible. The latest tsunami in this world has been the Google Books initiative which has taken many by complete surprise, like a rogue wave screaming out of a perfect e-book storm towards the Amazon coastline. Trust chak.... before it's all over, bricked e-readers will be shat. If you listen closely, you can hear the plopping from here. Much like the aforementioned squabbles though, try to resist taking a side and just enjoy the fight. No matter who wins, we all win. We're no longer subject to an oligarchy who controls words for us and doles them out sparingly for a premium price. WE control the word now and nobody can change that. The line between writer and reader is permanently blurred. That's a boon to both, albeit a potentially scary one for some. And so the line between consumer and provider is irrevocably scattered to the winds as well.
Breathe in the sweet ocean air, baby.... sip your chardonnay... turn up the music and think to yourself... what a wonderful world. What a wonderful WORD. It's all yours now. Yes I'm talking to you. Take good care of it. After all, it's one of the most precious gifts you've ever received whether you use it or not.
