Social Networking Revolution and We Writers

The Show must Go On

Social Networking Revolution and We Writers Arunabha Sengupta Arunabha Sengupta is the co-editor of Scroll  and the author of three novels, the latest being The Best Seller

Malcolm Gladwell writes impeccably on topics that lie in the fuzzy intersection of popular
science and social phenomenon.  He deals with ideas and opinions with an admirable mix of depth and anecdotes which enable books such as Tipping Point, Blink and Outliers to retain their popular appeal without being stripped of scientific reasoning. In his column for The New Yorker, he writes with the same élan, where, in one of his recent articles he questions how much the Social Media really has the power to affect a revolution.  

Clay Shirky is a charismatic academic who specialises on and teaches New Media at the New York University. In his book Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age, the ideas he projects about the social media phenomenon are radically different from the popular association of the same with brand new paradigm shift. In a recent column for the
austerely utilitarian Foreign Affairs, he provides a lucid and dispassionate analysis of the positives and the limitations of the political power of social media. 

It was the difference in the points of view that developed into a showdown between the two accepted thinkers of the day, ending in a much publicised and rather outspoken debate.

Gladwell stuck to his idea of slacktivism that suggest that armchair clicks satisfying the infinitesimal political consciousness of FaceBook activists achieve little more than a few likes and a puffed ego through their weak ties. He did not pull his punches when he accused
Shirky of overselling the potential of wiki-activism as a tool for social transformation.

Shirky, in his turn, did not really turn the other cheek. He called Gladwell’s article weird, pointing out that the New Yorker columnist was not a very avid Internet user, and was probably trying to propagate his employer’s agenda of protecting the old school business model.

 While, in the aftermath of all that has gone on in the recent past, this debate is a focal point of our interest, we will nevertheless strictly adhere to the old wisdom so poignantly put forth in rhyme by John Gay.

“Those who in quarrels interpose

Must often wipe a bloody nose”

 We won’t be taking sides other than observing that it is a case of polarisation between social mediaists and traditionalists, that probably works wonders for the sales of both the periodicals and the books of the protagonists.

 A few days back, in his blog documenting a discussion between three columnists of Scroll, the analyst of the effect of internet on modern world view, Dr. Suprakash Roy, tried to objectively judge both sides of the argument. Political analyst Shruti Rattan passionately spoke about the role of Twitter and FaceBook in current political history, from the fall of the Philippines president Joseph Estrada to the recent toppling of Hosni Mubarak. Our in house cynic, Simon van der Wiel, however pointed out Belarus 2006, Iran 2009, the Green Movement and Red Shirt protests as limitations of the political power of Social Media. 

What our in-house science writer concluded was much in agreement with both Malcolm Gladwell and Clay Shirky. Social media is indeed an invaluable asset in the hands of activists as free and scalable means of organising people and spreading the word, most often through unchecked and non-confrontational channels.  The uneven playing fields that generally make reactionaries stumble when despots try to beat them down is levelled out to an extent with FaceBook, Twitter, text messages and the numerous other methods of instant communication helping the activists circumvent the problems posed by the difference in resources and infrastructure.

However, at the same time, our expert agrees that this organisational capability is useful only if there is an already existing strong and systematic movement. If all that the protests in Egypt amounted to were those millions of forwarded posts on FaceBook reading ‘Walk like an Egyptian’ complete with smileys, the nation would still have been dancing to the tunes of the despot.

 It was an existing rebellion smouldering for over two decades, combined with chance factors like the passing away of the grandson Mubarak doted on and information overload leading to hasty announcements on the part of CIA that made the power of FaceBook activism decisive.

 While we stick to our promise of not taking sides as long as we are discussing the political power of social media, we do have a thing or two to say about another observation by Gladwell. 

Whether in the heat of the confrontation with a formidable peer and rival, or whether because of his own deep seated beliefs, he proffers his opinion that Internet has not changed business
in any remarkable way. He describes his trip to Lands’ End, Wisconsin, a decade earlier to determine the effect of the dot com revolution on retail. His inference at the end of the journey was that though Internet was a step up from paper catalogue and phone orders, the technological changes that really mattered for the retailers were bar codes and overnight delivery. 

Here, in spite of our obvious respect for Gladwell’s intelligence and writing ability, we find him making the same mistake as the dwellers of the old world, uninitiated into the modern day
computing, who are unable to distinguish between a desk top computer and an upgraded typewriter. 

Technological upheavals – and we cannot deny that Internet is by millions of miles the mega marvel in that regard – change lives and businesses in ways that cannot be determined with
pin-pointed focus on the operations of one enterprise. Internal practices do not always change dramatically, but the arena generally changes beyond recognition.

Airlines keep selling tickets and carrying people from one place to another on their Boeings and Jets. If one questions with sarcasm whether people can go from city to city by boarding
aircrafts through proxy servers, the answer is a definite no. But, the business has been transformed in humongous ways. The websites of the Airline companies have rendered the profession of Travel Agents a crippling blow from which they are still struggling to recover. The passengers now book tickets, choose their seats, print boarding passes and check in themselves and their luggage sitting in their homes after studying the weather for possible flight disruptions. The landscape of service has therefore undergone a paradigm shift. Pricing has gone through unbelievable modifications, and the parameters for customer satisfaction
have evolved exponentially. The travel agents such as Expedia and Orbitz have moved
online and packaged air tickets, hotels and car rental under one super saving bracket.

If we look at historical effect of major technological shifts we find similar cataclysmic changes.

The steam engine did not just enable
people to move from one place to another faster. It cut through the business
landscape and revamped the means of livelihood of people in unforeseen ways. The
refrigerated railcar, invented by Chicago meatpacker Gustavus Swift, revolutionised
a painstakingly slow, inefficient meat processing business involving prairie cattle and cowboys into a prompt, productive and profitable operation, thereby altering the trend, taste, trade and tools of a generation. By slaughtering and dressing beef in his slaughterhouses and then sending them as vertical
carcasses packed in his new invention, he reduced shipping costs, took care of the problem of cattle demise and weight loss during transportation, and ensured freight for only those parts of the product which had value in the market. Local butchers, unable to compete with their ancient slaughter-dress-pack methods, had to change their trade into that of cutting Swift’s carcasses into steaks and roasts.

Internet has similarly metamorphosed the way industries interconnect to do business. Retailers may ostensibly only add internet as a channel for accepting orders additional to phone, post and physical interactions over the counter, but the real difference lies elsewhere.
Clothing firms now have to compete with Zappos and bookstores with Amazon.com. The
rules of the game have changed beyond recognition, and the insurgents get to play more and more to their strengths and win against the incumbents. Underdog Davids can now take on the might of established Goliaths, as Gladwell himself mentioned in one of his articles for The New Yorker in 2009. 

The success of the revolutionaries using social media and the makeover of businesses are both welcome news to writers.

As mentioned earlier, if activism has smouldered for long, social media plays an important role in coordinating the efforts and raising a rebellion to topple the despot. From the days of The Lost Illusions of Honore de Balzac, the nexus of publishers and agents have compromised human minds by keeping many great offerings of literature away from the shelves while promoting recurring print runs of works that can be generously described as mediocre. The talented authors without the blessing of recommendations of the established have had to deal with the frustrations and futility of unread submissions and unopened manuscripts, along with super efficient uses of Self Addressed Stamped Envelopes.

And now suddenly, an industry that demanded solicitations and double spaced typed submissions and ran on the relationships with distributors and bookshops, finds itself on the level playing grounds of Amazon.com and more importantly, the mass-less, freight less
instant delivery methods of eBooks. The monumental change that this brings in to the industry is yet to be realised.

In July 2010, Amazon disclosed that Kindle e-books were outselling hardcopies from their website. Even as traditional publishers and bookshops went into denial, several second hand
booksellers  around Europe informed me that it was probably their last year of profitable business. 

Honestly, it is very recently that I have woken up to the power of eReaders myself. Disillusioned by traditional publishers and their diabolical disinclination to respond to queries and even further aversion towards making royalty payments, I had hooked up with Amazon.com for my new novel The Best Seller.

Foreword Clarion Reviews gave it a 5 star rating, recommending it in superlative terms, but as an independent author without the benediction of a large publisher, I did not pin too much
hope in it. My frustrations with the publishing industry need not be repeated here. All of it is documented in detail in the saga of the hero of the book, who goes through the steps of query letters, synopses, sample chapters and SASE over and over again till he finds his way out.  It was only as an afterthought that I made my book available on Kindle and started promoting it within moderation through blogs, twitter and Facebook.

The first indication of something extraordinary going on struck me when I found that the decent, but unspectacular, sales of the book had somehow pitch-forked it into several of

Amazon’s best seller categories. It was only after that I looked into my Kindle account to find the electronic version of the book outselling the paperback three to one, hence working wonders for the sales figures. 

No warehouses, no printing costs, no middle men in the form of agents and distributors, aided by a collaborative circle of struggling authors organising their mutual promotion on FaceBook,
Twitter, Blogs, Texts and others. The time is ripe for the unholy nexus of publishers, distributors, agents and affiliated review pages of the columns to be taken head on.  

It was quite some time before people came to terms the power of electricity, for long viewed as a semi magical force to revive the dead and little more. Alexander Graham Bell was

indulgently asked who would want to use an apparatus to speak to another person at a distance. G.H. Hardy apologised for his work on big primes stating that it would never have any practical use. Sometimes it takes a while before the extent of radical usefulness of the greatest of inventions becomes apparent. 

The political topplings in Tunisia and Egypt, and now the protests in Iraq, Lybia and elsewhere lead me to wonder whether the hidden might of the Internet in overthrowing totalitarian authority is just being unearthed.  It goes hand in hand in moving from a
closed to an open society that comes with the exchange of communication. 

And if that is the case, the ivory towers of traditional publishing are definitely under threat.

Pages covered by eReaders

Science or Fiction?

Pages covered by eReaders 

Chris Henderson

Wrapped in blanket, the secure tactile touch of cloth and paper of a  hardbound volume caressing  your hands, fingers flicking the page as the eyes rushes over the last few lines, the comforting sound of the sheet whipping across the silent air as a leaf is turned. The last few minutes of the day when the eyelids droop even as you fight sleep to read just a few more words – then the thud of the book landing on the ground wakes you up with a start, the dreams enmeshed with the tale you were reading try to disentangle as you raise your hand to turn off the bedside lamp.

The romance of reading continues on the settee, in the train, leafing through the volumes in the homely or the big chain bookstores, the smell of the freshly unpacked pages, the allure of the printed black on fine grained white.

Die hard bookworms look askance at the modern and marauding mediums. Reading soft copies online, scrolling down instead of turning pages, feeling cold shiny metal instead of the fine textured paper as one navigates across screens on eReaders and, worse still, on the nex-gen phones –each act of modern day readership tantamount to sacrilege.  The decay and modernisation of our sacred passion, the symbol of the fickle, flitting minds more concerned with gizmo than crystallised thought spread out on paper.

If we try to work off our disgust at the prevailing winds of change, attempt to cleanse our souls with a stroll to revel in the comfort amidst sanctity of paperbacks in the McNally Jackson bookstore of Manhattan, we may discover two authors at a standard book reading session. To our horror,   one of them may happen to be reading his short fiction off an iPad. Indeed Jim Hanas did just that some days back, prompting Brian Joseph Davis to tweet, "First fiction reading off an iPad ever?" Davis, by the way, is the managing editor of Joyland Fiction, a site that publishes short fiction. One of his staunch beliefs is that short fiction is native to the internet.

So, it is not only the readers who are migrating across the rapidly changing seasonal time-scape to embrace new reading formats –and thereby material – on offer away from the time tested monopoly of the printed press. So are many writers.

While the past decade has tempered the culture shock and oxymoronic implications initially associated with eReading, and has accelerated the activity through the internet, kindle, iPad, Sony eReader and hundreds of other gizmos, an e-book is still considered a "deprecated version" of a print volume.

Well, centuries back, water colours may have had hinted at the decay of aesthetics to the primordial artist who etched bisons on the cave wall. Mandelbrot inspired fractal art may still seem atrophy of the finer senses to the ones who swear by the Impressionists. Steinbeck may have taken an interested look at word processors before resuming his writing in trusted long hand. But, times change. With our preoccupation with books in the published form, we sometimes forget that the printed press is a relatively recent development in the chequered history of telling tales. The medium has always changed. Probably it is time.

The truth is that the place of writing in the electronic medium is not just limited to short fiction.  Digital formats are being embraced by many writers, who weren't getting paid much for their printed work anyhow. Hanas says, if you give a writer a choice between $10,000 and 10,000 readers, the writer will always choose the latter.

With more people trapped in the web than ever, especially in these days of social networking, the chances of finding 10,000 online readers look more promising than ever. On the other hand, winning the battle for shelf space with the emerging literary sensations – in the form of super models, WWF wrestlers, linguistically challenged MBAs with a flair for connections, society pin up girls, wives of industrialists, political activists, ex Tory politicians and so on – and making $10000 from writing akin to a game of remorselessly rigged Russian roulette. Hanas has been published in several respected journals and admits he has been paid a total of $250 in 10 years for this body of work. To paraphrase Nicholas Taleb, when we look at some new Nobel prize winning sensation,  we tend to forget that most of the more talented authors are still making ends meet serving coffee in Starbucks.

Publishing still remains a tiny industry perched atop a massive hobby. It's still a hobby today because people at the top of the publishing industry are obsessed with controlling access to the passionate pastime. And judging by the enormous amount of inane semi-formed crap that seem to drip from the popular shelves today, the controllers are not really doing a good job at ensuring quality. After all, a craft that is a passion for a major proportion of humanity surely produces enough excellent material to keep unreadable tripe away from bookstores. Sadly, the prevalent system for zeroing in on great writing is like trying to hit an unknown target in blindfolds.

The major activity of a writer today, more often than not, boils down to the task of getting through the intricate, often impenetrable, maze of agents, publishers, booksellers, distributors, stores, royalties, reviewers and the rest. If their wares reach the limited space on the shelves, the remainder of their famous lives are spent in appearing on political debates, reality shows,  controversies, judging talent contestants - various vehicles for their books to ride the few feet into  the best seller area - till the fickle flicker of fame extinguishes and they fade into the immense expanse of oblivion under the superficial surface of instant popularity.

Through all these dynamics, the trash that often nestles in the best seller sections, sometimes arranged in various three dimensional shapes more suited for confectionery, perhaps to ensure sales similar to hot cakes, makes one wonders how many of the talents are forever caught in the claustrophobic chaos that is the labyrinth of middlemen. There are a lot of writers who are fast waking up to realise that life is too short to turn out Self Addressed Stamped Envelopes and synopses by the bulk, that will be respectively posted promptly and returned unread by the semi literate drones of an industry that thrive on recommendation and networks. In any decent educational institution, any solicitation merits a cancellation of candidature. But, in publishing, unsolicited manuscripts are openly discouraged, are returned unopened, unread or are relegated to the lower layers of the proverbial slushpile. This has gone on far too long for the thousands with the writing itch to sit back and keep playing into the hands of a defunct system that produces unreadable books sometimes topping best seller charts and winning acclaimed awards.

Steven Arnold auctioned all his books and shelves of his vast library at his house off the 17^th Street, Whitestone Road, Clermont, Ohio.^. People there conversed in hushed tones that Mr. Arnold had actually bought an eReader.

Right now, one requires masterly skills to solve one’s way through the complex equations of connectivity posed by elusive agents, domineering publishers, politically correct drivel, New York Times Bestsellers and all the other layers up to Oprah Winfrey , but those are not really proficiency correlated to producing great literature. So if one is talking about a new business model for publishing the written word, from the perspective of many writers, it would be welcome. Authors are embracing the opportunity to be read by the crowd migrating to the internet, to communicate with the readers directly, away from the smug isolation of ivory towers, to do away with the middlemen who, in several real life experiments, have refused to publish works of noble prize and booker winners when submitted under pseudonyms.

Getting published by Print On Demand companies or electronic magazines  and even having one’s own popular blog ensure much more. Through Amazon and other online retailers, devices such as Kindle and other eReaders, search engines catering to their keywords, the writing can be instantly available over the networks to virtually the entire world, to anyone with an internet connection or a cell phone. They are not limited to the select few stores that carry a few copies and run out of stock when two get sold in a month. There is no such thing as the terrifying fate that awaits most authors after their first exciting advance – that of being pulped and going out of print. The books are available for print or electronic delivery on demand, ensuring that they are accessible from anywhere in the world anytime one wants one. None of the local bestsellers in countries other than where Amazon has set up its corporate base can actually boast such absolute availability.

POD companies are service providers who take a chunk of the sales profits. The transactions with most of them are transparent and timely. Hence, one need not politely clear one’s throat and painstakingly remind the publisher, monoliths and insignificant alike, that it is three months since they were supposed to send the royalty check.

And then there is the small thing of exercising the literary freedom of not building sizeable novels around the rambling of spastic kids or the excellence of the US policy in Afghanistan to ensure adequate representation.

During a discussion on eBooks, Richard Nash, editorial director of Soft Skull Press from 2001 to 2007, heralded the e-book for its potential to "end the endless shitification of the book." He said Soft Skull's first books were printed on 55-pound paper. By 2004, they were printed on 50-pound ones. And in 2009, they were printed on 45-pound counterparts, which turned yellow within weeks if exposed to excessive sunlight. Across the book world today, leather bound volumes disappear and pages are more often gummed together rather than bound.

"You cannot tell me that that is better than a pdf," Nash remarks. Digital formats free books from the burden of being a mass-market product, he points out, and restores them to a pre-industrial state, that of a "tribal fetish."

eReaders on the other hand getting cheaper by the day, becoming more user friendly, enhancing themselves to replicate the touch and even the sound of a turning page. Just as the authors who started out writing with an elegant fountain pen in the nineties discovered that laptops and word processors do not necessarily compromise creativity, the readers who swore by the pleasures of thumbing through a paperback are finding their modernisation Kindled by a sparkling set of positives. Looking up the previous occurrence of Semyon Zaharovitch Marmeladov in a 500 page novel may be a tedious task of flipping through pages, but a simple find function does wonders. And while carrying the four volumes of Quite Flows The Don or the entire Remembrance of Things Past on a holiday can be quite a handful, an eReader can take your entire library and manage to look sleek. Add the features of looking up words, names, terms and so on without having to take a couple of flights of stairs and reaching for the Encyclopedia. This is a generation who loves to get newspapers to weather to music on one single device which can also be used to talk to friends and family on the other side of the world. Figure it for yourself.

Publishers do cling on to the hope that unlike digital music or video, eReaders demand that the consumers change their consumption habit. However, the new generation is used to the computer and other screens, and absorb faster from flexible information of electronic format than the constancy of text. Books have changed little in the past half a millennium or so. The time is ripe for an upheaval. 

Finally there is the relentless lure of the consumer. The Amazon is unique in its appeal because, unless and until one looks for the rarest of rare, it is always available. Brick and mortar stores are limited by space in an age where the three dimensions have become unlimited by being cramped into electronic screens. Demand for unlimited stock is inevitable. As I predict in The Best Seller, in a not too distant future, bookshops will switch to the hybrid mode where electronic searchable stocks will be lined with the paperbacks and hardbounds, with the facility to print, bind and package on demand and within seconds whatever the customer finds interesting. Similar set ups are already available for Newspapers in stalls in big cities.

POD stand for Newspapers
in Press and Book Store, Zurich Hauptbahnhof

The world has to bow to the demands. Libraries are already lending out books on eReaders - and this carries the added in-built insurance against dog ears, loss, damage, overdue and missing pages.

Publishing houses today do far too little to connect writers with readers, something that digital formats can enable. They take too many liberties with the authors, something that the digital format can correct. They sit smug and satisfied in their ivory towers, something that the tentacles of the fibre optic cables are fast encroaching and circumventing.

There are lots of interesting and useful changes that are being brought about by technology. During an era when a book is a corporate produced marketable unit product, the trend of serialisation has been considered passé. However, with digital formats,  the endearing episodes, with to be continued at the bottom trailed by a promising ellipsis, is making a comeback. A striking example is a firm called DailyLit that divides e-books into small chunks for drip-feeding by e-mail. Harlequin, a Canadian publisher of romantic fiction, sells short-fiction e-books for reading on PCs or other devices to be consumed with quick sandwiches during the lunch hour.

Changes take place. The cart drops a t to make way for the car, the telegram is beaten at the wire by the email. The costs of printing and shipping paper and cardboard are rising. POD is now cheaper than standard printing for runs of fewer than 1,200 copies, and the threshold is rising quickly. If consumers become more price-sensitive, as they inevitably will, e-books will become more appealing. Publishing is sure to be hit like the music industry has been. And as a curious poetic justice, even the environment will benefit with less books being sold in the printed format, less space being hogged for storage of countless volumes.

And, in the modern world of spoiled net browsing readers, the features of embedding pictures, movies and sound clips into the electronic copy of the book open up new horizons which will surely be explored.

Ultimately the book world consists of two indispensible stakeholders – the authors and the readers. Any technology which reduces the gap will be welcomed by both, but will prove a menace to the entities that currently exist and feed on the distance between the two.

Chris Henderson is a fictitious character who appears in Arunabha Sengupta's The Best Seller.  He is an aspiring author and lives in Pasadena, California