Topic: Peer Pressure—The Pontification of Fellow Travellers

August 2009

Amanda Palmer wants human connection

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Typically I reserve this space for proper-ish essays. And my tumblr for quotes too long for Twitter. But I just have to quote this, an email from Amanda Palmer to Bob Lefsetz. Almost needless to say, what Amanda says for music, I believe to be true for writing also.

Amanda Palmer:

the new art of twitter and blogging and realtime connection with hundreds and thousands of people means that the very role and meaning of the rock star is changing.

watch it happen.

i started making the music in the first place not because i wanted music, but because i wanted human connection.
music was the bridge there.

(it took me a long time to admit this to myself, because i felt guilty and like a naughty/bad/inauthentic artist when i truly discovered this, in my mid-twenties, classic crisis time).

BUT this is, hands fucking down, also why people listen, why they search, why they want art.

connection = primary.
music/art = secondary.

yes, you need a filter (like you’re often saying) to FIND the music you love and connect to (and that filter has evolved and will continue to evolve….radio-vinyl-MTV-blogs and on and on)
BUT
the music ITSELF is a filter to connect to another human expressing mind/heart that blows your skirt up and makes you feel alive, not alone, etc etc what have you.

so in a weird way, music may take the backseat and act as a filter to those you follow on twitter….not the other way around.
fucked up, but maybe not.

it’s a symbiosis. one will need the other, but don’t discount the realtime human connection as only a tool.
it is and it’s not.
for many people, it’s the thing that they NEED and WANT, the holy grail of Not Feeling Alone in a world where that used to be JUST A FANTASY as you lay in bed with your headphones on, imagining a connection with the artist and the other people who might be out there in beds just like yours, imagining the same thing.

the music simply provides the necessary room in which the miraculous happens and all these bed-worlds collide in cyberspace.

there is a reason that i often find myself wanting to sit behind twitter and connect instead of sitting at the piano and writing.
there is a reason that the fans on there would often rather be connecting than lying in bed with their headphones on.

we do both. we need both.

twitter = realtime connection.
at the very end of the day, humans crave realtime connection.

that is Why It Works.

twitter.com/amandapalmer
amandapalmer.net

Richard Eoin Nash, Aug 18, 2009

July 2009

Eoin responds to Richard Eoin who reciprocates, gratefully…

So the excellent Irish publisher Eoin Purcell reviews my Publishing Perspectives editorial and provides a nice exegesis.

He is concerned about a few dimensions of it, and I thought it would make sense to respond to this, as I think that the problems he perceives lie in my poor expression of the ideas, rather than the not-poor ideas themselves.

HIs chiefest concern has to do with what he’s coined “Publishing as a Service (PaS)”—“the idea that if publishers want to survive they should adapt to become facilitators of the people who are creating and consuming content.” He contrasts this notion with one recently elaborated by Mike Shatzkin who believes “the focus should be on curating those niches and in re-engineering a publishing portfolio around a vertical segment.” He advocates that a new publishing enterprise not choose only one of those options, especially not the first only, lest “they have become software engineers.”

in large part his concern is that publishers not reinvent the wheel—“I don’t think that most publishers should spend their time creating design software or better printing presses, leave that to the odd genius who happens to also be a publisher or the software programmer.” I absolutely agree. I can’t specifically speak for Andrew Savikas (who outlines his most current thinking here in a excellent essay, Content is a Service Business) but I know that I have no intention of building anything from scratch. My understanding of Publishing as a Service Business is to distinguish it from one that sells a product in a supply chain, a peddler of tchotchkes. It does not exclude the notion that we would create physical objects, preferably gorgeous, expensive, high margin ones that are never returned and that the purchaser passes onto the next generation, it rather advocates for a mentality, a philosophy, a corporate culture, that is a service, rather than manfacturing-and-distribution one. Much in the way that Zappos is a service business.

Indeed, I concur still further with Eoin in that, as he writes, “far better for us to spend time curating and filtering content, because filtering is what the web needs.” Even more so when he argues that “that doesn’t necessarily mean gate-keeping [for] we may be facilitating the filtering-by-readers within a community, rather than choosing what floats.” Nicely put, sir!

He again warns, don’t reinvent the wheel, and I again concur. I do use (in fact in the “About” page of my blog) the admonition “Now is time to build their infrastructure” but I mean it more metaphorically. I don’t mean invent the infrastructure—I simply mean let’s take all the existing tools out there and start to put them together in the appropriate configurations. This will involve levels of customization, tweaking, both of the software itself and of the user interfaces, and of any number of business processes. And that’s the process I wish to embark on, as soon as possible. I’m not going to invent a new kind of brick, but it is time to figure out the architecture of the right kind of niche publishing houses. Indeed, my goal is to create a small portfolio of houses, in order to see how much is similar, how much is different, what the user preferences are with writers, and readers, and reader-writers in different areas and styles of story-telling.

Richard Eoin Nash, Jul 19, 2009

March 2009

Notes On Clay Shirky on the News, Part the Second-to-Last

This is a short one, I might have even left it as a tweet, were it not for the pseudo-series I got going here. The upshot is that Jay Rosen, whose field this really is, has provided a superb summary of post-Shirkian thinking, emphasis on the more front-facing stuff. I do still need to do one last post on Shirkian thought in relation to books, which I’m likely to combine with one on the Steven Johnson SXSWi speech. (And just so’s you all know, I am, in the background, working on a by-my-standards-at-least epic series on supply, demand, and pricing since 1950. I shirk not…)

Richard Eoin Nash, Mar 28, 2009

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I ran Soft Skull Press, now an imprint of Counterpoint, from 2001 to 2007 and ran the imprint on behalf of Counterpoint until early 2009. Here's why I left. I'm now consulting on how to reach readers (details here) and developing a start-up called Cursor, a portfolio of niche social publishing communities, one of which will be called Red Lemonade. read more »