clay shirky
Author-functions and work-functions
There are many, many noteworthy things in this interview with Clay Shirky, but this caught my attention (bold-emphasis is mine):
[W]hat we’re dealing with now, I think, is the ramification of having long-form writing not necessarily meaning physical objects, not necessarily meaning commissioning editors and publishers in the manner of making those physical objects, and not meaning any of the sales channels or the preexisting ways of producing cultural focus. This is really clear to me as someone who writes and publishes both on a weblog and books. There are certain channels of conversation in this society that you can only get into if you have written a book. Terry Gross has never met anyone in her life who has not JUST published a book. Right?
The way our culture works, depending on what field you’re operating in, certain kinds of objects (or in some cases, events) generate more cultural focus than others. Shirky gives an example from painting: “Anyone can be a painter, but the question is then, ‘Have you ever had a show; have you ever had a solo show?’ People are always looking for these high-cost signals from other people that this is worthwhile.” In music, maybe it used to be an album; in comedy, it might be an hour-long album or TV special; I’m sure you can think of others in different media. It’s a high-cost object that broadcasts its significance. It’s not a thing; it’s a work.
But, this is important: it’s even more fine-grained than that. It’s not like you can just say, “in writing, books are the most important things.” It depends on what genre of writing you’re in. If you’re a medical or scientific researcher, for instance, you don’t have to publish a book to get cultural attention; an article, if it’s in a sufficiently prestigious journal, will do the trick. And the news stories won’t even start with your name, if they get around to it at all; instead, a voice on the radio will say, “according to a new study published in Nature, scientists at the University of Pennsylvania…” The authority accrues to the institution: the university, the journal, and ultimately Science itself.
The French historian/generally-revered-writer-of-theory Michel Foucault used this difference to come up with an idea: In different cultures, different kinds of writers are accorded a different status that depends on how much authority accrues to their writing. In the ancient world, for instance, stories/fables used to circulate without much, if any, attribution of authorship; medical texts, on the other hand, needed an auctoritas like Galen or Avicenna to back them up. It didn’t make any sense to talk about “authorship” as if that term had a universal, timeless meaning. Not every writer was an author, not every writing an act of authorship. (Foucault uses a thought-experiment about Nietzsche scribbling aphorisms on one side of a sheet of paper, a laundry or shopping list on the other.)
At the same time, you can’t just ignore authorship. Even if it’s contingent, made-up, it’s still a real thing. It’s built on social conventions and serves a social function. There are rules. Depending on context, it can be construed broadly or narrowly. And it can change — and these changes can reveal things that might otherwise be hidden. For instance, from the early days of print until the 20th century, publishers in England shared some of the author-function of a book because they could be punished for what it said. At some point in the 20th century, audiences became much more interested in who the director of a film was. (In some cases, the star or producer or studio, maybe even the screenwriter still share some of that author-function.) And these social ripples — who made it, who foots the bill, who’s an authority, who gets punished? — those are all profound ways of producing “cultural focus.”
Foucault focused on authorship — the subjective side of that cultural focus — because he was super-focused on things like authority and punishment. But it’s clear that there’s an objective side of this story, too, the story of the work — and that the two trajectories, work and author, work together. You become an “author” and get to be interviewed by Terry Gross because you’ve written a book. And you get to write a book (and have someone with a suitable amount of authority publish it) because you accrue a certain amount and kind of demonstrable authority and skill (in a genre where writing a book is the appropriate kind of work).
It’s no surprise, then, that the Big Digital Shake-Up in the way cultural objects are produced, consumed, sold, disseminated, re-disseminated, etc. is shifting our concepts of both authorship and the work in many genres and media. What are the new significant objects in the fields that interest you? Pomplamoose makes music videos; Robin wrote a novella, but at least part of that “work” included the blog and community created by it; and Andrew Sullivan somehow manages to be the “author” of both the book The Conservative Soul and the blog The Daily Dish, even when it switches from Time to The Atlantic, even when someone else is guest-writing it. And while it takes writing a book to get on Fresh Air, to really get people on blogs talking about your book, it helps to have a few blog posts, reviews, and interviews about it, so there’s something besides the Amazon page to link to.
Maybe being the author of a blog is a new version of being an author of a book. I started (although I’m not the only author of) Bookfuturism because I started stringing together a bunch of work that seemed to be about the future of reading; through that, my writing here, and some of the things I wrote elsewhere, I became a kind of authority on the subject (only on the internet, but still, I like who links to me); and maybe I’ll write a book, or maybe I’ll start a blog with a different title when it’s time to write about something else. I don’t know.
It’s all being reconfigured, as we’re changing our assumptions about what and who we pay attention to.
Chimerical post-script: Not completely sure where it fits in, but I think it does: Robin and José Afonso Furtado pointed me to this post by Mike Shatzkin about the future of bookselling, arguing (I’m paraphrasing) that with online retailers like Amazon obliterating physical bookstores, we need a new kind of intermediary that helps curate and consolidate books for the consumer, “powered” by Amazon. It’s not far off from Robin’s old post about a “Starbucks API.” See? Even your coffee has an author-function.
Anyways, new authors, new publishers, new media, new works, new devices, new stores, new curators, new audiences — everything with a scrap of auctoritas is up for grabs.
Your local stationers’ shop
There are a few ways in which the future of bookstores will resemble the past. Here’s one you might not know about: The money in bookstores has never been in selling books.
Don’t believe me? Read The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. Franklin was a printer, a publisher, a newspaperman, a bookseller, and of course an author, scientist, inventor, and über-citizen. Do you know where he made his money? His stationery shop. He sold bookplates, printed invitations, letterhead, and plain writing paper. This was always the high-margin AND high-volume end of his business. Franklin’s newspapers, pamphlets, and books were a labor of love, patriotism, and intellectual overflow, but functionally, they were loss leaders.
And really, this is still the way bookstores work. Yes, we go in to browse, be comforted by, and perhaps even purchase books — but really, the big-ticket items are greeting cards, blank books, calendars, wrapping paper, college sweatshirts, candy, coffee. That, at least, is where the money is. Booksellers are still primarily dealers in 1) paper and 2) social goods — books are merely the low-profit-but-high-prestige emblem of that intersection.
Of course, now big-box retailers are using books as loss leaders in a very different way — selling hot books below WHOLESALE in the hope of getting you in the store to buy a big-screen TV. It’s not just books and media, but also groceries, tube socks, and prescription drugs. The Targets, Wal-Marts, and Best Buys of the world arguably have just taken the stationers’ model to parodic heights. And since there wasn’t exactly an independent tube-sock market before, the people who stand the most to lose from this are booksellers. Booksellers who, again, are already selling books as loss leaders to get people into the store to buy their high-margin items. You can be more charitable and say that the sale of the high-margin items subsidizes the sale of the books, which is what sellers and readers REALLY care about. But functionally, it’s the same model. It’s just that when it comes to high-margin goods, a photo album simply can’t beat a Blu-Ray player — so Wal-Mart can “subsidize” their book sales a lot more than the booksellers can.
This is the economic substrate of the American Booksellers’ Association’s open letter to the Justice Department. Here’s the ideological payload:
For our members-locally owned, independent bookstores-the effect will be devastating. There is simply no way for ABA members to compete. The net result will be the closing of many independent bookstores, and a concentration of power in the book industry in very few hands. Bill Petrocelli, owner of Book Passage in Corte Madera, California, an ABA member, was also quoted in the New York Times:
“You have a choke point where millions of writers are trying to reach millions of readers. But if it all has to go through a narrow funnel where there are only four or five buyers deciding what’s going to get published, the business is in trouble.”
We would find these practices questionable were they taking place in the market for widgets. That they are taking place in the market for books is catastrophic. If left unchecked, these predatory pricing policies will devastate not only the book industry, but our collective ability to maintain a society where the widest range of ideas are always made available to the public, and will allow the few remaining mega booksellers to raise prices to consumers unchecked.
Okay. So let’s just grant all of that stuff about independent booksellers — or hell, even chains like B&N or Borders, so long as they primarily sell books — being essential to the functioning of a free society. I’ve got my doubts about how or why that might be true, and way too much (bookstores, newspapers, the American auto industry) seems essential to the functioning of a free society these days — but screw it. In the case of bookstores, I want to believe it.
At the very least, let’s grant that bookstores are awesome, and add a lot of value to their communities. Let’s also grant that even if the DoJ tries to keep big-boxers from selling below wholesale, they’re still going to exert a lot of price pressure on bookstores so long as they’re selling books cheaply. We can also assume that online bookstores, too, are going to continue to chip away at brick-and-mortars by offering greater selection at a lower price. And let’s assume — or pray — that the ABA’s request that “the loss-leader pricing of digital content also bears scrutiny” by the DoJ doesn’t lead to crushingly high price-fixing on that end. Then we need to figure out a new business model that can keep local brick-and-mortar booksellers alive.
Clay Shirky proposes going co-op (or at least, offering some kind of NPR-style patronage):
Reservable space for book clubs, writers rooms, or study carrels; membership with buy-back options for a second-hand book market run out of the same space; certain shopping hours reserved for members or donors; use of volunteer labor, like a food coop; sponsorships from the people or businesses in the neighborhood most interested in the social value of the store and most interested in being known as local machers.
The core idea is to appeal to that small subset of customers who think of bookstores as their “third place”, alongside home and work. These people care about the store’s existence in physical (and therefore social) space; the goal would be to generate enough revenue from them to make the difference between red and black ink, and to make the new bargain not just acceptable but desirable for all parties. A small collection of patron saints who helped keep a local bookstore open could be cheaply smothered in appreciation by the culture they help support.
There are already existing models for this, like the mighty Seminary Co-Op bookstore in Chicago. Barnes & Noble offers paid memberships that translate into free shipping and discounted books, well worth it for high-volume purchasers. It seems to keep the Sem Co-Op running, and probably nets a significant profit for B&N, so there are good reasons to think that this program has got a shot — especially if bookstores are inventive in how they come up with member benefits. For instance, it would be fascinating to see a bookstore run as a real co-op, with members actively driving the direction of the store. The Sem Co-Op certainly gets a lot of feedback and advice from its members (especially the U of C profs), but it’s pretty far from direct democracy.
Cory Doctorow offers a different way for customers to contribute to the stores’ future — and it’s not unlike what Franklin offered in his stationers’ shop:
At the Harvard Bookstore, they have someone who spends the day mousing around on Google Book Search, looking for weird and cool titles in the public domain to print and shelve around the store, as suggestions for the sort of thing you might have printed for yourself. This is a purely curatorial role, the classic thing that a great retailer does, and it’s one of the most exciting bookstore sections I’ve browsed in years. And even so, there’s lots of room for improvement: Google Books produces the blandest, most boring covers for its PD books, and there’s plenty of room for stores to add value with their own covers, with customer-supplied covers (the gift possibilities are bottomless), and so on. I can even imagine the profs across the street producing annotated versions — say, a treatise on Alice in Wonderland with reproductions of ten different editions’ illustrations and selling them through the store’s printer and shelf-space, restoring the ancient bookseller/book-publisher role.
Of course, most of the mass-produced catalog will probably end up in the print-on-demand catalog some day, and stores will be able to fill those orders, too. But if you already know what book you want, why bother going to a store? (Unless you’re in too much of a hurry to wait for the mail).
On the other hand, there’s plenty of ways that a physical store could offer added value on mass-market titles: localized covers, signed books, high production-value gift editions, a point-of-sale “donate to our neighborhood schools” kiosk that lets you print a book on the spot for a classroom that’s requested it…
The key point seems to be that bookstore patrons today are kind of like the Republican Party — almost everyone who hasn’t given up on the project altogether is a zealot. To stay alive, bookstores need to foster their communities and harness that zealotry, making sure that they don’t lose a generation of future zealots simply because they didn’t show up.
I like Doctorow’s formulation: “In that world, booksellers become a lot more like bloggers who specialize in all things bookish — wunderkammerers who stock exactly the right book for the right people in the right neighborhood.”
Now this actually loses bookstores the pure democracy argument. It will no longer be the case that bookstores are the only places offering salvatio — er, I mean, books. Bookstores might not be our Catholic churches, where everyone is welcome — but they could be our hard, thrifty Puritan churches, whose members go out into the world and demonstrate their salvation through their worldly works.
The Great Confusion
No comment on the bulk of Clay Shirky’s mega meta-journalism speech, because I haven’t read it all, but this little chunk jumped out at me. It’s a macro point, much bigger than journalism:
To use the historical analogy from Eisenstein, from The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, there was a long hundred years between the Protestant Reformation and the Treaty of Westphalia. And that was a hundred years in which people almost literally did not know what to think. The old institutions were visibly not functioning any longer, but the nation-state as a new organizing principle was not yet in place. And those were, for many people, not a great hundred years.
A time “in which people almost literally did not know what to think.” That sounds pretty familiar to me. So much is now unmoored, at every level. What does good work look like? How should you organize your life economically? To which institutions should we be pledging our allegiance? How do we—especially as writers, thinkers, creative people—imagine and identify success?
I love the etymology of the word “confusion.” There are old threads of overthrow and combination (“-fusion”) in there along with the modern notion of mental mixed-up-ness.
So forget the Great Recession. Get ready for a Great Confusion.