Share This Course!

A few weeks ago I posted a question to the readers of this blog.

I haven’t gotten a single reply.

I’m beginning to think it’s time to shutter Share This Course.  It’s served its purpose.  But we all seem to have moved on.

Thoughts?

I’m finding this site pretty interesting as a way of publishing a body of ongoing research with a pulse…

http://www.shroudstory.com

I uploaded Future Present to Scribd. Now I can imbed my book in any website I like. Such as this one!

Future Present

(You may need to have Adobe’s Shockwave player installed to make this work.)

On Friday morning I received a note from my Big New York Agent (as described in the recording of my Sydney Writer’s Festival talk), telling me that Random House had ‘reverted’ the rights to my 2000 book, The Playful World: How Technology is Transforming Our Imagination.  This means that I own the copyright to the book.  I can do anything with it that I like.

What, then, do I choose to do?  If I practice what I preach, I know that ‘a resource shared is a resource squared’, so I should make it freely available, as broadly as possible.  That much I understand.  But what we’ve come to understand here is that an author, a book, and publishing are all so much more than just taking a dead text and putting it online for people to download.

This could be the opportunity we need to get started with a full-length text.  Because The Playful World is a decade old some parts are a bit outdated, some parts are still quite relevant, and some parts miss the mark entirely.  It could do with a refresh.  It could do with an expansion.  It could benefit from becoming densely interlinked with the subjects it describes – something I couldn’t do in 2000.

This is a big question, and something that I’d like to reflect upon as a collective intelligence – that is, with all of you.  What are your thoughts about this?  How best to proceed?

In all the rush to get everything ready for the Sydney Writers’ Festival, I forgot to mention a little project: I wrote a 144-page book in 90 minutes, so that I could get it overnight printed and bound and have it in my hand to flash around on my various festival panels.  It worked a treat.  But of course, I also did an electronic version of this book – two, actually, one in PDF format, the other in ePub format – so that anyone can freely have a copy of it.

If you’d like your own copy, click here.

Two weeks ago, Marcus Westbury and I held a panel at the Sydney Writers’ Festival titled “The Future of Publishing”.  When I scheduled this panel, I thought we’d be well done with Share This Book.   And I’d be able to report on how it all went.

Live and learn.

Instead I took the lessons and offered them up to the standing-room-only crowd of two hundred.   Both of us spoke for about 15 minutes apiece, then we took questions from a very interested and engaged audience.

If you’d like to hear my talk, click here.

If you’d like to hear Marcus’ talk, click here.

Please share your reactions to what we had to say!

Surprise = Information & so, Make It New.

What are your thoughts? Observations? Suggestions? Now’s the time, and here’s the place. Thanks! –Mark Pesce

“But a magnificent brut! ‘Caligula’ (Mr Danl Magrath,
bookmaker, wellknown to Eastrailian poorusers of the Sydney
Parade Ballotin) was, as usual, antipodal with his: striving todie,
hopening tomellow, Ware Splash.–James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, pg. 60.

Suggestion:
Read Finnegans Wake again. Pick a word. Make that a title and write on from there.

Observation:
More than half of the magic stored within ‘Finnegans Wake’ dwells within the air, literally awaiting a speaker to link the symbol with the sound, and ‘make it whole’, like a neurochemical synaptic lock & key, the symbol and the sound harness the powers of Onomatopoeia, and like with musical notation, the medium changes utterly when processed through a musical instrument as sound waves.

Thought:

I deduce that future books will have a spoken component, and behave like a book of magical spells in the way that when you speak the right words in the right order with the right sense of commitment and intention something will reveal itself to the reader/speaker. Something that not even the author could imagine, something that to us today may just seems weird, like meaningful synchroncity, or the workings of international finance capitalism? This constellation of ‘things’ is best left described as ‘life’ I think, that magical/mystical experience and the goal of great literature and Shamanism. Life seems to make the momentum of linearity, the gives a sense for the arrow of time, life-like literature therefore; may define a good page turner. I believe we are living in a Holographic Multiverse, and I think that Finnegans Wake is a Holographic Multiverse too.

Thought Question:
How can I better serve both the ‘network’ and my own ’seclusive’ writing habits to a balanced satisfactory degree, producing the best work I possibly can but still staying within the wishes and prefered orbits of our network of, co-creators?

Observation:
Leading by example, recording and sharing your works, works.

Thought:
I’ll add that it seems to me that Government generally (U.S, U.K and Australia) clog up and slow down the inevitable coming together of the tribes by shared experience, and the new age of publishing. See The U.K’s Digital Economy Bill, for an example of ‘hyperstupidity’.

This week I’ve been invited to speak on two panels at the Sydney Writers Festival.  These panels concern digital media and the emergence of the electronic book, and I’m on them specifically because I told the organizers I was working on Share This Book.  That hasn’t really gone as planned: there is no finished text, what we have are a lot of ideas and (perhaps) some flagging enthusiasm.

When I go before these audiences this week, what can I tell them we have learned?  I know that I’ve learned a lot about consistency, about contribution, and about what I reckon the future of the book to be – which I’ve been sharing recently, here.  But I also want to bring to them what you’ve learned, because this isn’t about me.  This is about us, and about what we are working to achieve.

Please leave a comment, or start a discussion, and tell us what you’d like to share to other authors who have the same questions we do about where all of this is going.  I’ll do my best to record what I say on these panels, so I can bring that back and share it with you.  We can close that loop and move on into deeper work.

What are your thoughts?  Observations?  Suggestions?  Now’s the time, and here’s the place.  Thanks!

After my last post, someone rather properly asked, “Sounds nice, but what does it mean? How does this work in reality? Can you give us any examples?” Fair questions, these, because what I’m trying to articulate doesn’t exist precisely in the form I’d like to see it come into being. That said, we should establish some common themes:

• There is no singular author, rather a forest of contributors;
• A laser-light focus is exchanged for a broader flashlight beam illuminating the darkness;
• The lengthy, linear text is exchanged for a set of densely interconnected nodes.

Wikipedia is not a bad example of any of these traits.  People ask, ‘What is Wikipedia about?’  Well, it’s about being an encyclopedia.  Just as Wookieepedia is about Star Wars and Conservapedia is about, um, right-wing lunacy.  In each case multiple contributors work toward a shared understanding of a domain of knowledge.

Does this mean a wiki is the right way to go?  The answer is yes – and.  The form we’re moving toward looks like a hybrid between a series of linear texts (similar to long blog posts), and a thicket of shorter ‘articles’ that explore a fact or theme in particular depth.  The linear texts provide a narrative which contextualize the articles.  Each reinforces the other.  And any of them can be written by any one of us.

We are already doing this.  We’ve been doing this since we got together to work on this.  We simply need to embrace our already-existing process, and take it forward.  I know of a lot of linear texts – stories – that need to be written.  We’ll need to provide a lot of support for them in explanatory articles.  It’s very straightforward, even if it seems quite different to what has come before.