It must be tricky being an author with a book to promote these days. You do all the rounds, grateful for every chance to plug your book but conscious that the people who read your interview in the WSJ are also likely to watch your interview on Newsnight and on MSN and your conversation with Borders or whatever. You're aiming at different audiences each time, but your True Fans will see you every time, alerted by the drip of RSS or the burp of twitter. And, obviously, you run the risk of repeating yourself.
Which was why I was really impressed with Clay Shirky's efforts this time around promoting Cognitive Surplus. He ended up talking in a lot of places, to a lot of people, and I ended up instapapering and reading a lot of these interviews. But I never got the sense of hearing too much of the same stuff, indeed he almost seemed to be saving up some nuggets for each occasion. I bookmarked new thoughts from many of those interviews.
I think that's a sign of a particular kind of writer/thinker - someone who's immersed in a field or area of thought and has taken time to put a sample of it in a book. It means by the time they get round to talking about it, new stuff has occurred to them, and they can genuinely reflect on the questions they've been given and come up with interesting answers. Versus the kind of writer who's just managed to get enough stuff together to fill the book and has only got that material to repeat.
This is the stuff I bookmarked from Mr Shirky's interviews. All of which just fell into my lap via RSS or twitter, so I'm sure if you go looking there'll be much more out there:
“What the fight seems to me now is around cultural expectations of ourselves,” he told me. “It’s actually about changing the culture we are part of in ways that take the new medium for granted"
The Souls Of The Machine"All of a sudden in 2003-4, L.A. start-up culture got really interesting. It was the moment where 30-year-olds said, “Wait a minute. The people steering the ship only want to get it this much further and then they’re willing to see it sink. I’m bailing out now."
"Ecosystems don’t do things; people do things! To be in a room with people who care about what happens to the press and to offload to the ecosystem the idea that things will somehow be OK is to opt out of our cultural obligation to figure out what the “invisible college” model is right now, that is, to sign ourselves up for a more rigorous view of what the medium is capable of, beyond LOLcats."
"It is possible to think that the Internet will be a net positive for society while admitting that there are significant downsides—after all, it’s not a revolution if nobody loses."
"I think someone will make the imprint that bypasses the traditional distribution networks. Right now the big bottleneck is the head buyer at Barnes & Noble. That’s the seawall holding back the flood in publishing. Someone’s going to say, “I can do a business book or a vampire book or a romance novel, whatever, that might sell 60% of the units it would sell if I had full distribution and a multimillion dollar marketing campaign—but I can do it for 1% percent of the cost.” It has already happened a couple of times with specialty books. The moment of tip happens when enough things get joined up to create their own feedback loop, and the feedback loop in publishing changes when someone at Barnes & Noble says: “We can’t afford not to stock this particular book or series from an independent publisher.” It could be on Lulu, or iUniverse, whatever. And, I feel pretty confident saying it’s going to happen in the next five years."
"Of course there’s a new Luddism! There’s always a new Luddism whenever there’s change. I mean, Luddism is specifically a demand that the people who benefited from the old system be consulted before any technology is allowed to disrupt it."
"And so one of the problems that old people like me suffer from is just we know too many solutions for problems that no longer exist. And it kind of freaks us out to realize that all the things we mastered don’t really add up to much value anymore."
"The baby boomers, when we were young, we had zero, zero patience for the idea that people who are in their fifties in the ’70s and ’80s should somehow be shielded from cultural changes because somehow the stuff that we were doing was upsetting them. So, now it’s our turn and we ought to just suck it up."
"What is quite obviously happening is that the number of things that are available for short attention are increasing. But, so is the ability to consume complicated, long-form information."
Interview with Clay Shirky"Whenever media become more abundant, average quality falls quickly, while new institutional models for quality arise slowly."
"The response to distraction, then as now, was social structure. Reading is an unnatural act; we are no more evolved to read books than we are to use computers. Literate societies become literate by investing extraordinary resources, every year, training children to read. Now it’s our turn to figure out what response we need to shape our use of digital tools."
Does The Internet Make You Smarter?
"The final thing I'd say about optimism is this. If we took the loopiest, most moonbeam-addled Californian utopian internet bullshit, and held it up against the most cynical, realpolitik-inflected scepticism, the Californian bullshit would still be a better predictor of the future. Which is to say that, if in 1994 you'd wanted to understand what our lives would be like right now, you'd still be better off reading a single copy of Wired magazine published in that year than all of the sceptical literature published ever since."
"Would the world really be better off if we were to hide from ourselves the fact that teenagers waste a lot of time trying to either flirt with each other or to crack each other up? Like, to whom was this a mystery, prior to the launch of Facebook?"
"Look, we got erotic novels, first crack out of the box, once we had printing presses. It took a century and a half for the Royal Society to start publishing the first scientific journal in English. So even with the sacred printing press, the first things you get serve the basest human urges. But the presence of the erotic novels did not prevent us from pressing the printing presses into the service of the scientific revolution. And so I think every bit of time spent fretting about the fact that people have base desires which they will use this medium to satisfy is a waste of time – because that's been true of every medium ever launched."
"The whole, 'Is the internet a good thing or a bad thing'? We're done with that. It's just a thing. How to maximise its civic value, its public good – that's the really big challenge."
Guardian interview"I have this theory. I call it the Russia-Poland Theory. Which is: one of the reasons Poland did better than Russia after the collapse of Communism is they’d only had one generation under the Communists, so there were still people who could remember that it had been different. Whereas, under Russia, no one alive remembered what life was like in 1916. When people go through two generations of stability, it’s easy enough to adopt an attitude that it has always been this way. So for somebody entering the book publishing business in, say, the year 2000, some 23-year-old just out of school, it has ALWAYS been this way. No one in the publishing industry has known anything but the postwar landscape. What you get when a situation like that happens is that one word comes to stand in for a business, a production method, a product, a cultural signifier—the whole range of it is all compacted into that single thing."
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?...
...I think because the cost of writing a book is very large. Someone has committed a lot of time to it. They’ve put a lot of their thinking into it. But also, a whole bunch of other people who have significant amounts of capital on the line have said, “This is worth publishing.” They’ve either said it in the context of the academic press, which says, “This will redound to our credit,” or they’ve said it in the context of the commercial press, which says, “Revenues will exceed expenses.” We use the phrase “self-published author” to mean “vaguely suspect.” Right? Or take painters. 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."
"I’ve always adopted the Bill Burroughs mantra, which is, “If a thing is worth doing, it’s worth doing badly.” Which is to say that if there is any intrinsic value in writing or expressing yourself or taking a photo, it’s worth doing even if the results are mediocre."
"I think one of the ways of apprehending the world that’s actually showing up already in the academy is the so-called “one-box search,” where you don’t have to say, “This is the database I’m looking in.” One-box search privileges interdisciplinary work. Because if I search for a particular string or phrase, I am suddenly getting back results from psychology, sociology, economics, political science—all in the same search query. Disciplinary boundaries are just assaulted, rather than doubled down; if I have to know the database before I search it, then to become a good political scientist I have to know which journals are relevant."
"there are revolutions in which people’s principal skill is not being afraid of what they don’t understand. These people do well in revolutionary times. I jumped into this not because I was good at it, but because I didn’t have much to lose. That will give way—in fact, it even is giving way now. I started doing this in a day when you had to understand something about how the Internet works just to use it. Literally. There was no web, there was no graphic interface or anything like that. You had to understand something about the plumbing just to go to the bathroom. It’s like having to know how your car started to own a car. Those days are long gone. In fact, some of the interesting commentary on the iPad considers it as a new model for how little you have to know about your computer in order to get it to do what you want to do."
"There’s this long, long, lonely gap between the 8,000-word New Yorker article and the 80,000-word book. And there are a bunch of interesting things that are about 20,000 words long. In fact, it’s gotten to the point where, if you’re reviewing a nonfiction book, it’s commonplace, if you like it, to assure the readers of the review that this is not just a magazine article inflated to 80,000 words so that it can be sold on the shelves at the bookstore. Which, in a way, is saying there’s a bunch of stuff that actually would be better at 20,000 or 25,000 words than at 80,000 words."