One of the talks I've got coming up is at Making Magazines on March 16th. I'm trying to work out what to say for that.
The brief is to do something about the 'blended future' - ie moving past the analogue v digital stuff and talking about what happens when we're equally comfortable with both, and are using both. Newspaper Club experiences providing a backdrop.
But I'd also like to explore what some of this means for writing and being a writer. I figure five years of doing a weekly column qualifies me to call myself that. Just.
Having watched Mr Bridle's unfolding ideas about Networked Realism and networked writing the line that keeps coming back to me is 'Writing now has machines in it'. What's exciting to me about writing now is that machines aren't just part of the distribution system - they're in the writing. They're in the process (see James and Gibson and Google), they're in the reading experience and they're in the conversation around them. Or at least, they are if you want them to be, and I, personally, want them, because I think they'll make for interesting new things.
I haven't worked out what I want to say about all this yet, but this is some of the raw material:
Various experiments with 'live writing' by Paul Graham, Baratunde Thurston and Danny O'Brien. (it's interesting how ephemeral this stuff is, the final pieces are captured, not many examples of it in action.)
Kindlyness, kindlyness again.
Trying to write with metadata (by me), metadata and magazines, long, good reads.
The Autonomous Parapoetic Device.
Bot booksellers and authors, bot journalists, (how long before AOL invent SubBots?)
Anyway.