New English Review has Theodore Dalrymple’s essay on Web site comment sections.

As it happens, I have myself sometimes been the recipient of such abuse: if, that is, one can be said to be the recipient of anything that remains in the virtual world alone. No subject is too recondite to provoke the insensate rage of those who disagree with the view the author has taken of it. Indeed, it sometimes seems as if fury leading to ill-mannered personal abuse and foul language is the predominant mode of disagreement in our society, at least among those who append their comments to an article that appears on the internet.

At The Millions David Backer offers a guide to fiction online.

Literature is supposed to be a culture’s conversation with itself. A way of telling the story of its time, its moment. It’s a healthy and necessary thing, an authentic expression of the truth of the age. As a writer and student of literature and of this conversation, I went in search of the new fiction. I wanted to see its extent, the borders of its world. I wanted to do a little cartography to glimpse the map of our conversation with ourselves.

It was already clear, in December of 1999, that books were a dying species. Already more people seemed interested in producing novels than consuming them, and when it came to serious works, there seemed more fascination with the writer than the writing. Books, I heard from two serious, bewildered editors in New York on the same trip, were now part of the “entertainment industry,” and a first-time novelist was as likely to be judged on the power of his author photo as on the character of his content.

In the Los Angeles Times, Pico Iyer escapes the tyranny of the moment.

At n+1 Benjamin Kunkel examines the insidious pull of networked living.

My hope is that these reminders will keep me from succumbing any further to a pastime that has already cut deeper into my more serious reading and writing than I’d like, and that has led me to partcipate in the great ongoing suicide (by freeloading content) of the intellectual class. Thinking of the internet, I remember the reflections of Proust’s Swann on his mistress Odette: To think I spent years of my life on a woman who did not appeal to me, who wasn’t even my type! Of course—one recalls that word domestication—he married her all the same.

Not recommended.

At Salon Vincent Rossmeier interviews Andrew Lih, author of The Wikipedia Revolution.

Let’s talk about the somewhat notorious case of the journalist John Seigenthaler. Why did that case impact Wikipedia in such a momentous way?

John Seigenthaler is a journalist who was running a journalism institute at Vanderbilt and there was a rather short Wikipedia entry on him. He wrote a commentary for USA Today saying that, to his horror, he discovered his Wikipedia entry falsely claimed he was part of the conspiracy to assassinate John F. Kennedy. And he said this shows you how terrible Wikipedia is. What good is the site if these types of things can crop up?

Andy Baio of Waxy.org explores how Chinese Internet users access articles from The Economist.

Renowned novelists released their works online after veteran author Park Bum-shin became the first to take the plunge by posting his latest novel, “Cholatse,” on Naver, the nation’s top portal site, last year.

It was the first attempt of its kind for a veteran novelist to release literary work with a serious theme online as a tool to efficiently communicate with readers about his or her work.

In The Korea Times, Chung Ah-young reports a resurgence in Korean literature.

Millions of journal articles are available online, enabling scholars to find material they never would have encountered at their university libraries. From classic psychology studies to the most esoteric literary theory, it’s all just a few clicks away.

A recent study, however, suggests that despite this cornucopia, the boom in online research may actually have a “narrowing” effect on scholarship. James Evans, a sociologist at the University of Chicago, analyzed a database of 34 million articles in the sciences, social sciences, and humanities, and determined that as more journal issues came online, new papers referenced a relatively smaller pool of articles, which tended to be more recent, at the expense of older and more obscure work.

In the Boston Globe, Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow examines the findings.

At Slate Ron Rosenbaum sounds the new-media warning bell.

Do you despise choppy modern forms of communication such as text messaging? There is nothing wrong with the model, Luddite. The problem is your vocabulary.

At the Los Angeles Times, Lee Drutman reviews Mark Bauerlein’s The Dumbest Generation.

Information has never been stable. That may be a truism, but it bears pondering. It could serve as a corrective to the belief that the speedup in technological change has catapulted us into a new age, in which information has spun completely out of control.

At The New York Review of Books, Robert Darnton contemplates the fate of research libraries in the age of the Internet.

On National Public Radio’s All Things Considered, David Gura examines writers’ Web sites. The popular ones seem to be designed to appeal to those who do not read books.

Recommended with reservations.

At the New York Times, John Lanchester reviews Lee Siegel’s Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob.

10 Zen Monkeys asks. A few hardy individuals answer.

Erik Davis:

. . .I find most comments sections boring and/or tendentious and/or tough to read for one still invested in proper grammar.

Mark Dery:

As someone who once survived (albeit barely) as a freelancer, I can say with some authority that the freelance writer is going the way of the Quagga. Well, at least one species of freelance writer: the public intellectual who writes for a well-educated, culturally literate reader whose historical memory doesn’t begin with Dawson’s Landing.

John Shirley:

Editors are no longer permitted to make decisions on their own. They must consult marketing departments before buying a book. Book production has become ever more like television production: subordinate to trendiness, and the anxiety of executives.

And in my opinion this is partly because a generation intellectually concussed by the impact of the internet and other hyperactive, attention-deficit media, is assumed, probably rightly, to want superficial reading.

At Slate, David Shenk revisits his 1997 book Data Smog: Surviving the Information Glut.

Michiko Kakutani at the New York Times reviews Andrew Keen’s book on the evils of Web 2.0. I wanted to recommend The Cult of the Amateur after I read it; many of the points that Keen raises therein are absolutely correct (such as the one I touched on in an earlier post). The digressions kept me from it.

. . .Mr. Keen wanders off his subject in the later chapters of the book–to deliver some generic, moralistic rants against Internet evils like online gambling and online pornography. . .

Recommended with reservations.

A Forbes report on publishing asks the question, opening with the pleasing assertion that the Web’s “emphasis on textual snippets, skimming and collaborative creation, seems ill-suited to nurture the sustained, authoritative transmission of complex ideas that has been the historical purview of the printed page.”

The post at The Guardian’s Culture Vulture blog begins with a description of recent changes at the Web sites of Penguin and HarperCollins. It ends with the truth:

Or maybe it’s a pincer movement. Some publishers–though not yet HarperCollins–have used the web to begin cutting out bookshops. You don’t need to go to a bookshop, or even onto Amazon, to pick up a Penguin. As big publishing wakes up to the potential of the web and tries to reach “customers” direct, perhaps the media are next for the chop?

In the early, heady days of the World Wide Web, the Utopian fantasy of having a virtual printing press in every home took hold. While the surface of the idea shone with an appealingly egalitarian luster, what we had long known–that most people do not write well–again became painfully apparent. The Web was not going to usher in a golden age of plebeian poetry.

By 2000 it had become clear that the Web had become largely a conduit for commerce. Some idealism remained, and Stephen King engaged in his famous experiment, publishing The Plant in serial fashion. The installments were made available in an unencrypted format, and payment was on the honor system. King and his publisher considered the experiment a failure, and that single announcement silenced many who had been clamoring for a new paradigm in publishing. The money men woke up, took the reins, and put the wheels of the cart back in their well-worn tracks, perhaps whipping the horse a little more than was strictly necessary in the process.

Although most of the publishing industry was going through recidivism, science fiction mavericks pushed ahead, Baen Books leading the charge. The Baen rallying cry, one Cory Doctorow often repeats as a reason for making his books freely available, was:

Losses any author suffers from piracy are almost certainly offset by the additional publicity which, in practice, any kind of free copies of a book usually engender. Whatever the moral difference, which certainly exists, the practical effect of online piracy is no different from that of any existing method by which readers may obtain books for free or at reduced cost: public libraries, friends borrowing and loaning each other books, used book stores, promotional copies, etc. [1]

Baen authors and Doctorow claim that sales have been adequate, and while I certainly find their approach to publishing intriguing, I am not convinced that it will work for literary fiction in the same way that it seems to work for science fiction. Science fiction has the “cool” factor that creates wide interest, and its readership is already accustomed to doing most of its reading from a screen.

In the early days of the Web, I created a site for some of my writing and had the horrible experience of seeing my work propagate, often uncredited or simply with someone else’s name pasted where mine went, to other sites for the gain of others. This led to my pulling back from the Web and not posting any of my writing for many years. I still get the occasional e-mail from a harried English professor whose student has ripped off a poem of mine that was only on the Web for a period of eight months almost ten years ago.

Reference

1. Flint, Eric. “Introducing the Baen Free Library.” 11 Oct. 2000 http://www.baen.com/library/>.

Resources

• Read about The Plant at Wikipedia
• Read about Creative Commons Licenses at Creative Commons
• Read Criticism of Creative Commons at Alex Bosworth’s Weblog
• Read Criticism of Creative Commons at PC Magazine

I do not frequently read science fiction. Much of it is suitable only for adolescent boys and that barely. There is, however, a kind of science fiction that warms my progressive heart and gets my liberal blood moving. This kind of science fiction uses its future setting and advanced technology solely as distancing devices through which it makes social commentary more palatable. Vonnegut and Bradbury are the masters of this sub-genre. A friend suggested that Cory Doctorow’s novels take a similar approach.

The Internet could have developed into many things, but it has become a buzz machine and a distribution channel. Doctorow is skilled at getting both heads of the beast to roar. His liberal distribution policies under a Creative Commons license are what first caught my attention and will be the subject of tomorrow’s post. I downloaded Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom from his web site and am reading it on my Palm m500.

I am not yet deep into the novel, but so far the book is pleasant if not profound reading. Coined tech hipster terms like Whuffie, deadheading, and the Bitchun Society are a little too cutesy for me and elicit little grimaces. Doctorow writes with enough skill that he may win me over on that count before the end.

Resources:

• Buy Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (Paperback) at Amazon.com
• Download Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom from Cory Doctorow’s Web Site
• Read about Cory Doctorow at Wikipedia