jameswharris

R.I.P. – The Good Ole Days

Let me start out by saying I don’t want this essay to be doom and gloom. Also let me just remind you about the Yin and Yang nature of the world. Creation also means something gets destroyed. Old folks are always crying about how things aren’t the way they were when they were growing up at the same time the young’uns run wild, gleeful embracing every new fad coming down the expressway. I’m a glass half-full kind of guy who enjoys wearing rose colored specs while examining the philosophies of those dark clouded guys proposing the half-empty theories.

As I mentioned previously, I’m listening to The Cult of the Amateur by Andrew Keen. I just finished his eulogy for the music store and I just can’t help tossing out my two pennies worth of monkey typing. I know most bloggers pretend to barf when they hear the name Andrew Keen, but I actually think his book should be read by everyone. He’s done much cogitating and turned up a lot of ideas to think about. Only I’m not sure I’m thinking about his vital issues in the same way he does.

When Keen started lamenting the demise of the record store I was reminded how I used to love record shopping. From 1965 through 1998 I bought a damn lot of LPs and CDs. I averaged buying two to four albums while shopping in two or more records stores each week. I loved record stores. Hell, it was a stab to the heart when LPs disappeared, with their great 12″ venues for fantastic cover art. To me the good ole days of record stores was from 1965-1975 – from Byrds to Bruce. Okay I do love those little dinky little CD albums, but never as much as the big beautiful LPs.

Now Andrew Keen wants us to believe that the Internet is murdering the music business. And that is true for the old way of business. I believe stealing music is stealing, and P2P does cause lost sales. However, I’m not sure that music thieves are the only suspect holding a smoking MAC-10. I never stole music when it became a fad, but around 1998 I stopped buying CDs by the handful – so I’m sure my kind hurt the industry too. I don’t know how many baby boomers are like me but the damn music industry just stopped selling music I wanted to own.

There are other factors. I’d say part of the music boom of the 1980s and early 1990s was us old guys re-buying all our favorite LPs on CDs, as well as trying to discover everything great back to the 1910s as we got older. As the price of CDs reached the point of kissing an Andrew Jackson good-bye I got wary of buying CDs just because of one good tune – or even no good tunes at all. For years I kept buying all my favorite artists whenever they churned out a new CD and it took awhile to learn that great music often is created by the wild at heart – a state of being hurt by age and success.

Mr. Keen, I’d love to have the good ole record store days back again, but for me that means recreating 1965 and not 1995. I think Andrew Keen’s ethical issues are spot on and pointing out the music industry has a long history of being unethical is no rationalization to steal by. His theory about big music companies are the patrons of great artists and without real investment great music in the future might not get made as well, does have some merits, but that is a hard case to make. Would I have discovered Bruce Springsteen if Columbia Records hadn’t promoted him? I don’t know. Would his first five albums been as fantastic if the Boss had made them on a computer as MP3 files? I don’t think so, but I really don’t know either.

I also agree that the music business is hurting and hurting bad, but so did the buggy whip makers when people started buying cars. And I strongly believe all those ethical issues Mr. Keen brings up regarding the Internet are happening and they are critical issues we need to work on. But even if we fix those problems we’re not going to bring back the record store or see CD albums sell in the tens of millions. Those good ole days are gone.

When Fleetwood Mac sold albums in the kazillions, kids didn’t have to choose between buying cell phones, $60 video games, computers, iPods and so on. Junk food was still budgeted with pocket change and you could see a major rock band live for $7.50. If I was in the lamenting business like Mr. Keen, and I often am, I’d wail about what happened to those days when several touring bands came to town every week. I’m also desponded that sharing music isn’t like it used to be – see my “Why Has Listening to Music Become as Solitary as Masturbation?”

I’ve spent many words on crying over the dwindling subscriptions of my favorite SF magazines. And there are numerous hobbies that are fading from existence because kids have new interests, and there are lots of Dads sad to see cherished pastimes of old ignored by their sprouts. Things change and that’s tough. I actually love Rhapsody.com and having millions of albums to listen to for $10 a month. Sure, it ain’t as fun as shopping for LPs, but I can live with instant gratification.

Someday, some kid who read this blog will write a blog, but it won’t be called a blog, about how sad it is that iTunes is going out of business, and he’ll have a lot of teary feelings to try and put into words. Maybe he will even remember reading this essay and note the kids of his time have found something exciting to move on to. As long as there are people there’s going to be music. The creation of a new system to promote music will always destroy the previous system. BFD. Move with the times or rust, because Neil told us that decades ago. I bet there are plenty of people out there still crying over the 78 era.

I’m writing to myself as much as you Mr. Keen. Yes, Andrew, it is a dirty rotten shame that the way we bought music is fading into our dim memories. Sure, these young whippersnappers won’t know what their missing, but then I haven’t a clue as to what they are jamming on now. I’m sure it’s something hot, maybe as hot as the Beatles, but I’ll never now. That’s just the way things are. I admit I don’t get Rap or Brittany Spears – but I assume that’s just payback for forcing my Dad to listen to rock and roll when he kept screaming for me to shut off that goddamn noise.

Mr. Keen, the good ole days are always passing.

Jim

Going Paperless 2 – Magazine Reading

I’m starting to learn just what I’ve got myself into since I had the bright idea of Going Paperless. After I wrote that post I decided I’d focus on giving up newspapers and magazines and justified that the paper in books is different because books are meant to last and not be disposable. Going cold turkey on buying magazines has turned out to be very hard.

I originally planned to go paperless to save on trees and the natural resources and energy that go into making paper. I assumed digital is more environmental. Since that time I’ve discovered other benefits to going paperless.

I buy a lot of magazines and subscribe to maybe twenty of them. I love magazines. I spent several years working in a Periodicals department at a university library. To me each magazine represents a subculture. After writing my original post I’ve been to my favorite bookstores a number of times. I linger in the magazine section looking at the issues I’d love to buy and walk away feeling disappointed, empty, even sad. Well, I am saving some bucks too!

So far I’ve only read Time, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov’s, Reader’s Digest and Analog on my Kindle. I’ve only subscribed to Time and just bought single issues of the others. Amazon.com doesn’t offer that many magazines yet. I could get The Atlantic which I currently subscribe to, and over at Fictionwise.com I could get Interzone, a SF magazine I’ve always wanted to try.

Luckily, I have about 12 feet of back issues to tide me over before going through total withdrawal. You see, I’ve always bought far more magazines than I can read. To be honest, I do way more flipping than actual reading – looking at photographs, cartoons, ads, reading tidbits and columns, and only sometimes getting down to reading the core articles.

Reading on the Kindle is teaching me to read differently. The Kindle does not have photos. Nor is it practical to just flip through the pages. When I get out my Kindle to read a magazine it means reading – and reading only. And that’s very different. For casual scanning I’m going to have to use the web.

Nor do I have colorful covers, art and photography to seduce me into a particular article. Geez, I might need to hang around the bookstore to get aroused and then run home and hope I can find that story my eyes are bulging to read. The net has art and graphics but I can’t remember seeing a magazine site that entice me into reading a story like a magazine layout.

The latest issue of Astronomy Magazine has a stunning cover showing a bizarre image with the headline, “Is this the shape of the Universe?” And sad to say Astronomy Magazine does not offer any freebies at their web site. Going paperless will mean giving up this periodical.

Discover also has an eye catching cover with a lead story “Before the Big Bang: 3 Theories Explore the Backstory of Creation.” Jumping over to the site gives no indication if I could read that article but there’s lot to read, with many entries on the same subject. The DiscoverMagazine.com site is geared to provide reading material but it appears to have a web based structure. It’s a busy site with lots of tiny print. I’ll still offers lots to read after going paperless, it just won’t be easy to read.

Scientific American has a beautiful cover too that beckons me to read, “The End of Cosmology,” an article I can read online. The SciAm.com home page is colorful, but still not as inviting as an actual issue. SciAm also provides many full articles online, but reserves content on others. After dumping paper I will have reading material here but not always the essay I want.

It would be great if these magazines offered a Kindle edition. And it would be even greater if Kindle 2.0 had a nice hi-rez color screen.

There is another way to go paperless without considering the Kindle and the web, and that’s audio. I already read 40-50 books a year via my iPod. I can get Scientific American and The New Yorker in an abridged audio format.

Learning to read magazines with the Kindle means I need to change my buying habits. It’s one thing to buy magazines and let them sit around on the shelf mostly unread, but it seems down right silly to buy magazines that go unread and unseen as bits and bytes on my Kindle. To be practical I need to only buy what I can read.

Going paperless means learning to buy just the amount of words I can read on a regular basis. Learning to do that will be difficult. I’ve subscribed to the audio edition of The New Yorker before and like my paper copies many issues went unopened.

Thus going paperless means changing a lot more than I previously thought. I opened my Kindle last night and discovered I had four issues of Time queue up already. I spent little over an hour and read many stories. Without the photos Time really is a much different magazine. The Kindle formatting tries to describe charts and graphs with words and that takes some imagination to see.

On the other hand I got a much better feel for the content of the magazine. I flipped through an entire issue one screen at a time. The Kindle tends to encourage speed reading. There’s a delay in “flipping” pages, just enough that I still grasp some content I’m skipping past. This causes two things to happen. One I pick up tidbits just by flipping, and second I end up jumping back and reading stories I had planned to skip.

If I really have the guts to go paperless I’m going to have to change myself significantly. Strangely enough going paperless might force me to focus on content and learning to read more efficiently. I’ll end up reading more if I stick with the Kindle. It will also force me to learn my limitations on how much I can read.

Moving away from magazines might mean spending more time reading whole non-fiction books, or watching more documentaries. Nova (PBS) and The Universe (History Channel) have gorgeous visuals in high definition, far more stunning than magazine covers. Magazine reading has always been the shallowest form of reading. Ditto for newspapers. Going paperless may also mean focusing on more substantial reading sources.

Finally, there are the Best American series of annual books that collect the best of the best periodical writing from the previous year. These include The Best American Science and Nature Writing and The Best American Science Writing. And I just got The Best of Technology Writing 2007. I could easily give up magazine reading and just buy these volumes. I might discover that the amount of time I spend reading non-fiction essays and articles each year might be equal to the time it takes to read a handful of annual best of anthologies.

By the way, I have thrown away a number of magazine subscription offers – some that made me want to cry because they were so cheap. I love cheap magazine subscriptions. That’s why I have so many magazines on my selves going unread. Another reason going paperless is good for me. It breaks a bad consumer habit.

Going Paperless 3

Jim

Ordinary Life and Science Fiction

I just finished reading Marsbound by Joe Haldeman as a serial in Analog SF. The book won’t be published until August but all parts of the serial can be found at Fictionwise.com. I got to study with Joe Haldeman and his wife Gay for a week in 2002 when I attended the Clarion West Writer’s Workshop, so I feel bad for making criticisms of his new novel in the narrative below. I’m going to be critical but not in an ordinary review way – I’m going to use Marsbound as a jumping off point for talking about some general problems I have with science fiction. Overall I found Marsbound to be a fun novel and if you read Jason Sanford’s review he reports its his favorite SF novel from recent years.

Jason also has the same reaction I had reading Marsbound because we both felt it was modeled after Robert A. Heinlein juveniles – which in my book is very ambitious. Part of my criticism will be how this story doesn’t measure up, but that is unfair criticism too. Joe has to write his own novels and they shouldn’t be compared to Heinlein – even though I do. However, I think the qualities I want can’t be described as belonging to Heinlein, I just saw them first in his juvenile novels.

This essay isn’t a review. I’ll try to avoid specific spoilers, but I will mention plot elements because they will be examples of what I want to talk about in general. Normally I hate serials but the title Marsbound just grabbed me because I love books about colonizing Mars. Part of my disappointed deals with the fact that the story turned out to not be about colonizing Mars. Again, this is not the fault of Joe’s writing or the story. Instead of being Red Planet its more like Have Space Suit-Will Travel my all time favorite SF novel. That is both good and bad.

Let’s get down to business. I call this essay “Ordinary Life and Science Fiction” because SF seldom deals with ordinary life and people. Marsbound starts off being a story about a young woman of 19 who is traveling to Mars with her brother and parents. In the future this could be about ordinary life and the beginning was very promising to my hopes. Because Haldeman was pacing the story slow, dealing with the background of Mars exploration and explaining a space elevator I assumed Carmen Dula’s story would be a step by step narrative about what living on Mars might be like.

This excited me because I don’t think enough science fiction deals with the reality of space travel. Kids need to see what hard work it will be to conquer another world. And the first installment of this story appeared to be exactly what I wanted. Early on Carmen admits she’s a virgin and one interesting plot problem appears to be centered around romance in a limited colony. I thought this complication was excellent. Haldeman had done something interesting for a SF juvenile by having a female lead and dealing with sexuality and romance, topics Heinlein could not touch back in the 1950s.

Alas, Joe takes a sharp plot turn at the end of the first segment and Marsbound becomes a completely different story. Like Have Space Suit-Will Travel, the plot is structured like a multi-staged rocket. When the second stage kicks in Marsbound leaves the story I was hoping to read. Again like Have Space Suit-Will Travel it takes on good and bad aliens, and eventually deals with the fate of the Earth. All exciting stuff by traditional science fiction.

What I’d like to read is non-traditional science fiction novel. We’re now leaving Joe Haldeman’s territory. This is something I often do with films – fall in love with the beginning but I end up wanting to rewrite the ending myself. I must emphasize again this can’t be consider criticism of Marsbound.

From now on I’m speculating about a new book that could be considered inspired by Marsbound. Even one of my favorite Mars colony books, Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson moves away from the details of day to day colonization and ordinary life. SF seems to hate the mundane life. Too often SF seems bored with any plot smaller than save the world.

When I started reading Marsbound I hoped it would be two things. First, a detail speculation about ordinary people colonizing Mars – much like stories about colonists in early America. Second I wanted it to be a true science fiction romance from a female’s POV. I wanted Jane Austen meets Robert A. Heinlein. Heinlein never could have done Austen because he didn’t have a clue about women but he was great at telling stories to youngsters about how to survive and succeed.

If mankind is to ever explore space beyond low Earth orbit we’ve got to colonize the Moon and Mars. Such adventures will involve millions of mundane details not normally found in SF. People who colonize these worlds will be ordinary and romance will remain a big part of their lives. Because SF is addicted to epic plots it has trouble dealing with the minute problems people face daily.

Strangely enough Philip K. Dick attempted this in 1964 with The Martian Time-Slip when he dealt with a union on Mars and mental illness. I think part of PKD’s success is sticking close to the little people, the ordinary person rather than writing about heroes that save the world.

I believe classic science fiction inspired rocket engineers and early space exploration but I don’t think modern science fiction has that impact on young today. I’ve talked to a number of kids who have asked me when will space travel be like Star Wars or Star Trek. When I reply probably never they act like I just told them Santa Claus isn’t real. They whine that the space shuttle and NASA is boring.

Living on Mars will be a whole lot about farming and recycling – not very hip topics. Living on Mars and the Moon will be about living underground in confined spaces. Few people will get to hot rod on the surface. So what will it be like to be a teenager growing up in such a limited world? How does romance unfold when there will probably be very little privacy. Life will be hard and kids won’t be allowed to waste hours a day on television, computers and video games. Survival will depend on everyone pitching in. Success will not be measured by wealth but skills and hard work, not qualities often associated with modern teen.

This is all very different from the way kids grow up today. It should make for a great story, so why don’t we see SF books like this? Maybe writers feel it would be too dreary to sell. Maybe I should get off my ass and write it myself. What’s really required is using the conventions of normal literary story telling and meld them with the details of science and science fiction. In other words I’m asking for someone to write the great American novel set on Mars.

This is why The Road by Cormac McCarthy beats the common after-the-collapse SF novel. McCarthy deals with the little details. At Clarion they taught us that good fiction is the accumulation of significant details. That’s why the Heinlein juveniles were so good and why later Heinlein adult novels are so bad. Opinions and far out ideas are fine for blog writing, but fiction writing requires a focus on finer observations about ordinary living. It’s nothing for me to ask for such a novel, but it’s years of work for someone to write.

I’d love to read Great Expectations or Pride and Prejudice set on Mars but with all the Martian details known by a JPL engineer. Like I said before, if that’s something I want then maybe I should go write it myself. But that’s even more ambitious than modeling stories after Robert A. Heinlein.

Jim

Science Fiction Short Stories 2007

I love science fiction short stories so it’s a pleasure to discover BestScienceFictionStories.com. And yesterday Rusty posts his list of “The 10 Best Web Sites for Free Online Science Fiction Stories.” Even though the print magazines are losing subscribers short stories are finding new venues on the web. This site is slowly recognizing and reviewing quality short stories and helping their readers find where to read them. What an admirable undertaking. Now I just need to campaign to get all online publishers to create a “Send to Kindle” button.

Over at the new F&SF blog John Joseph Adams has an entry “Free Fiction Friday: Paolo Bacigalupi” that I hope becomes a regular feature of the blog. So far JJA has three authors listed at his Free Fiction section. This week he links to three free stories by Paolo Bacigalupi, one of F&SF’s contributors who is making a few online waves in the past few weeks with the release of his new collection. I have already reviewed one of the free stories in my entry “Science Fiction and Global Warming.”

Over at Black Gate Dave Truesdale provides his rather extensive list of 214 stories that he categorizes in various ways for “2007 SF & Fantasy Recommended Reading List.” Damn, I wished I had the time to do this kind of reading. Maybe Rusty at Best Science Fiction Stories can find links for many of these. John Joseph Adams extracts all the F&SF stories from the list which will help me find them in my back issues.

Over at Locus Magazine they have their Recommended Reading: 2007 list – scroll down to the bottom and you’ll see their short fiction favorites.

If you are concerned about the viability of the short fiction market you may want to read “The Rise of the Genre eZine: Will it ever find a profitable model?” over at Bloggasm by I assume Simon Owens. He focuses on online markets, but I wished he had interviewed the print publishers about their status and their plans for co-existing in the online world.

Jason Sanford does cover the health of the print mags in “2007 SF/F magazine circulation numbers.” It doesn’t look good. I was worried back in 1994 when I covered the numbers in “Classics of Science Fiction Short Stories,” when I thought those numbers spelled doom, but the magazines are still surviving even with a fraction of their 1994 subscribers. Please subscribe to a magazine! Support the world of SF short stories.

The best stories of 2007 will be published in print in several annual best of anthologies, but they will all have 2008 in their title. John Joseph Adams at his blog has the lineup for Rich Horton’s SF and Fantasy anthologies in Best of the Year 2008. Over at Asimov’s forum Gardner Dozois gives us a list of stories for his The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Fifth Annual Collection for 2008. Kathryn Cramer offers a list of what will be in Year’s Best SF 13 edited by Carmer and David Hartwell.

If I had more time and energy I’d cross-tab all those best of 2007 stories to see which ones were cited the most. If anyone is doing that please let me know. I don’t read as much SF as I used to. To be honest I find non-fiction about science more exciting in the years since I turned fifty. But I still love to keep up with the SF short story field. Strangely enough, my Kindle is getting me to read more SF. It’s rather ironic that a science fictional looking device is getting me to read more SF, as well as reading online from a world wide network. If I could some how tell my 1965 self who discovered science fiction short stories in little pulp magazines about how his future self would be reading SF it would be very amusing.

Jim

Blogging and the Hive Mind

I’ve always meant to write a “Why I Blog” post and now that I’m listening to The Cult of the Amateur by Andrew Keen this seems like a great time to do it. I googled Keen and many of the reviewers I read just dismissed him out of hand. Keen is essentially calling all us bloggers monkeys with typewriters. He’s not kind to amateur writing and talks as if the Internet is one giant slush pile that is assaulting the true quality writing that comes from traditional publishing.

Keen does make some good points. One point he champions over and over is culture is better served by the expression of the elite few rather than hearing from the democratic roar of everyone. Keen also suggests the idea that television would produce better shows if there were fewer channels and he also believes the emergence of YouTube dilutes what the average viewer watches down to crapola.

Now I don’t disagree with him. If all the video we watched came from twelve networks then I’d say the average quality of TV would be pretty damn great. In fact, for TV viewing I’d prefer having only twelve networks. I actually miss the days when there were only CBS, NBC and ABC. During those years I felt I had a stronger bond with my friends and family because we all watched the same shows. Three is too few but five hundred is too many. The same math does not apply to the Internet.

Keen believes the time people waste on reading blogs could be better spent on reading professional edited magazines and books. He also believes that the web undermines the economy of traditional publishing. I think in both cases this is true. However, he misses the point on the real value of blogging.

Blogs and blogging actually have many purposes. Few bloggers see themselves competing with Time, Harper’s or Scientific American. Most blogging is social and their posts would be competition with casual conversation rather than paid writers. Some bloggers are just writing public diaries and many others are just following the herd hoping to meet other like-minded creatures.

I do believe there is a small percentage of bloggers who would like to be real writers and use blogging as a form of practice. However, I can’t imagine them wanting to kill off commercial writing because they all secretly hoped to get published and paid too. Many bloggers dream they can make money blogging but Andrew Keen shoots down this idea by interviewing owners of high traffic sites. I also talked about these get-rich-quick bloggers in my post “Has Google Become King of the Spammers?” I don’t equate blogging with these people.

All of this doesn’t discredit Keen’s attack that the web is hurting professional publishing by distracting readers from buying books and magazines. The world of money centers around attracting eyeballs and minds. There is always competition for people’s attention. Even before the Internet parents and educators wanted to recapture the attention of their children and complained the choice kids faced was between quality and drivel. Back then the pundits worried that television was empty calories and books were primo brain food for kiddies. Now Keen is protecting TV from the Internet.

Is Andrew Keen’s book, The Cult of the Amateur just a descendent of Seduction of the Innocent by Fredric Wertham? Both men could be right in their campaign to defend culture but they could also be wrong in that they missed the qualities of a new art form. What does blogging bring to our world that didn’t exist before?

Instead of being passive individuals that consume predigested information produced by the elite, people on the net embrace being active through self-expression. The Internet represents a do-it-yourself revolution. Sure, by the yardstick Keen measures blogging does not measure up – yet. The value is not in what’s being expressed but in the effort people make to express themselves. Blogging represent amateur essayists. I remember back in school when the teacher assigned writing a 500 word essay it would bring about groans. Now millions want to write such essays every day. Is that a bad thing?

Personal computing has always represented a strange kind of revolution and transformation. I helped hundreds of people learn to use a PC back in the 1980s and I always felt sorry for them. Suddenly jobs for secretaries and professors required that they learn all kinds of new skills that was never part of their jobs before. The average worker now has to learn skills once left to specialists like typesetters, graphic layout artists and computer operators. Now the net is expecting little Jacob and Emily to write and edit, and for some to be sound engineers and video production technicians. Is that so bad? Most of the people producing the content for the web are rank amateurs and Keen doesn’t like that. To Keen everyone is practicing the piano and it’s painful to hear.

Personally I think Keen is worrying too much over nothing. He screams the sky is falling by predicting there will be five hundred million blogs by 2010. It’s my theory that blogging will fall out of favor before 1/12 of the human race takes to the blogosphere. There’s a good chance that socializing on the net might be a fad. I say this because I see an awful lot of dead and neglected sites. It takes a lot of work to maintain and grow a site. Blogging isn’t for the lazy. Nor does it have wide appeal.

I do not have any friends my own age that blog. In fact, I have a very hard time getting my friends to even read my posts. Even when I tell my wife that I’m writing about my girlfriends she can’t find motivation to read my writing because the world of blogs isn’t real to her. Now blogging might be an age related activity, or it might be a person-type activity. Most people I know define socializing as meeting other people face-to-face. Blogging is a kind of hive mind socializing that allows certain kinds of people to enjoy communicating in a non-face-to-face mode, and I think that greatly limits the audience.

Which brings me back to why I blog. I always wanted to be a writer because I loved to read. I’ve taken a number of fiction writing courses, including many hours in a MFA program. I also attended the Clarion West writer’s workshop in 2002. It’s a semi-serious hobby that I’ve tried to work at more since I turned 50. Blogging is writing and publishing without an editor. I consider it practice writing. Forcing myself to write 3-4 essays a week is a kind of discipline. And it’s very educational.

Blogging has taught me that I have to entertain readers and that’s very hard to do. When you’re young and want to be a writer you assume you’ll hammer out a novel and people will want to read it. Well, they don’t. I use blogging stats as a tool to measure successful stories, and so far I have not been very successful at all. My best day was hitting 149 readers. And even that number is deceptive because most people come to this site by accident. WordPress shows me the search terms used and it’s obvious in most cases what people want isn’t what I’m offering them.

My two most successful essays “DRM and iTunes and Rhapsody Music” and “Did AAPR Rip Off My Old Mother?” were flukes dealing with topics outside my normal range of interests. That’s actually a great lesson of journalism – write about what people want to know and not what I want to naval gaze. Of course then I’d always be writing about Brittany Spears or how to create web sites that brings hordes to Adsense links. I have a lot of room to learn and practice. There are zillions of great essays to study and my hope is to find many models to work from. Eventually I’ll write posts that succeed in the way I want.

I also blog to make friends. My wife had to take a job out of town and I spend a lot of time in my house alone. This has forced me to socialize more with face-to-face friends, but I also find blogging to generate good company. I love the passion that my fellow bloggers show for their subject matter. I admire many for their skills and I study them hoping to improve myself. I see blogging as a self-improvement hobby.

I have also discovered a by-product of blogging that is very beneficial to me. In recent years my memory has gotten more sieve like. Since I’ve started blogging I’ve slowly changed and I’m now retrieving words better. I worried I was on the road to Alzheimer-land. Blogging is good for my mind and helps me learn discipline. Keen is right – I don’t write as well as a professional writer. However, that doesn’t mean I don’t want to improve. Blogging challenges me to improve every day. I read other blogs and admire what they have done and that pushes me to do better. I read professional magazines and study their quality and that makes me want to write better too. Keen missed this whole angle that deals with self-improvement.

Finally, blogging makes the world smaller. There is a hive mind quality about the Internet. I think of the Internet as a sixth sense and it disturbs me that my friends only live in the world of five senses. This is both metaphorical and real. I think Andrew Keen devalues this new kind of neural network of bits and bytes in which we’re all a synapse. Keen really hates Wikipedia and fails to credit the hive mind for creating something both useful and wonderful.

I think Keen has some valid criticisms in The Cult of the Amateur and I’m going to return to them time and again. I think blogging, YouTube, Wikipedia and all the other products of the net can be improved. Many magnitudes of evolution will happen on the net in the next ten years. Reading Andrew Keen won’t save the old ways of things, but his criticisms will help us to grow stronger. Keen fails to see the competition of the fittest angle is this brouhaha. I think traditional publishing will survive and thrive and the net will only get more powerful too.

Jim