André Klein's Blog, page 21

Associative Doing: a Theoretical Model for Work in a Hyper-linked World

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For many people, the Internet has become an irreplacable part of both work and entertainment. Whether we’re sending an email to our boss, marathon watching series on Netflix, doing research, shopping on Amazon, managing our online bank accounts, or just idling on Facebook, the fun part and the work part often run very closely alongside each other.

It has almost become a cliché to complain about procrastination caused by the Internet. It’s like a giant hall of mirrors, reflecting us back to ourselves in a myriad different ways: one moment we’re leaving an angry comment on a YouTube video, the next we’re sharing inspirational platitudes on Social Media. The Internet is like a neverending roadside show of baby animals, amateur acrobats, live concerts and high school reunions.

And it all begs the question: How the hell are we going to get any work done in this place?

Fuzziness of Attention

In a world of instant notifications, sounds and popup windows, our attention is in a constant state of disruption. As Linda Stone once said, we are suffering from “constant partial attention”. In other words, we’re never fully paying attention, part of us is always wrapped up in that advertising flashing in our peripheral vision, that email notification sound, the little red numbers accumulating on our Social Media apps.

Multitasking has been our instinctive response, but it’s less of a coping strategy and more of a desperate measure, because it creates a lot of stress and often doesn’t bear any fruit — as the old saying goes: “hunt many rabbits, catch none”

The Assembly Line Model Of Work

In the assembly line model of work (Fig. 1), there are three distinctive steps or stages, connected in a linear way. First, there is an idea, then there’s the action or applicaton and at the end there’s the outcome.

This chain works very well, as long as there are no distractions, no phone calls, instant messages, tempting funny videos just a click away and so on and so forth.

The only way to still follow this chain in an always-online word is with strict discipline. That means, disabling all popups, notifications, putting your phone on mute and removing any potential distractions.

It’s still a valid strategy and “Digital Discipline” or “Attention Hygiene” should be an essential part of high school curriculums worldwide.

However, we should also be aware that we’re applying an outdated model to a changed landscape. The Internet is not a perilous territory against which we have to protect ourselves by all means, guarding our attention and clarity of mind like a ninja in the night.

And maybe we can’t change the way the world works, but we can certainly change the way we work with it.

From Assembly Lines to Hyperlinks

Each tiny piece of data on the Internet is linked to a million others, not in a linear fashion, but more like a web.

Everyone of us has experienced the phenomenon of going to Wikipedia about a certain topic of interest, clicking a Hyperlink, another one, and another one until we barely remember what it was we started with.

Associative Thinking

Associative thinking is defined as “an unconscious or uncontrolled cognitive activity in which the mind wanders.”

In a way, this describes the way we behave online. When we let our digital guard down, we tend to wander aimlessly from one webpage to the next, bobbing along the waves of our newsfeeds, lazily scrolling through comment-sections and related posts until we find something that tickles our fancy.

Instead of fighting this kind of behavior as “unproductive” or incompatible with the assembly line model of work, maybe we could embrace it and integrate it with the way we operate online?

Associative Doing

In this new model of work (Fig. 2) which I’d like to call “associative doing” we’re not just aimlessly drifting. We’re still following a course, but we’re also open to opportunity. Instead of only one thought, one action, one outcome, there are always multiple thoughts, actions and outcomes.

Associative thinking is often linked to creativity because it’s like day-dreaming. It’s in that semi-aware state that humanity’s greatest discoveries were made. It’s when we stop controlling our attention too much that we often stumble upon simple or elegant solutions we never would have thought about.

Associative doing implies the application of associative thinking to our course of action in a hyperlinked world.

We might start with the thought of writing an article, but during our preliminary research we find something, share it on Social Media, and a friend comments about it. We exchange a few messages, the friend sends you a link, and through this link you’ll find another link which completely changes your initial thought or thesis. From this renewed discovery we might end up with a significantly changed outcome or even start a new chain of work.

Adjusting Our Focal Length

In the assembly-line model we do one thing after the other, often with great efficency and productivity but our attention becomes over-focused and we miss out on unplanned discoveries (serendipity).

In the multitasking approach we try do everything at once and don’t get anything done.

As noted before, sometimes it’s just best to put on blinders and power through without noticing anything else.

In the “associative doing” model, however, we follow a loose course but we don’t close off our peripheral vision.

We don’t do one thing after the other or everything at once but everything at its time.

How to distinguish when to block of or to welcome a “distracting” factor is impossible to formalize. It might just be a matter of being in the moment and working it out as one goes along …

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About the author: André Klein was born in Germany, has grown up and lived in many different places including Thailand, Sweden and Israel. He has produced two music albums, performed and organized literary readings, curated an experimental television program and is the author of various short stories and non-fiction works.

   

Who Wants To Write A Book With Us?

There’s something magical about making books. Thanks to the advent of independent or self-publishing, the process has become a lot easier and more accessible.

About one month ago I thought about how to share this exciting experience with more people. Should I write more tutorials about independent publishing? Well, I’ve already done that, and besides, there are already thousands of good instructions out there. Google and ye shall find!

So I thought, let’s do an experiment instead! What If I asked friends and colleagues I know from the (online) education field to write a book together that will help people learn English?

1. What’s the Book About

Since I’ve had a lot of positive feedback about my stories for German learners, so I thought we might try something similar in English. This collaborative book project will contain a collection of stories with vocabulary and comprehension questions, written by you!

The book will be released as ebook and paperback, first through Amazon, later on other online stores.

2. How Does It Work

Each one of you who wants to participate will write a short text (fiction or non-fiction, 500-1000 words), add explanations for difficult words and 5-10 comprehension questions. Also, you have the possibility to add some art or even scribbles.

3. Who Can Participate?

Basically, anyone with above average English skills (not just native speakers) can participate. You don’t have to be an English teacher but it helps if you have some teaching and writing experience.

4. What Do Authors Get?

Since this is an experimental project I can’t offer money for your participation. However, there are other benefits. First of all, you’ll get your name into online bookstores and can point people to a published work or show off a paperback to friends and family. Secondly, each author will appear in the book with picture, short biography and most importantly, links and ways to contact him/her for lessons (if he/she is a teacher) or other services. Last but not least, this project is an invitation to start making books and will hopefully inspire more teachers or budding authors to release their work.

5. Who’s Participating?

So far, a number of people from the online education space have signed up. Among them are Sylvia Guinan from sylviasenglishonline.org, Kerstin Hammes from fluentlanguage.co.uk, Michael Gyori from mauilanguage.com, Jason Levine from colloandspark.com, Benjamin Stewart, Chris Workman from learnbritishenglish.co.uk and Mau Buchler from tripppin.com.

6. Okay, Where Do I Sign Up?

If you want to participate, just download this template document and follow the instructions.

IMPORTANT: We’re now in the stage of collecting stories. If you want to participate, please make sure to send in your submission until the 15th of July!

[ Note: We reserve the right not to publish all submissions. ]

More Information

Benjamin asked me yesterday to have a little talk about this project and we had a lot fun. Watch the video:

 

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About the author: André Klein was born in Germany, has grown up and lived in many different places including Thailand, Sweden and Israel. He has produced two music albums, performed and organized literary readings, curated an experimental television program and is the author of various short stories and non-fiction works.

   

After The Hype: The Web Is Growing Up

Yesterday I read a post by Kirsten Winkler in which she noted that “there is no innovation, just some iteration and lots of hype” in the (education) technology world at the moment.

Is this just a temporary phase before the next big breakthrough? Or are we perhaps developing a kind of tolerance to technological innovation and the way it is marketed?

The Anatomy Of Hype

In the beginning advertising was a pretty straightforward business. It usually consisted of a) making people aware of the product and b) listing the benefits of the product.  Since then, advertising has become much more psychological.

Advertising is based on one thing: happiness. And do you know what happiness is? Happiness is the smell of a new car. It’s freedom from fear. It’s a billboard on the side of a road that screams with reassurance that whatever you’re doing is OK. You are OK.  - Don Draper

Mobile phones and consumer technology are the cars of today. They are marketed in a very similar way. We see beautiful people smiling through Instagram filters, hair waving in the wind in slow motion, a lens-flare between trees, time-lapse sunrises, all telling us: this technology will make you feel loved and alive.

A second trope of marketing new online services or products is the “quirky” demo video which features faux hand-drawn user interfaces, 3-step explanations and the everpresent “lighthearted banjo” music.

Last but not least, there is the pseudo-documentary approach, where we see (mostly white) people with glasses and high foreheads talking casually and sincerely (I wonder how many takes they need) about the sophistication of their work, preferably on a white background.

Many times, these three different forms of advertising are mixed together. It has been the standard approach for the last few years. On top of that, every new “The New Facebook” or “The Next Instagram” is written about extensively on tech-blogs that masquerade product placement as journalism, feeding their “news coverage” through the echo chambers of Social Media.

Too Many MCs, Not Enough Mics

Advertising and marketing aside, there is also the very real possibility that the tech market is reaching over-saturation. How many photography apps does a person really need? Do we really want to sign up for yet another social network? In times when it’s not just a paranoiac’s fantasy but a proven fact that the government is collecting everything we do online, are we really so eager to fill out yet another profile with personal information?

New start-ups are born and dying every day, all clamoring for our attention, fueled only by their own hype.

We drank the Kool-Aid and went all-in. By the time demo day came around, we had cheques being written and were all over the press. Still, I had this nagging feeling eating away at me. That nagging feeling was disbelief. –  My Startup has 30 Days To Live

Let’s be honest. After the first few years of Social Media hype we’ve come to know not just the warm fuzzy feelings of connection but als  the pressure of maintaining one’s social presence, the terror of esoteric “privacy” settings and the annoyance of redundant notifications that are constantly nagging for our attention.

The Web Is Growing Up

In about one month, the World Wide Web will celebrate its 22th birthday. It was “born” on August 6, 1991 when Sir Tim Berners-Lee launched the first webpage in history.

And although it’s still far from being an adult, we are slowly leaving behind the teenage years of reckless experimentation, the fights for individuation and finding one’s own place. The Internet has become an inseparable part of everyday life. We use it to find things, buy stuff and connect to family and friends.

Maybe this is the time to stop waiting for the “next big thing”, to cancel your subscription to the party-line of bigger, better, stronger, faster, take a good look at what we already have and what we can actually do with it.

In the end, it’s not the platform that is important, but what you build on it.

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About the author: André Klein was born in Germany, has grown up and lived in many different places including Thailand, Sweden and Israel. He has produced two music albums, performed and organized literary readings, curated an experimental television program and is the author of various short stories and non-fiction works.

   

The Beast of Untamed Time

There used to be a time when we had to wait 7 days for the next episode of our favorite TV-series; when we needed to hang on until the next morning for our latest fix of news; when a written message from friends and family took many days to arrive.

Waiting Is History

We don’t wait for new books, video games or music albums to appear on shelves or on our doorstop, we download them instantly. Only limited by the speed and bandwidth of our connections, we rush from activity to activity, sequenced by the everpresent drum of the progress bar.

There are “20 minutes left in this chapter”, “6 songs to go”, “34 seconds until download completion”, x number of breaths left in this body.

In the age of immediate gratification, everything that’s not instaneous is automatically suspicious. Time is not an element. The clock doesn’t count our breaths in soft sweeps of hands. Time is allotted, slotted, cut, wasted and killed.

In the remains of these shattered days and hours we live out our lives timed by the steady tapping of fingers on keyboards, wiping and sweeping, clicking, opening, closing, sharing, staring.

“Clocks slay time… time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life.” ― William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury

The Life-Cycle Of Lines

We went from milking cows to instant milk, from working the land to landing a job, from farming the earth to server-farms.

We’re still aware of autumn, winter, spring and summer. There are times to turn on the heating, times to turn on the air-conditioning, maintaining the perfect comfort levels regardless of external conditions.

Our inner senses are regulated by the flows of our newsfeeds, the stories we read, the music we hear, our thoughts crowdsourced gyrations around the navel of popular culture.

The ancient rhythm of seeds, growth and harvest was tuned to the cycle of the year, the seamless transition of seasons. The life span of start-ups follows the principle of cash and burn; grow big quickly or be swallowed by the competition: write more blog-posts, spin a hype, feed your Facebook, buy more ads, drink your own kool-aid, act fast and ask questions later.

Our work is just a reflection, an aspect of our lives. And yet, we become our work. Our “quantified selves” are scattered on spreadsheets and archived for further analysis. Between the lines we search for a sense of … something, maybe, perhaps – the hope of optimization, “making the world a better place”, hacking the human machine to run more efficiently, dangerously close to overclocking our hearts and minds.

If time is money, where are the rescue packages for the hyperinflation of hours and days, where are the moments which aren’t managed? Do we really love efficiency with a fiery passion, or are we just afraid of untamed time?

“…I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire…I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all of your breath trying to conquer it.”― op. cit.

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About the author: André Klein was born in Germany, has grown up and lived in many different places including Thailand, Sweden and Israel. He has produced two music albums, performed and organized literary readings, curated an experimental television program and is the author of various short stories and non-fiction works.

   

Untamed Time In The Age Of Productivity

There used to be a time when we had to wait 7 days for the next episode of our favorite TV-series; when we needed to hang on until the next morning for our latest fix of news; when a written message from friends and family took many days to arrive.

Waiting Is History

We don’t wait for new books, video games or music albums to appear on shelves or on our doorstop, we download them instantly. Only limited by the speed and bandwidth of our connections, we rush from activity to activity, sequenced by the everpresent drum of the progress bar.

There are “20 minutes left in this chapter”, “6 songs to go”, “34 seconds until download completion”, x number of breaths left in this body.

In the age of immediate gratification, everything that’s not instaneous is automatically suspicious. Time is not an element. The clock doesn’t count our breaths in soft sweeps of hands. Time is allotted, slotted, cut, wasted and killed.

In the remains of these shattered days and hours we live out our lives timed by the steady tapping of fingers on keyboards, wiping and sweeping, clicking, opening, closing, sharing, staring.

“Clocks slay time… time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life.” ― William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury

The Life-Cycle Of Lines

We went from milking cows to instant milk, from working the land to landing a job, from farming the earth to server-farms.

We’re still aware of autumn, winter, spring and summer. There are times to turn on the heating, times to turn on the air-conditioning, maintaining the perfect comfort levels regardless of external conditions.

Our inner senses are regulated by the flows of our newsfeeds, the stories we read, the music we hear, our thoughts crowdsourced gyrations around the navel of popular culture.

The ancient rhythm of seeds, growth and harvest was tuned to the cycle of the year, the seamless transition of seasons. The life span of start-ups follows the principle of cash and burn; grow big quickly or be swallowed by the competition: write more blog-posts, spin a hype, feed your Facebook, buy more ads, drink your own kool-aid, act fast and ask questions later.

Our work is just a reflection, an aspect of our lives. And yet, we become our work. Our “quantified selves” are scattered on spreadsheets and archived for further analysis. Between the lines we search for a sense of … something, maybe, perhaps – the hope of optimization, “making the world a better place”, hacking the human machine to run more efficiently, dangerously close to overclocking our hearts and minds.

If time is money, where are the rescue packages for the hyperinflation of hours and days, where are the moments which aren’t managed? Do we really love efficiency with a fiery passion, or are we just afraid of untamed time?

“…I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire…I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all of your breath trying to conquer it.”― op. cit.

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Time Management For Freelancers And Power Procrastinators24 Shortcut Cheatsheets For Everything From iTunes To PhotoshopBrilliant Tools For Distraction-Free WritingNailing the Coffin on “Internet Addiction”How To Create A Simple Google Chrome App In Less Than 5 Minutes

About the author: André Klein was born in Germany, has grown up and lived in many different places including Thailand, Sweden and Israel. He has produced two music albums, performed and organized literary readings, curated an experimental television program and is the author of various short stories and non-fiction works.

   

Why Making Books Is Like Baking Cookies

Making books is fun. In fact, it’s rather addictive. Once you get started, it’s hard to stop. The process of bookmaking has long been in the hands of a small intellectual elite, heavily guarded by cultural gatekeepers. The internet has disrupted this machinery and exposed its arbitrary rules of admissions.

Now, everyone can make books — at least theoretically — and distribute them on a global scale across a multitude of different ereading devices or in the form of the time-tested paperback. Whether it’s a good or bad thing that every Tom, Dick and Harry can now write and publish their thoughts is irrelevant, because it doesn’t change the fact that they can.

Making books used to be a prestigious business, in some ways it’s still viewed as such, but our ideas are changing slower than our technology. No matter what we might think about it, making books has become more accessible and more transparent than it has ever been before.

Putting The Pieces Together

In some ways, making books has always been a highly compartmentalized business. There was someone who wrote a manuscript, someone who presented it to publishing houses, someone who edited it, someone who designed a cover, someone who printed it, someone who marketed it, someone who sold it, etc.

In the age of independent publishing, a term that has come to replace the outdated and stigmatized self-publishing, all these someones above have merged into one and the same person — let’s call this person the bookmaker (for lack of a better term).

He’s not just a writer, she’s not just an editor, graphic designer or a marketer, but all of it — at least to some degree. And even if he summons other people to help with editing, design, etc. the main responsibility still sits with the bookmaker who prepares, writes and directs the process, and oversees the production from start to finish.

While this bookmaker obviously requires a broad range of different skills, both technical and social, and the work is by no means trivial — the overall process of making a book has been simplified, nevertheless.

Instead of being a compartmentalized process split and segmented across a vast territory of different people, schedules and interests, the process has become more natural, more wholesome, in the sense that one person shapes and molds the book from beginning to end.

From Rocket-Science To Handcrafting

If bookmaking used to be like building airplanes, it has now become more similar to making cookies. Despite — as said above — requiring a wide range of specialized skills, the overall process is not one of over-specialization. The cookie maker gathers the ingredients (preparation), makes the dough (first draft), shapes it into cookies (editing), bakes them (publishing) and offers them for eating (distribution).

Asking how one person could possibly create a quality book without publishing houses and agents is like asking how your grandma could bake cookies without trained industry specialists! All she needs is the ingredients, a recipe (or idea) and an oven, doesn’t she?

Of course we’ve always been able to create manuscripts with a typewriter or even a pencil. But — without stretching the metaphor too far — it’s the “oven” technologies of print-on-demand and direct e-publishing which have made all the big difference in recent years.

While the gatekeepers still would have us believe that without their specialists the survival of good writing is endangered, it’s actually their privileged process which is in jeopardy.

We have the ideas, the technology and the willingness to venture into new terrain. And as much as the specialists may be specialized, there’s simply nothing like the taste of home-made cookies.

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About the author: André Klein was born in Germany, has grown up and lived in many different places including Thailand, Sweden and Israel. He has produced two music albums, performed and organized literary readings, curated an experimental television program and is the author of various short stories and non-fiction works.

   

3 Writing Tools You Aren’t Using Yet

If there’s anything I’ve learned over the course of the last 15 years of writing, then it’s probably the fact that writing is a craft like any other. Listening to one’s “muse” and getting inspired is all great, but ultimately, if you don’t control the writing, it controls you!

And even beyond the mere mechanics of sentence construction and interpunction — since writing in the 21st century is digital — there is the meta-craft of handling your writing most efficently and painlessly on a computer, juggling paragraphs from software to software without getting distracted by the infinite amusement park of the interwebs.

1. Signal To Noise: Music, White Noise Or Silence?

Talking about distraction, it all starts with the mental and physical work space. Many people who work in offices or noisy environments tend to work with headphones on, and although listening to music can actually have a counter-productive effect, it still avails a sense of isolation (shutting out external sounds) and focus (being in one’s own space).

For those of us who like the benefits of headphones but despise the distraction effect, there is always the option of white noise generators — but there’s also a new tool for listening to music which is actually built around being productive.

The service is called “Focus@Will” and describes itself as a “neuroscience based web tool that uses phase sequenced instrumental music to increase your attention span up to 400% when working, studying, writing and reading.”

As someone who’s always loved listening to music while writing as much as I hated the distracting effects this almost sounded too good to be true.

For the last week, I’ve been testing Focus@Will and I’m very pleased with it. The way it works is that you set a time you want to focus, e.g. 100 minutes, 60 minutes, etc., select a music style and press play.

I can’t speak to the the science behind it, but the selection of music is really great (interesting enough to keep going, but not interfering with the conscious part of the brain required for writing), one track fades seamlessly into the next and gently lifts you into the “zone”.

2. Copy & Paste Galore: The scourge of unwanted formatting

For most writers nowadays, copying and pasting is part of the daily process. Whether it’s quotes, definitions or cross-posting paragraphs from different manuscripts, we all need it.

One annoying aspect of copying and pasting stuff from one application into another is that it sometimes copies the formatting, as well, i.e. bold, italic, font, etc.

In many cases, there’s a quick workaround. Instead of pressing CTRL + V to paste something, CTRL + Shift + V pastes the pure text without formatting. As much as I was overjoyed when I first found it out, I noticed that it doesn’t work with all programs. For example, in Open Office when you do CTRL + Shift + V you get a little popup asking you how to paste, and while “pure unformatted text” is part of the options, when you’re pasting a lot, this popup is an annoying extra-step.

Luckily, there’s a little free tool called “Pure Text”. It runs in the background, you assign it a certain hotkey, and by pressing it it always pastes the immaculate text, without formatting, wherever you are. (Mac users take a look at this alternative)

3. Explode Your Browser: Reclaim Your Text Fields

Another tool that I’ve been using recently is called “Text Editor Anywhere“. It’s the perfect antidote to the current epidemic trend of running everything in a web-browser.

I have nothing against filling out a quick form in a web-browser, but anything that is longer than a few lines is hazardous. Depending on all the other things running in the background, browsers tend to crash, tabs accidentally get closed, stuff gets lost.

“Text Editor Anywhere” is a little tool that allows you to fill any web-based text forms with the text-editor of your choice. For example, I’m currently writing this blogpost on WordPress, but instead of using the web-based text editor, I’m writing this in Write Monkey, my favorite writing tool.

The way it works is simple. The tool runs in the background, you set a hotkey, and whenever you see a text field in your browser, press it and fill the field with your favorite text editor. (Mac users take a look at this alternative)

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About the author: André Klein was born in Germany, has grown up and lived in many different places including Thailand, Sweden and Israel. He has produced two music albums, performed and organized literary readings, curated an experimental television program and is the author of various short stories and non-fiction works.

   

Why TV-Series Are The New Great Novels

Whether it’s award-winning series like Mad Men, Game of Thrones, Breaking Bad or Downton Abbey — TV-series are thriving in the Internet age. Their stories and characters occupy people from all over the world, feeding back into discussions on blog posts, forums and Social Media. The reason for their success lies not only in great writing and production — TV-series have become the most characteristic narrative medium of the 21st century.

TV-Series Without TV (consumption & production)

Although we still talk about television series, we tend to watch them everywhere, on mobile phones, tablets and gaming consoles — just not on television. Not everyone has a cable television subscription, but we all have Internet. Whether people pay a few dollars for a Netflix subscription to feed their binge-watching habit or pirate new seasons through BitTorrent before they come out, the television as a delivery mechanism for television series seems increasingly irrelevant.

The first season of House of Cards is maybe the best proof that television networks aren’t just unnecessary for the distribution of high quality TV-series, they aren’t even necessary for their production!

In some ways, it’s similar to the “Rise of the Novel” in the 18th century when literature suddenly became a huge market. It wasn’t necessary anymore to go to a theater to consume a good story, one could snuggle up with one of the thousands of new books that were produced every year. Stories (in their written form) had suddenly become mobile, resulting in increased public appreciation and an explosion of media coverage.

The Show Must Go On (continuity & serialization)

Compared to an average feature film, TV-series have an addictive quality. The story and characters live in the viewer’s head not just for an evening’s sitting but for many months or even years! Each episode solves some conflicts, only to throw up more, promising surprising new turns if only we “tune in next week”. The Internet has disrupted the mechanism of weekly releases, allowing for a completely new immersive experience: the viewing marathon, in which a year’s worth of weekly episodes are consumed over the course of one weekend.

Let’s look at the experience of reading a novel. It’s not a matter of delving into a story for one and a half hours, it can take many days, weeks or even months to finish a challenging book. On some days, a reader will make great progress, reading for many hours in one sitting, at other times there’s just room for a quick chapter here and there. In other words, it’s completely “on-demand”.

In that sense, the technological possibility of the marathon has made the process of consuming TV-series much more similar to the consumption of novels. It’s about immersion and personalization (whenever, wherever).

Interestingly, the written word has gone through a similar process. In the 17th century, despite the growth of movable type, the process of printing was still expensive, so books were released in serialized form:

[T]o reduce the price and expand the market, publishers produced large works in lower-cost installments called fascicles – wiki

When we speak about “serial literature” today, we often think about the 19th century with Dickens’ The Pickwick Papers and many other works which first appeared in monthly or weekly installments in magazines or newspapers. But whether it’s the fascicle which appeared before the “Rise of the Novel” or the Victorian serialized novel which rode its crest — at one point or another, the complete novel as we know it today began to replace an episodic reading experience with a more continuous one.

As a sidenote, it’s interesting that serial literature is experiencing a comeback of sorts in the ebook age, just like TV-series are thriving in the post-TV streaming era.

Salons & Coffeehouses (social & coverage)

When a new season of Mad Men (or any other hugely popular series) comes out, all major online news sources report it and the Social Media sphere is abuzz with hopes, expectations and spoiler alerts. Not even movies get that kind of media coverage anymore. And even if there isn’t a new season, there’s always someone somewhere watching an episode and tweeting or blogging about it. It’s an advertiser’s wet dream: constant coverage.

While new movies get less attention than TV-series, novels get even less. Once in a while there is a “Fifty Shades of Grey” which everyone talks about because of its novelty value, but in general there is no serious mass-interest in written stories, at least not in a public sense. This is not recent news. Already in the first half of the 20th century magazines and newspapers stopped printing periodical fiction as radio and television became the primary entertainment medium and periodic print media shifted towards news and information.

Whereas news coverage of TV-series is at an all-time high, novels don’t really have a platform anymore outside of close-knit exclusive circles. In a very broad sense, news coverage can be seen as just a natural extension of social activity: since everyone watches a particular series or reads a book, everyone talks about it. It’s both reflection of and cause for a cultural item’s popularity.

In the 17th and 18th century the literary salons of Paris shaped a whole culture. These salons, often held by authors themselves in their private home provided a vital forum for discussion and the creation of new works, just like the coffee houses of London. In the 18th and 19th century people began to form book clubs, not only to exchange opinions but also because books were expensive. Newspapers gave critical attention to new publications, libraries and bookstores enjoyed great popularity.

Today, the literary salon and the coffee house has been replaced by Social Media, and with the same vigor in which new books were once discussed, now people talk about the exploits of their favorite TV-series heroes on Twitter and Facebook.

Does all this mean that books are dead? Certainly not. Disruption doesn’t equal destruction. Is there no place for the narrative written word in the Internet age? No, in fact we’re experiencing a revival of reading and writing through the explosion of self-publishing. But perhaps — in the same way the novel was the perfect medium to reflect 17th-19th century life — the format of the TV-series simply serves best as a mirror for our current culture.

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About the author: André Klein was born in Germany, has grown up and lived in many different places including Thailand, Sweden and Israel. He has produced two music albums, performed and organized literary readings, curated an experimental television program and is the author of various short stories and non-fiction works.

   

Why TV-Series Are The New Novels

Whether it’s award-winning series like Mad Men, Game of Thrones, Breaking Bad or Downton Abbey — TV-series are thriving in the Internet age. Their stories and characters occupy people from all over the world, feeding back into discussions on blog posts, forums and Social Media. The reason for their success lies not only in great writing and production but in the fact that the format of TV-series may have become the central narrative medium of the 21st century.

TV-Series Without TV (consumption & production)

Although we still talk about television series, we tend to watch them everywhere, on mobile phones, tablets and gaming consoles — just not on television. Not everyone has a cable television subscription, but we all have Internet. Whether people pay a few dollars for a Netflix subscription to feed their binge-watching habit or pirate new seasons through BitTorrent before they come out, the television as a delivery mechanism for television series seems increasingly irrelevant.

The first season of House of Cards is maybe the best proof that television networks aren’t just unnecessary for the distribution of high quality TV-series, they aren’t even necessary for their production!

In some ways, it’s similar to the “Rise of the Novel” in the 18th century when literature suddenly became a huge market. It wasn’t necessary anymore to go to a theater to consume a good story, one could snuggle up with one of the thousands of new books that were produced every year. Stories (in their written form) had suddenly become mobile, resulting in increased public appreciation and an explosion of media coverage.

The Show Must Go On (continuity & serialization)

Compared to an average feature film, TV-series have an addictive quality. The story and characters live in the viewer’s head not just for an evening’s sitting but for many months or even years! Each episode solves some conflicts, only to throw up more, promising surprising new turns if only we “tune in next week”. The Internet has disrupted the mechanism of weekly releases, allowing for a completely new immersive experience: the viewing marathon, in which a year’s worth of weekly episodes are consumed over the course of one weekend.

Let’s look at the experience of reading a novel. It’s not a matter of delving into a story for one and a half hours, it can take many days, weeks or even months to finish a challenging book. On some days, a reader will make great progress, reading for many hours in one sitting, at other times there’s just room for a quick chapter here and there. In other words, it’s completely “on-demand”.

In that sense, the technological possibility of the marathon has made the process of consuming TV-series much more similar to the consumption of novels. It’s about immersion and personalization (whenever, wherever).

Interestingly, the written word has gone through a similar process. In the 17th century, despite the growth of movable type, the process of printing was still expensive, so books were released in serialized form:

[T]o reduce the price and expand the market, publishers produced large works in lower-cost installments called fascicles – wiki

When we speak about “serial literature” today, we often think about the 19th century with Dickens’ The Pickwick Papers and many other works which first appeared in monthly or weekly installments in magazines or newspapers. But whether it’s the fascicle which appeared before the “Rise of the Novel” or the Victorian serialized novel which rode its crest — at one point or another, the complete novel as we know it today began to replace an episodic reading experience with a more continuous one.

As a sidenote, it’s interesting that serial literature is experiencing a comeback of sorts in the ebook age, just like TV-series are thriving in the post-TV streaming era.

Salons & Coffeehouses (social & coverage)

When a new season of Mad Men (or any other hugely popular series) comes out, all major online news sources report it and the Social Media sphere is abuzz with hopes, expectations and spoiler alerts. Not even movies get that kind of media coverage anymore. And even if there isn’t a new season, there’s always someone somewhere watching an episode and tweeting or blogging about it. It’s an advertiser’s wet dream: constant coverage.

While new movies get less attention than TV-series, novels get even less. Once in a while there is a “Fifty Shades of Grey” which everyone talks about because of its novelty value, but in general there is no serious mass-interest in written stories, at least not in a public sense. This is not recent news. Already in the first half of the 20th century magazines and newspapers stopped printing periodical fiction as radio and television became the primary entertainment medium and periodic print media shifted towards news and information.

Whereas news coverage of TV-series is at an all-time high, novels don’t really have a platform anymore outside of close-knit exclusive circles. In a very broad sense, news coverage can be seen as just a natural extension of social activity: since everyone watches a particular series or reads a book, everyone talks about it. It’s both reflection of and cause for a cultural item’s popularity.

In the 17th and 18th century the literary salons of Paris shaped a whole culture. These salons, often held by authors themselves in their private home provided a vital forum for discussion and the creation of new works, just like the coffee houses of London. In the 18th and 19th century people began to form book clubs, not only to exchange opinions but also because books were expensive. Newspapers gave critical attention to new publications, libraries and bookstores enjoyed great popularity.

Today, the literary salon and the coffee house has been replaced by Social Media, and with the same vigor in which new books were once discussed, now people talk about the exploits of their favorite TV-series heroes on Twitter and Facebook.

Does all this mean that books are dead? Certainly not. Disruption doesn’t equal destruction. Is there no place for the narrative written word in the Internet age? No, in fact we’re experiencing a revival of reading and writing through the explosion of self-publishing. But perhaps — in the same way the novel was the perfect medium to reflect 17th-19th century life — the format of the TV-series simply serves best as a mirror for our current culture.

-

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About the author: André Klein was born in Germany, has grown up and lived in many different places including Thailand, Sweden and Israel. He has produced two music albums, performed and organized literary readings, curated an experimental television program and is the author of various short stories and non-fiction works.

   

Are Typos The “Bugs” Of Written Language?

In the age of instant publishing we have cut out the middleman. Publishing houses are routinely avoided and replaced with the process of self-publishing. Agents and editors are left standing aside, and while quick earnings of self published authors caused a sensation at first, an old problem is coming to the fore again: the typo.

A Brief History Of The Typo From Scribes To Lolcats

Historically, the term typo refers to mistakes in manual type-setting. And yet, even before the printing press, the typo was well known in the form of the “copyist’s mistake” or “scribal error”. As Wikipedia notes: “the term includes errors due to mechanical failure or slips of the hand or finger but excludes errors of ignorance, such as spelling errors.”

In the Internet age the typo has gained new meanings and functions. Besides the common usage of voluntary typos in LOLCat text, such as “teh”, “pwned”, etc. people have found ways to exploit the typo for profit, for example in online auctions such as eBay. When someone submits a pair of “Nike” shoes, for example. and a typo slips into his product description, such as
“Nkie” or “Niek” not many people will find these auctions by searching for “Nike”, except those that have specialized on browsing auctions with typos in order to decrease their bidding competition.

Another phenomenon is “typosquatting”, in which a well-known domain name is registered with a common typo in order to scrape off traffic, i.e. registering “facebool.com”, etc.

Beta-Readers and Bugs

Apart from the above examples in which typos are intentionally exploited, in most cases typos are simply a nuisance and battled wherever we find written text. In the age of the type-writer correction fluid was used to cover the typo, nowadays we quickly correct typos in instant messages by sending another message containing the correct spelling. Due to modern technology we can fix typos almost as quickly as we make them.

In the field of digital self publishing where authors often don’t have the luxury of professional editors or proof-readers, there is a new tendency to recruit “beta-readers” on blogs and Social Media. The term “beta-readers” is a term borrowed from the language of the software release life cycle. A “beta-tester” is a person who tests new software.

Software in the beta phase will generally have many more bugs in it than completed software, as well as speed/performance issues and may still cause crashes or data loss. wiki

It’s not surprising that authors talk about “beta-readers”, since their books are released as software. An ebook is nothing but a very simple piece of software, built to run on a certain set of hardware. And just like the beta-tester, the beta-reader’s role is to find and report bugs in order to improve usability. These kind of “bugs” might be found in erroneous formatting or missing links, but the most common bug is still the typo.

Irreversibility And Instant Updates

Decades of using software has taught us that bugs are an annoying but unavoidable ingredient of computing. There is no software that doesn’t need to be updated. Even big companies like Microsoft fight bugs in the ever-sprawling code of Windows.

However, it seems to me — and I might be wrong — that the typo is still considered a much graver “sin” than a bug. The Guardian, for example, has often been ridiculed for its typos in the print-era, earning it the mock name The Grauniad. And when I see the vehemence with which commenters attack authors of online newspapers over typos, I wonder what makes the typo so much worse than a bug?

One reason might be that we have been conditioned to think of the typo as irreversible, because once a typo was discovered in a printed book there was often nothing one could do. On top of that, writing is personal. Everyone of us has been in a situation of being reprimanded in school for bad spelling. Typos seem to be connected to a sense of incompetence and shame.

We have come to accept bugs in our software because we know they can be easily fixed. If there is a problem in an app, we just need to wait for the update and download it. Developers sometimes take a risk of releasing something quickly, and even if there are bugs in it, they can still be fixed later.

Will we ever reach a similar attitude in book design and publishing, or is there something fundamentally different about the nature of the written word that leads us to demand perfection? Add your comments below.

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img: Etan J. Tal Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported via Wikipedia

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About the author: André Klein was born in Germany, has grown up and lived in many different places including Thailand, Sweden and Israel. He has produced two music albums, performed and organized literary readings, curated an experimental television program and is the author of various short stories and non-fiction works.