The Future of Writing

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0001
Also by John Potts

AFTER THE EVENT: New Perspectives on Art History (co-edited with Charles Merewether)
A HISTORY OF CHARISMA
CULTURE AND TECHNOLOGY (with Andrew Murphie)
RADIO IN AUSTRALIA
TECHNOLOGIES OF MAGIC (co-edited with Edward Scheer)
THE UNACCEPTABLE (co-edited with John Scannell)

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0001
 The Future of Writing
Edited by
John Potts
Macquarie University, Australia

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0001
Introduction, selection and editorial matter © John Potts 
Individual chapters © their contributors 2014
Softcover
f reprint off the hardcover 1st edition 2014 978–1–137–44039–6

All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this

publication may be made without written permission.
No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted
save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence
permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency,
Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS.
Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication
may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work
in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published 2014 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN
Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited,
registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke,
Hampshire RG21 6XS.
Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies
and has companies and representatives throughout the world.
Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States,
the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.

ISBN: 978–1–137–44040–2 PDF

ISBN: 978–1–349–49447–7

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
www.palgrave.com/pivot
doi: ./
 Contents
Acknowledgements vii
Notes on Contributors viii

Introduction 1
John Potts

Part I Writing and Publishing

1 Culture Is the Algorithm 18
Richard Nash
2 When the Web Is the World 27
Kate Eltham
3 Me Myself I: Revaluing Self-Publishing in
the Electronic Age 33
Sherman Young
4 Book Doomsday: The March of Progress
and the Fate of the Book 46
John Potts

Part II Creative Writing

5 Multigraph, Not Monograph: Creative
Writing and New Technologies 58
Nigel Krauth
6 On the Art of Writing with Data 77
Chris Rodley and Andrew Burrell
7 The Design of Writing: 29 Observations 90
Kathryn Millard and Alex Munt

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0001 v
vi Contents

Part III Journalism: Estate 4.0

8 Storytelling in the Digital Age 105
Garry Linnell
9 Reading and Writing the News in the Fifth Estate 115
Jennifer Beckett and Catharine Lumby
10 News Breakers and News Makers in the 24-Hour
Opinion Cycle 127
Lachlan Harris
11 Education and the New Convergent Journalist 135
Mark Evans

Index 149

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0001
 Acknowledgements
The editor wishes to thank the authors who have contri-
buted lively and provocative essays to this book. Some of
the chapters have been developed from papers initially
presented at the Future of Writing Public Symposiums held
at Macquarie University, Australia, in 2012 and 2013. These
symposiums were supported by the Cultural Fund of the
Copyright Agency, Australia, whose financial assistance is
gratefully acknowledged. I also acknowledge the support
of the Department of Media, Music, Communication, and
Cultural Studies at Macquarie University, which was the
host of these symposiums. An earlier version of Chapter 8,
‘Book Doomsday: the March of Progress and the Fate
of the Book’ was published in Meanjin 69 No. 3, 2010. A
special thanks to Felicity Plester at Palgrave Macmillan for
her support in the development of this book.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0002 vii

 Notes on Contributors

Jennifer Beckett received her PhD from the University of

Sydney. She works in the Journalism and Media Research
Centre at the University of New South Wales and in online
and social media at the ABC.
Andrew Burrell is a Sydney-based artist working in virtual
environments, data, code, and networks. He is interested
in the construction of self with regard to the interrelation-
ship of personal identity with memory, imagination, and
narrative, and the way in which networked virtual spaces
influence the interactions that take place as part of this
construction. http://miscellanea.com.
Mark Evans is the co-editor of Perfect Beat: The Pacific
Journal of Research into Contemporary Music and Popular
Culture and author of the book, Open up the Doors: Music in
the Modern Church. He is Associate Professor and Head of
the Media, Music, Communication, and Cultural Studies
Department, Macquarie University, Sydney.
Kate Eltham is the festival director and CEO of Brisbane
Writers Festival. From 2006 to 2012 she was CEO of
Queensland Writers Centre, where she founded if:book
Australia, a think-and-do tank exploring book futures.
Lachlan Harris is the co-founder of the consumer net-
work One Big Switch, and a regular commentator on media
and politics on Channel Nine and 2GB, Sydney, and in
the Sunday Telegraph. Between 2007 and 2010 Lachlan
was senior press secretary to prime minister of Australia,
Kevin Rudd.

viii DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0003

 Notes on Contributors ix

Nigel Krauth is Professor and Head of the Writing Program at Griffith

University, Gold Coast, Australia. He is the co-founding general editor of
TEXT: Journal of writing and writing courses (www.textjournal.com.au).
Garry Linnell is Editorial Director of Fairfax Metro Media, publisher of
the Sydney Morning Herald, and The Age. A former editor-in-chief of The
Bulletin and editor of The Daily Telegraph, he has won a Walkley Award for
feature writing and is currently leading the shift of Fairfax newsrooms
into a digital future.
Catharine Lumby is Professor of Media at Macquarie University and
the author or co-author of six books. She was also a print and television
journalist with the Sydney Morning Herald, the Bulletin, and the ABC.
Kathryn Millard is a writer, dramaturg, and award-winning filmmaker. She
is Professor of Screen and Creative Arts at Macquarie University, Sydney.
Alex Munt is a screenwriter and filmmaker with a background in design.
He is Senior Lecturer in Creative Practices in the Faculty of Social
Sciences at The University of Technology Sydney.
Richard Nash runs content and partnerships for the US start-up Small
Demons. Previously he ran his own social publishing start-up Cursor, a
semi-conventional independent publisher Soft Skull Press, and an experi-
mental theatre company called Liquid Theater.
John Potts is Professor of Media at Macquarie University. He has pub-
lished six books including A History of Charisma and, most recently, The
Unacceptable (co-edited with John Scannell). He has published widely on
media, technology, art history, and intellectual history, and is a founding
editor of Scan Online Journal of Media Arts Culture.
Chris Rodley is a writer for new and old media. His work explores
emerging frontiers for the literary in networked environments and novel
ways of depicting transgressive and marginalised ideas. Past projects
include digital poetry, new media art, and viral videos as well as writing
for television and live performance. He is currently enrolled in a PhD at
the University of Sydney, studying the impact of data on storytelling.
Sherman Young is Professor and Pro-Vice Chancellor of Learning, Teaching,
and Diversity at Macquarie University, Australia where he is a researcher in
the Department of Media, Music, Communications and Cultural Studies.
He is the author of The Book Is Dead, Long Live the Book (2007) and co-author
of Media Convergence (2012) and Beyond 2.0: The Future of Music (2014).

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0003
 Introduction
John Potts

Abstract: The Introduction provides an overview of the ideas

and issues explored in the book. The impact of online and
digital technologies on the publishing industry, on journalism,
and on creative writing, is considered. A brief history of
writing is provided for context, along with a survey of recent
scholarship on the cultural effects of the internet with specific
reference to writing. Potts introduces this volume on the future
of writing with some general observations on the prospects of
writing and reading in the internet age.

Keywords: internet; journalism; technology; writing

John Potts. The Future of Writing. Basingstoke: Palgrave

Macmillan, 2014 doi: 10.1057/9781137440402.0004.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0004 
 John Potts

In the lobby of the New York Times building in Manhattan is an instal-

lation artwork titled Moveable Type. This work by Ben Rubin and Mark
Hansen, installed since 2007, comprises 560 small screens displaying
constantly changing pieces of text. The work is driven by algorithms that
select words from the vast and constantly expanding New York Times
database. This reservoir of text dates back to the newspaper’s founding in
1851, and is as current as the most recent posting on NYTimes.com.
The artists have programmed the work’s algorithms with specific
instructions: for example, sentences beginning with ‘I’ are juxtaposed
with those starting with ‘You’; or sentences ending in question marks
are selected; or the first sentences only of obituaries are included. The
resulting flow of text across the multiple screens reads like a poetic col-
lage of an ever-growing database, or like ‘floating on the newspaper’s
stream of consciousness’.1 Rubin and Hansen have successfully created
a computer-based artwork as organism, one that is ‘living and breathing
and consuming the news’.2 In the daytime, the text running across the
screens provides some oblique indication of the day’s biggest events; at
night, the artwork rummages, Finnegans Wake-style, through the news-
paper’s dreams, through articles, captions, and headlines stored in the
database going back generations.3
The artwork’s title Moveable Type refers to the older printing press
technology on which the New York Times was originally based, but this
Moveable Type is a work made possible by a much more recent set of
technologies. The networking of computers linking databases across the
internet has also produced a new type of writing. This mode of writ-
ing, emergent only since the mid-1990s, has been described as ‘big data
literature’, as non-linear or dynamic writing. It has moved beyond the
‘death of the author’ to a reconstituted author-as-algorithm (although the
artist-programmers maintain some initial authorship in their construc-
tion of algorithms and setting of parameters). The works produced by
this electronic writing are constantly shifting, changing, and growing, as
the algorithms generate ever-new combinations of words and sentences.
The works speak a new language, which is that of computer-based media
(once called ‘new media’). The basis of this language is the database,
identified by theorist Lev Manovich as the core of new media design,
replacing the narrative which had previously served as the basis of litera-
ture and cinema.4
Moveable Type provides an apt starting point for this series of essays on
the future of writing. A work of big data made possible by sophisticated

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0004
 Introduction 

computers and the mass-linking of the internet, it is nevertheless

housed within the premises of an august newspaper, which, like most
newspapers in the twenty-first century, has suffered serious decline in
circulation and profits. Moveable Type is driven by computer algorithms,
but its source material – the content of its database – is the archive of a
print newspaper stretching back to the middle of the nineteenth century.
It is an amalgam of old and new, as its title suggests. Its particular spe-
cies of dynamic writing looks forward to the online news items to be
posted tomorrow, while it also looks back to the history of newspaper
production stored in its archives. It is perhaps also fitting that this new-
est of writing technologies can be experienced within the building of a
newspaper, the media form whose future is most suspect in the age of
the internet.
This book is a collection of essays engaging with the prospects for
writing in the digital online environment. Attention is given to writing
in a wide range of forms and contexts: contributors to the book include
publishers, editors, journalists, writers, bloggers, start-up entrepreneurs,
media studies scholars, and media commentators. The book draws
together perspectives on the future of writing in publishing, journalism,
and online sites. Discussion ranges across the challenges and opportuni-
ties for writing and publishing in the context of new content platforms,
formats, and distribution networks, including e-books, online news and
publishing, and social media.
The future of writing is assayed in this book from a number of different
perspectives. An online start-up entrepreneur sees possibilities for new
forms of writing and interaction in the sphere of ‘Big Data’. A newspaper
editor notes with concern drastically falling circulation and advertising
in print newspapers, but also identifies the potential of online news. A
writer explores the differences between traditional book publishing and
e-book publishing, and the scope for transforming the reading experi-
ence offered by multimedia publishing. Media scholars observe the
transformations brought to news journalism by Twitter and its rapid
140-character bursts, while the means of teaching convergent journalism
to university students are examined. Elsewhere in this collection, the
tension between news and opinion in online media is studied, while in
publishing, the new possibilities for self-publishing are explored, as is
the future of that two-thousand-year-old media form, the book.
In considering the future of writing, some contributors to this book
focus on the practices of writing – Kathryn Millard and Alex Munt on

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0004
 John Potts

hybrid, screen-based writing, and Chris Rodley and Andrew Burrell

on writing with big data – while others examine the institutions and
formats of writing, publishing, and journalism. In this regard, rapid
change is the recurring theme. Only 15 years ago, the primary vehicles
for writing were as they had been for many decades, if not centuries:
the printed newspaper for journalism, the magazine for longer articles
and entertainment, the printed book for fiction and non-fiction. Today
the printed newspaper is in terminal decline, as only a small minority
of newsreaders still avail themselves of newsprint; magazines are closing
regularly or steadily losing circulation; and the printed book – it has been
confidently predicted – will soon be replaced by the eco-friendly, light,
clean, and digital e-book or other forms of digital online transmission.
All the chapters in this book engage with the transformations – ‘disrup-
tion’ is also a favoured descriptive word – brought to the world of writing
by online technologies. In the domain of journalism, these disruptions
include the emphasis on speed in breaking news stories in the age of
Twitter, whereby the 24/7 news cycle has accelerated: the cycle is now the
length of time it takes to type 140 characters.
Although the technological developments at the base of these transfor-
mations are relatively recent, a sizeable literature has already arisen. New
media theorists and artists began pondering the future of writing soon
after the advent of the World Wide Web in 1993. Theorist Pierre Levy
wrote of a ‘superlanguage’ of the future in 1994, one which would explore
the new ‘sophisticated possibilities of thought and expression opened up
by virtual worlds, multimodal simulations, the dynamic techniques of
writing.’5 A welter of experimental writing emerged from the mid-1990s,
exploiting the possibilities of internet writing and computer-based com-
position incorporating text, still and moving image, audio, design, and
the hyperlink connections celebrated by net-writer Mark Amerika as ‘I
link therefore I am.’
Responding in 2000 to the question ‘What in the World Wide Web
is happening to writing?’ Amerika proposed that internet writing,
with its capacity for collaborative multimodal projects, was ‘radically
refiguring the writer into a kind of Internet artist’.6 The trAce Online
Writing Community, which now exists as an online archive of a decade
of experimental internet writing from 1995,7 demonstrated some of the
possibilities of online writing, in which collaborative projects featured
multiple authors, multiple inputs, and multiple modes of expression,
including image, design, sound, and text. For Amerika, these early

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0004
 Introduction 

attempts pointed the way to future writing projects, defying catego-

risation while ‘maintaining an allegiance to the suppleness of nervous
words, sonorous syntax, vocal microparticulars, animated image texts,
and unsung e-motions.’8
Multimodal writing finds expression today in the app-book, the dig-
ital successor to the paper book that can incorporate text, sound, still
and moving images, background research, commentary, and interactiv-
ity – in a format that Nigel Krauth, in Chapter 5 of this book, calls not
the monograph but the multigraph. This is one vision of the future of
writing.
It may be objected that internet artworks remain a minority concern;
certainly large-scale works such as Moveable Type are expensive to
mount and are largely the province of electronic arts. It has also been
observed that the digital app-book has attracted very few readers, or
users.9 A far more widespread transformation in the practice of writing
may be observed in the domain of texting and social media. While many
obituaries have recently been written for newspapers, magazines, and
publishing houses, it is also apparent that today more people are writ-
ing than ever. Teenagers use their mobile phones to text endlessly, while
individuals blog and communicate profusely through Facebook pages
and other social media. Such is the rampant love of messaging that we
have entered a stage of info-philia, an overwhelming need to check for
new information. Much of this information is in written form. News is
increasingly delivered by the high-speed express of Twitter.
In the wake of Web 2.0 of 2004, social media has become a dominant
domain of writing. Lev Manovich has observed that social media writing
moves beyond the opposition between database and narrative that once
defined digital culture. In social media, the data stream, not the database,
is dominant. Facebook and Twitter present a constant stream of data, in
small bursts, so that the user ‘experiences the continuous flow of events;
new events appearing at the top push the earlier ones from the immediate
view.’10 One of the consequences of the data stream is the accentuation of
the present moment in internet culture, as the past – even the message of
a few seconds ago – is immediately consigned to archive status, while the
most important message is the one onscreen at the moment, in the ‘data
present’. Just as writing currently flourishes in the data stream of social
media, it will survive – indeed flourish – in some form, even if venerable
media forms such as the newspaper and the printed book no longer play
a prominent part in the distribution of writing. The essays in this book

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0004
 John Potts

explore the possibilities of the future, and the means by which writing
will be expressed in that future.

What is the future of writing?

Despite the claims of professional ‘futurologists’ and ‘futurists’, nobody

can predict the future with confidence and accuracy; the contributors
to this book, however, draw a number of lines from developments in the
present into the near future of publishing, journalism, writing, and read-
ing. The present is already bewildering enough, characterised by rapid
technological development and disruptive upheavals in media industries.
The cultural transformation effected by digital convergence and net-
worked communication has been dizzying, and, for many, disorienting.
None of the old certainties – political, corporate, and economic – seems
to hold, and the future – including the future of writing – is thrown into
doubt.
We live at a time when all that is solid is melting into data, when
knowledge is immaterial and lives in the Cloud, when the book is said
to be disappearing.
In this strange new world, white is the new black, and up is the
new down. Any individual may now self-publish by means of a blog,
Facebook page, or Twitter account. Convergence means that almost eve-
ryone carries around with them a device that is simultaneously a phone,
computer, camera, GPS navigator, and access to the internet. Much of
the transmission and reception of information occurs wirelessly, in the
Cloud, or in networked repositories of computer servers. The Cloud –
also known as the celestial library, celestial jukebox, celestial cinema,
and celestial gallery – stores enormous reservoirs of text, music, movies,
and still images, to be accessed by users and subscribers from any point,
including from portable devices.
Entire industries, such as the music industry, are imperilled, or at least
obliged to build new business models in order to survive. ‘Information
wants to be free’ was the rallying-cry for electronic civil libertarians in
the 1990s; in the decades following, information has been, for many
downloaders, free of charge. When digital information can be transmit-
ted instantly across the internet, and downloaded for free, the old struc-
tures, businesses, and media forms are simply bypassed and left to wither.
Unless new business models for online publication can be concocted,

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0004
 Introduction 

entire tranches of media forms may be at the risk of disappearing. This

includes such long-standing vehicles for writing as the newspaper, the
magazine, and the book, all endangered ‘old world’ technologies.
Beneath the structural or institutional level, what are the other ways
in which online technologies will affect writing? One area of impact will
be spelling. David Crystal, professor of linguistics and prolific overseer
of the English language, has recently peered 50 years into the future of
the written form of the language. He has predicted that written language
on the internet will alter spelling of words in English, particularly those
words with ‘irritating’ silent letters. We can call this ‘the rubarb effect’,
since this is one word which Crystal predicts will undergo change.
Crystal notes that ten years ago he started monitoring the word
‘rhubarb’, with the ‘h’ and without, by typing both spellings into a search
engine. Ten years ago, ‘rubarb’ spelt like this produced only one or two
hits; a few years later, it yielded hundreds, then a few years later still
it registered hundreds of thousands of hits. Crystal predicts that in 50
years, the two spellings on the internet will be equal, creating pressure
for an ‘inevitable’ change of spelling for words such as this, whose irra-
tional silent letters provide some of the English language’s quirkiness, but
also the difficulty it presents to those learning the language. The ‘h’ in
rhubarb is irrational, and the technology of the internet will, according
to Crystal, foster a new rationalisation of the English language, follow-
ing the previous effort by Americans in their rendering of the ancient
tongue.11
Similarly, the colloquial forms of writing employed in social media,
particularly Twitter, are likely to exert pressure on the language as it is
articulated in writing. Texting and social media messaging is character-
ised by extreme abbreviation, acronyms of the ‘lol’ variety, extra-lingual
emoticons conveying an emotional range within messages, and generous
use of idiom and slang, all compressed into rapid-fire delivery. When
the emphasis is on the speed of messaging, the message itself – and the
written language – becomes compressed, and may well leave a mark on
the language in general.
These long-term effects, coupled with the institutional changes in
journalism and publishing discussed in this book, are all responses to
the technological transformations undergone within the media indus-
try over the last two decades. To gain a broader perspective on writing
and its relation to technological change, a brief history of writing is
necessary.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0004
 John Potts

From clay to the cloud: a (very brief) history of writing

Much of the discussion in this book concerns technology: the new

mobile digital technologies and networked communication. However,
it should not be forgotten that writing is itself a technology, one of the
relatively recent inventions in human history. Historians of writing
generally agree that ‘complete writing’ may be defined as ‘the sequenc-
ing of symbols to graphically reproduce human speech and thought.’12
Of course other forms of inscription existed before the invention of
phonetic writing, including cave painting and ritual markings. However,
writing which represented speech using symbols, inscribed on a durable
surface, developed only about 6,000 years ago in Mesopotamia, and
became systemized phonetic writing less than 5,000 years ago.13
The impact of this technology of writing on human consciousness and
culture has been profound; Walter J. Ong, the great scholar of orality and
literacy, has claimed that ‘more than any other single invention, writing
has transformed human consciousness.’14 Writing creates a new space for
knowledge; writing is an artificial memory. It makes possible analytical
thought through the practice of re-reading and studying a text; it fos-
ters abstractions of thought, as well as precision and linearity. Phonetic
writing, which emerged only relatively recently in human history, is an
‘intellectual technology’ which re-structures consciousness into a new
‘intellectual ecology’.15
Writing is a technology that needs other technologies to be realised:
writing instruments and materials for inscription. Writing began on clay
tablets in Mesopotamia around 5,000 years ago, using a reed stylus to
press wedge shapes into soft clay, which then dried. These were the first
tablets; some were palm-sized, containing miniature text, to be read as
hand-held mini-tablet. Other vessels for inscription have included wax,
ivory, metal, glass, papyrus, parchment and, finally, paper.
The mass reproduction of the written word made possible from the
middle of the fifteenth century by the Gutenberg printing press wrought
enormous cultural and political transformation. Elizabeth Eisenstein,
in her extensive study of the printing press as ‘agent of change’, declares
that the press effected ‘the most radical transformation in the condition
of intellectual life in the history of Western civilization.’16 The precision
in large-scale copying enabled by the printing press encouraged the
development of the scientific method along with other forms of rational
enquiry. The Reformation exploded in the wake of printed and circulated

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0004
 Introduction 

texts, as, later, did nationalism. The encyclopedia became the great store-
house of knowledge, emblem of the Enlightenment.
As literacy rates rose in the nineteenth century, books proliferated
to meet the demand of new hungry readers: circulation libraries were
established to make books available; ‘dime novels’ and other cheap
paperbacks sold in increasing number. Indeed, despite the emphasis
given to technological change in histories of writing, it should be
remembered that one of the most significant developments was not a
technological feat but a social one: the creation of mass literacy, through
universal education. Writing and reading – from the first pamphlets to
social media – are entirely dependent on literacy. The free circulation of
books symbolised the circulation of ideas, knowledge, and freedom to
think: when a totalitarian regime sought to restrict thought and beliefs,
it staged book burnings. Books – durable capsules of thought and crea-
tivity – have helped inspire the great social movements of the last 200
years.
But what of writing today, and tomorrow? Much writing of the future
will take the form of e-books, online news, blogs, social media, self-
published online works, text downloaded to tablets or smartphones.
Does it matter that the vehicle for writing changes? Nietszche thought so:
‘Our writing instruments contribute to our thoughts,’ he wrote in 1882,
having recently acquired a typewriter.17 Can we isolate effects of online
technologies on the practices of writing and reading?
In his recent book The Shallows, Nicholas Carr collected evidence from
studies in psychology and cognitive science demonstrating that the ‘cog-
nitive overload’ of web-based reading, with its ‘multi-message’ format,
interferes with the cognitive activities of reading and comprehension.18
The result according to Carr is a new form of reading: browsing and
scanning, prone to constant distraction and interruption, a superficial
attention to texts and knowledge.
Yet there are many commentators and critics who reject these findings,
or who find that the benefits of online writing and hypertext outweigh
any disadvantages. Some indeed have praised distraction as a stimulus to
connectivity and creation. The new forms of ‘collective intelligence’ made
possible by online connections, such as Wikipedia, testify to the potential
of knowledge through connectivity, the ‘wisdom of the crowd’. Much of
the recent research on the future of writing has praised the opportunities
to publish enabled by connectivity: Here Comes Everybody, ‘the people
formerly known as the audience’. More people than ever are now writing

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0004
 John Potts

and publishing, or self-publishing, online texts, blogs, twitter, Facebook

pages. This constitutes a ‘Daily Me’, to some extent, but the point of online
writing is to connect with others, to make your texts available for other
readers and writers. This information abundance has been celebrated as
a form of empowerment: an Army of Davids, We the Media, a new form
of mass collaboration based on electronic self-publishing.19
Today, large bodies of digital information are archived in the cloud,
waiting to be downloaded or accessed by reading devices. Is writing
about to dissipate completely into the cloud, leaving behind its material
base? Will old-fashioned writing formats such as the print newspaper
and the book be vapourised, unloved, and unGoogled, replaced by their
immaterial successors?
Every year I survey my undergraduate media studies students on their
reading habits, and their responses are indicative of the ‘digital natives’
who have grown up with the internet and social media. Only 5 regu-
larly buy or subscribe to a print newspaper; in some years the figure is
as low as 2 (those 2 are also the rare exceptions in their generation,
conscientious objectors to Facebook). It’s easy to see why there is distaste
for printed news among the internet generation: the paper is by neces-
sity yesterday’s news, and you have to pay for it. The online version of
the same newspaper, by contrast, features current breaking news, video
features, readers’ questions, and blogs – and in some instances it’s free.
What of the venerable printed book, a vehicle for writing far older than
the newspaper (the codex form of the book dates to the first century)?
The CEO of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, has declared that the physical book and
bookstores are dead, replaced by the Kindle and other new vessels for
digital text. The e-reader is upheld as the vehicle of progress, displacing
the old-fashioned printed book already referred to, a little disdainfully,
as the ‘p-book’.
Here, though, the digital natives are not marching to the drum-beat
of digital progress. Those same undergraduate students who have aban-
doned the newspaper profess a love for the printed book: only 4 use
e-readers instead of ‘p-books’. Their common complaints about e-readers
include the strain of reading continuously from a screen; the difficulty
of reading in certain light conditions; and the distractions from the text
due to other information sources on tablets. This finding is supported
by a survey of the reading habits of 16–24-year-olds, published in The
Guardian late in 2013. The survey found that 62 of these ‘digital natives’
preferred traditional printed books to their e-book equivalents. The

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0004
 Introduction 

top-rated reasons for this preference related to the emotional connec-

tion with printed books and their physical presence: ‘I like to hold the
product’, ‘I like the smell’.20 There is an enduring affection for the tactility
of handling a printed book, and for the sheer materiality of the book – as
an object that can be written on, bent, bookmarked, and added to your
personal library. Perhaps this will change as an even younger generation
goes to school knowing only e-text books – but even small children seem
to have a love for holding, folding, and tearing paper books.

Estate 4.0

One of the concerns of this volume is journalism, the Fourth Estate,

or perhaps Estate 4.0, in its online incarnation. Journalism is faced by
enormous challenges in the context of new content platforms, formats,
and distribution networks, including online news and social media.
The printing press that produced mass printed books also made possi-
ble the first mass-produced printed newspaper. The first such newspaper
was published in Germany in 1609 (the Gothic font of the New York Times
and Sydney Morning Herald mastheads bears a trace of the early years of
printed newspapers, when Gothic was common). A free press became
an essential component of liberal democracies. But the decline of the
newspaper from its heights in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
has been swift, dating from the early 1990s. Newspaper circulation in the
West began dropping at the rate of 1 per year in 1990; loss of circulation
and advertising revenue accelerated from the mid-1990s, corresponding
to the rise of the World Wide Web.
The last newspaper, it has been predicted, will stagger off the presses
in 2043,21 and many observers consider that a generous assessment; other
media commentators have prophesied an earlier end-point for print
newspaper production, such as 2020. In the United Kingdom, one-fifth
of local newspapers have closed over the past seven years. In the United
States, newspaper advertising revenues have plunged 50 in the past
five years. In Australia, overall daily newspaper circulation has declined
over the past 27 years by more than one-third.22 There is a website – The
Newspaper Death Watch – counting the newspaper corpses and chroni-
cling the death of the species.23
It should be noted that this tale of decline in newspaper circulation
and revenue is not universal. There are parts of the world, such as India,

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0004
 John Potts

where print newspapers are booming. In India, which has at least 85,000
individual newspapers, newspaper circulation, and advertising are ris-
ing. The Times of India has a daily circulation of 4 million 300,000, the
largest of any English-language paper in the world. There are a couple
of factors specific to India, however, which distinguishes its newspaper
environment from Western counterparts. Literacy is still rising, feeding
a hunger for cheap printed news and information; and there is little
online competition. Less than 10 of the population has access to the
Internet, while smart phones and tablets remain prohibitively expensive
for the great majority. The printed newspaper in India costs 5c a day, and
is delivered free; non-English newspaper circulation is growing at 5 per
year.24
In Australia, by contrast, print circulation and revenue has fallen fast.
Today, only 23 of the Sydney Morning Herald’s readership is buying the
paper version.25 The online version of newspapers features ‘most read’
stories and ‘most watched’ videos, which can tend to celebrity items
and sensational crime stories; news items online tend to be shorter;
and international news can sink down the contents page. I have had
conversations on current events with a friend, based on my reading of
the Sydney Morning Herald paper, and her reading of smh.com.au – and
it became apparent that we had read quite different versions of the news.
One of the differences between the print version and the online version
of a newspaper relates to the instant feedback provided to editors of
reader’s habits: ‘the most clicked’ news items or ‘most viewed’ videos.
This facility exerts great pressure on editors to cater to readers’ tastes by
providing increasingly popular news items.
Much recent discussion on the future of journalism, however, has not
been funereal, but rather optimistic, focusing on the potential of online
news and digital delivery. Even the Newspaper Death Watch site has a
two-fold mission: to chronicle the death of the old newspaper, and to
celebrate the ‘rebirth of journalism’. This trumpeted resurrection is to
occur in the virtual realm, the datasphere, online. The new world of
news – as text, photographs, sound, and video – is to be found in online
news outlets, able to respond instantly to events and able to include blogs
and other contributions from citizen journalist prosumers. The Guardian
online, for example, includes reviews by readers as amateur critics.
One of the pressing issues for online news is the question of making
it financially viable. It has been estimated that an online advertisement
is worth only one-tenth of its print news equivalent. Indeed, the relative

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0004
 Introduction 

value of ads in the old-fashioned papers is providing the revenue for the
online news, which attracts the great majority of readers. Perhaps for this
reason, print newspapers may hang on longer than has been predicted,
at least until new business models can be conjured for online news
delivered to tablets, smartphones, and computers. Strategic business
planning in this regard may entail metered subscriptions, as practiced by
the New York Times online, or so-called ‘porous paywalls’, in which some
online items remain free to visitors. The issue of migration of news from
print to online is the central problem of contemporary journalism: it is
considered carefully in this volume.

The structure of this book

This book is divided into three sections: ‘Writing and Publishing’,

‘Creative Writing’ and ‘Journalism: Estate 4.0’. While several of the essays
deal with two or more of these general areas, the three sections empha-
sise different aspects of writing in the digital and online environment.
The first section focuses on the effects within the publishing industry.
When there is so much being written, and read, online, without the need
of previous publishing structures and gate-keeping, there is a greater
need perhaps for curating – for filtering and selection of texts. In the
opening chapter of this book, ‘Culture is the Algorithm’, Richard Nash
ponders the future of writing by considering reading, and, in the con-
temporary context, searching and sorting. How, he asks, does writing
come to be read? Units of culture – essays, books, poems, songs, films –
come to the audience via algorithmically based systems: Google’s search
engines, Facebook’s social graph, Amazon’s People Who Also Bought.
Nash argues that the integrity of writing will survive its encounter with
Big Data, for the history of publishing suggests that it is possessed of a
remarkable resilience, one born simultaneously of a resistance to and an
embrace of capitalist modernity.
In ‘When the Web is the World’, Kate Eltham proposes that the
boundary between our physical lives and our digital lives is becoming
permeable and will soon disappear altogether. In a networked reality,
books and stories can no longer be bounded by containers, either print
or digital. The future of publishing, Eltham declares, lies in creating and
curating the relationships between nodes on the network: people, stories,
data, and metadata.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0004
 John Potts

In ‘Me Myself I: Revaluing Self-Publishing in the Electronic Age’,

Sherman Young examines recent developments in self-publishing. In
the book trade, self-publishing has traditionally been dismissed as lit-
tle more than an exercise in vanity. But the possibilities of e-books have
thrown up examples that force us to rethink the role and reputation of
self-publishing.
John Potts considers the future of the printed book in his chapter ‘Book
Doomsday: The March of Progress and the Fate of the Book’. The claims
that the printed book will soon become obsolete, replaced by e-books
and online publishing, proceed from a belief in technological progress.
According to this doctrine, the old media form must inevitably be usurped
by its more advanced, more convenient, more modern technological
successor. Potts traces the march of progress in the publishing context,
evaluating the prospects for the e-book as well as the printed book.
Part II of this volume concerns the possibilities of online and digital
technologies for creative expression. Nigel Krauth surveys recent elec-
tronic publication of app and web books, finding in them both a different
type of writing and a different type of reading. These electronic works no
longer house a linear text-only writing, but feature image and sound as
well as text, while also adding background material and gloss on the text.
Krauth argues that in this context the book ‘is less a published object
and more a writerly and readerly set of processes which complement its
publication status.’ The app and web book is for Krauth not a monograph
but a new form of multigraph.
Chris Rodley and Andrew Burrell explore the potential of ‘big data’
writing in their essay ‘On the Art of Writing with Data’. Rodley and
Burrell provide examples of works of ‘data-driven literature that search
and reconfigure textual information in real time’. This recently emerged
form of non-linear or dynamic writing, drawn from massive databases, is
upheld as a mode of writing highly suited to the internet age, one which
may become more timely in the future.
In their essay ‘The Design of Writing: 29 Observations’, Kathryn
Millard and Alex Munt explore hybrid or multimodal writing forms.
This includes writing that incorporates visual images or sound and image
into textual design. Millard and Munt take ‘text’ at its literal meaning of
weaving, and describe the many innovative modes and techniques with
which hybrid writing has developed.
In Part III of this volume, leading journalists, editors, and media
theorists discuss the future of journalistic writing. Garry Linnell, in

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0004
 Introduction 

‘Storytelling in the Digital Age’, surveys the current state of journalism.

He describes a world engulfed in a tsunami of snapshots, alerts, briefs,
tweets, shorts, summaries, and posts. Linnell argues that strong story-
telling will have an even greater value in the digital age.
In ‘Reading and Writing the News in the Fifth Estate’, Jennifer Beckett
and Catharine Lumby explore the impact of social media on journalism.
In particular they address the use of Twitter to convey news information
at extraordinary speed, while advancing news events – or ‘stories’ – in
real time. Beckett and Lumby analyse the various challenges confronting
journalism in the age of ‘the news that never sleeps’.
Lachlan Harris surveys the changing relationship between news and
opinion in his chapter, ‘Newsbreakers and News Makers in the 24 Hour
Opinion Cycle’. Harris recounts the huge structural shifts that are occur-
ring in the political news cycle. These include the meteoric rise of opin-
ion, the growing dependency on data, and the blurring of roles between
‘news breakers’ and ‘news makers’.
This collection of essays concludes with a discussion of education and
the new convergent journalist, by Mark Evans. The rapid emergence
of a global, converged media environment provides the opportunity
to explore innovative pedagogies, collaborations, and professional
outcomes for journalism graduates. Evans advocates a university cur-
riculum built on the premise that new journalism is global, connected,
networked, ethical, and independent.

Notes
 Randy Kennedy, ‘News Flows, Consciousness Streams: The Headwaters
of a River of Words’, New York Times, Art & Design, at www.nytimes.
com/2007/10/25/arts/design/25vide.html (accessed 24 June 2013).
 Ben Rubin quoted in Kennedy, ‘News Flows, Consciousness Streams.’
 Kennedy, ibid.
 Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002,
p. 215.
 Pierre Levy, ‘Toward Superlanguage’, in ISEA 94 Catalogue. Helsinki: University
of Art and Design, 1994, p. 14.
 Mark Amerika, ‘What in the World Wide Web Is Happening to Writing?’,
2000, cited in Andrew Murphie and John Potts, Culture and Technology.
Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003, p. 73.
 http://tracearchive.ntu.ac.uk (accessed 1 September 2013).

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0004
 John Potts

 Amerika in Murphie and Potts, Culture and Technology, p. 75.

 Joel Naoum, ‘Who Wants to Read This Stuff?’ at http://momentumbooks.
com.au/blog/who-wants-to-read-this-stuff-the-business-of-storytelling-in-a-
digital-world (accessed 19 February 2014).
 Lev Manovich, ‘Future Fictions’, Frieze No. 156, June–August 2013, p. 199.
 ‘The Internet to Transform Spelling’, Sydney Morning Herald June 3, 2013, p. 11.
 Steven Roger Fisher, A History of Writing. London: Reaktion Books, 2001,
pp. 11–12.
 Ibid., pp. 31–32.
 Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy. London: Routledge, 1982, p. 78.
 The concept of intellectual technologies was proposed by Jack Goody in his
study of literacy and used by later media theorists such as Pierre Levy.
 Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change. New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1979, p. 115.
 Nietzsche’s aphorism is cited by Friedrich Kittler in Gramophone, Film
Typewriter. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999, p. 200.
 Nicholas Carr, The Shallows. London: Atlantic Books, 2010, p. 129.
 An overview of recent writing on the internet and its cultural effects is given
by Adam Thierer, ‘The Case for Internet Optimisim, Part 1’, in Berin Szoka
(ed.), The Next Digital Decade, TechFreedom 2011 at http://nextdigitaldecade.
com.read-book-now.
 Liz Bury, ‘Young Adult Readers “prefer printed to ebooks”’, The Guardian 26
November 2013 at www.theguardian.com/books/2013/nov/25/young-adult-
readers-prefer-printed-ebooks (accessed 13 January 2014).
 Philip Meyer makes this prediction in The Vanishing Newspaper. Columbia,
MO: University of Missouri Press, 2004.
 Debra Jopson, ‘It’s All about the Journalism, Stupid’. Sydney Morning Herald
News Review, 23 June 2012, p. 6.
 http://www.newspaperdeathwatch.com.
 Ken Auletta, ‘Citizens Jain: Why India’s Newspaper Industry Is Thriving’, The
New Yorker, 8 October 8 2012, pp. 52–61.
 Elizabeth Knight, ‘Drastic Change Carries Risks’, Sydney Morning Herald
Business Day, 19 June 2012, p. 7.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0004
 Part I
Writing and Publishing

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0005
 1
Culture Is the Algorithm
Richard Nash
Abstract: Richard Nash ponders the future of writing by
considering reading, and, in the contemporary context,
searching and sorting. How, he asks, does writing come to be
read? Units of culture – essays, books, poems, songs, films –
come to the audience via algorithmically based systems such
as Google’s search engines and Amazon’s People Who Also
Bought. Nash argues that the integrity of writing will survive
its encounter with Big Data, for the history of publishing
suggests that it is possessed of a remarkable resilience.

Keywords: algorithm; culture; data; publishing; search

John Potts. The Future of Writing. Basingstoke: Palgrave

Macmillan, 2014. doi: 10.1057/9781137440402.0006.

 DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0006
 Culture Is the Algorithm 

A frequent blind spot in the arguments concerning the growing adoption

of digital over print as a means for reproducing, disseminating, and con-
suming knowledge and narrative is that the book is not something that
exists in opposition to technology, but in fact is technology. It is simply a
technology that has been sanded down to a fine grain by hundreds if not
thousands of years of contact with humans, technology that is so perfect
it has become invisible, like the wheel or a chair.
To explore the ramifications of this, I’d like to look not quite as far back
as John Potts does in his Introduction, but just back to the point where
publishing as a commercial enterprise first becomes possible beginning
with Gutenberg in the 1500s: publishing 1.0 in the parlance.
If Gutenberg and his immediate successors represent publishing 1.0,
I’d argue that simultaneously writing 2.0 begins. Because up until the
printing press, a writer was a person who transcribed. The writer was a
person who existed to take the words of the culture, or take the words of
God, and write them down.
The role of the writer was not to invent or express personal truths, but
to reproduce: to reproduce the word of God or to reproduce the stories
that everybody knew, to reproduce Gilgamesh, to reproduce the Greek
myths, to reproduce information about how much grain was in the king’s
silos, to be a conduit through which acknowledged and agreed-upon
truths expressed themselves.
Printing was a much more efficient means for this information to be
reproduced than the writer who now goes from being a person who is
guaranteed a job, simply because they can write, to being somebody who
is now competing with a machine. The monk and the scholar have to
find something else to do.
Conveniently, over the course of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and
eighteenth centuries, Western culture invented genius, especially the
Romantics. They invented the idea that the individual existed independent
of society, independent of culture, and that the act of individual expression
was meaningful. This was a Faustian bargain, of course. In fact, Goethe
wrote a great deal about this particular topic, because the Germans in the
nineteenth century were seeking to invent copyright alongside the English
and had to provide a moral basis for copyright, to accompany the com-
mercial basis for copyright that had existed up until then.
The problem that the writer faces is that they now have the ability to
justify a job, because they are creating something that does not exist
before, something that springs from their own head, not from the world

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0006
 Richard Nash

around them (I speak here of how the law sees it, rather than how liter-
ary criticism has viewed authorship over the centuries). However, it also
puts them in a situation where they are dependent now on another form
of technology, typically not owned by them, to be able to reproduce their
texts, to be able to take advantage of their newly found genius.
Several centuries later, that begins to change. I speak not of the
Internet, though, not of the web, but of PostScript, the beginning of
publishing 2.0. PostScript, and its subsequent incarnation, the PDF, is
the first time anybody reading this essay could create something that
printers could use to print, as opposed to finding a type-setter who had
to be paid many thousands of dollars, assuming that one could even be
found willing to take on a single project. The PDF is the first moment
where an individual is able to produce something as high-quality as a
billion dollar corporation.
This of course, has a very significant effect on the output of books. In
the United States, the total number of titles produced increases fourfold
from 1950 to 1990 and in the following seven years it increases fourfold
again.1 That first phase from 1950 to 1990 is partially driven by very incre-
mental improvements in print and distribution technology including
the construction of the US interstate system. This allowed for cheaper
and faster re-supply, just-in-time inventory, stock control, all the vari-
ous ways in which industrial manufacturing over the twentieth century
became relatively more efficient.
Numerous social developments were also supporting this. The relative
amelioration of racism and sexism in Western society allowed people
who had previously been excluded from access to intellectual, cultural,
social, and financial capital to now be able to imagine themselves writing
100,000 word narratives. Publishing in 1950, when 8,000 titles a year was
done, was an activity of, by, and for white men.2
Now, I return to the data that I’d begun to outline earlier. From 1990
to 1997 we saw a very significant jump. Remarkably it starts to slow
down. In the next seven years, from 1997 to 2004, it only doubles. Again,
over the following six years it increases relatively less significantly. Note
that these are print, not eBooks, and note that we’re enumerating from
traditional publishers – and not including the ‘book’ titles coming from
companies that repackage Wikipedia entries as ‘books,’ which start to
account in 2008 for hundreds of thousands of additional titles.
So the dramatic increase in the title output of publishing is not in the
last decade with the advent of the Kindle and the pervasive Web. The

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0006
 Culture Is the Algorithm 

dramatic increase is in the 1990s as independent publishers and corpo-

rate publishers alike use the ability of desktop publishing to be able to
dramatically increase the title count of books published.
However, in the music business the advances were much more on
the consumption than production side early on. The MP3 standard is
established in 1993, allowing people to consume music digitally, but the
equivalent degree of access to production technology that pertained in
the book world in the mid-1980s does not come into being in the music
world until the middle of the 2000s. Innovation in the publishing world
was supply-side, in the music world demand-side.
To consider the ramifications of this, let’s look at Netflix, a US-based
company that began life as a mail-order DVD subscription service. It’s
since shifted to more of a streaming video model, but for our purposes
the original incarnation as a DVD subscription service suffices. Their
basic model was that you pay $10 or $12 a month and you got to have
three DVDs out at any given time. It was quite a successful business
because we all have movies that we always meant to watch and had never
got around to watching, as we didn’t have time to watch them in the
theaters, they didn’t end up on television, and the local video shops had
a very limited inventory.
If you’re a fan of esoteric Japanese cinema or weird 1970s American
grindhouse, you were out of luck in most cases. Netflix came along to solve
that problem for you, to allow niche interests to be efficiently satisfied. That
worked very well for a few years, but after a while Netflix began to see that
people had now watched all the movies they had always meant to watch
and were starting to cancel their subscriptions. Netflix had to figure out
how to get people to watch things that they didn’t yet know they wanted
to watch. They began to use algorithms to identify patterns in how people
rated films, to identify, in a word, ‘taste.’ The ability to predict taste would
allow them to suggest movies that people did not yet know they wanted to
watch, based on rankings from people with seemingly similar tastes (i.e.,
similar rankings of films). To improve the algorithms, they announced a
prize, the Netflix Prize, to be awarded to the first person who could improve
the algorithm’s ability to predict how people will rate movies by 10.
The race to win the prize became quite a media phenomenon. Jordan
Ellenberg, for Wired, interviewed a number of hundreds of mathemati-
cians around the world who were participating in the prize. Said one,
when asked why he was participating: ‘The 20th century was a matter of
supply. The 21st century will be a matter of demand.’3

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0006
 Richard Nash

About nine months after the Wired article, the New York Times Magazine
also covered the prize. At that juncture, the leading groups of mathema-
ticians had managed to get around an 8.5 improvement of the way
there. The journalist Clive Thompson wanted to figure out what was the
remaining one-and-a-half percent? What are the flies in the ointment?
It turns out that more than a third of what was left were movies like
The Squid and the Whale, Napoleon Dynamite, Sideways, Lost in Translation;
quirky movies; character-driven movies, voice-driven movies; movies
that effectively behaved like novels – suggesting that there are certain
areas of culture that might not necessarily be as amenable to algorithmi-
cally driven prediction as people might have hoped.
What was the book publishing industry’s solution to demand side
problems? In the United States it was exogenous: Oprah. Oprah was the
saviour of the American book business in the eyes of the American book
business (in the United Kingdom there was Richard & Judy, in Germany,
Elke Heidenreich, lest one think that this was an American thing, and
not a book business thing). Oprah’s book club arrived just as publish-
ing really started increasing their product count and it had the magical
ability to generate two, three, four million copy sales of books that might
otherwise have only sold 25,000 or 50,000.
What I would argue, though, was that Oprah was not, in fact, the
saviour of publishing. She was, rather, saved by publishing. Oprah was
the host of an afternoon talk show, up against five or six similar shows,
a pack in which she was early on in the middle. What she realised,
consciously or unconsciously, is that she was in a business – broadcast
television – that was unidirectional. It may seem to be very powerful but
it was powerful for an hour. For one hour she could talk to 10 million
people. When that hour was over, she left their living room and someone
else was now talking to 10 million people.
Once she started her book club, Oprah never left. Oprah was in your
bedroom. Oprah was in the bathroom if you read there. Oprah was in
the cafeteria when you were having lunch with your colleagues. Oprah
was in the bar or restaurant, Oprah was in the car with you if you listen
to audio books in your car. Oprah used books to build 24/7 mindshare,
as the marketing consultants might describe it. This allowed Oprah the
platform to develop her next phase in her media career, a 24-hour cable
network. At this point she cancelled the book club.
Over the course of 2011–2012, that network, OWN, did very poorly. As
a move to try and revive the flagging fortunes of her television network

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0006
 Culture Is the Algorithm 

she launched the Oprah Book Club 2.0. OWN’s rating have since
rebounded.
I don’t wish in any way to claim that the re-launched book club
was responsible for the revival of OWN, as many factors were in play.
Nevertheless, while we may think of books as marginal to the larger
media enterprises, the most preternaturally gifted media personality of
her generation has very cannily used books as a key driver of television
audience engagement. What this suggests is that the power of books lies
not just in them as a unit of consumption, but rather in the social rela-
tions that they help to drive.
Oprah’s selections were very heavily based on allowing people to be
able to talk about issues that mattered deeply to them and share that with
their friends. To be able to talk about love, grief, shame, family, food with
one’s loved ones. To have a shared basis for discussion in a way that was
intimate, but not too intimate. You could talk about your own shame
around an affair not with your friends, not by directly acknowledging it
yourself, but by doing it through the vehicle of a book.
What then, beyond relying on Oprah, are the ways in which these kind
of cultural relations, these social relations can be used to drive demand
for books? How can they be used to encourage readers to read particular
books?
We’ve seen over the last number of years a few different models arise.
The first of these is the consumption graph. This is an effort to use
algorithmic prediction based on your consumption patterns, similar to
the Netflix algorithm based on how you rank movies you’ve watched.
In some ways it is quite powerful, in other ways it’s quite limiting as
any algorithmic output is only as good as the dataset it is processing.
Amazon, for example, can’t predict based on books you might have
purchased before 1995: that’s completely invisible. Books you borrowed
from libraries, books you’ve been given by friends, are all entirely invis-
ible. But books you’ve bought to give to friends: visible.
The second area in which we see a modelling of social relations for
generating demand for books is from sharing information on online
social networks, where people offer information about who and what
they like. The main problem with this is that since in the time it took you
to read this far into this essay, there have been at least 50 million ‘likes’
on Facebook. The ‘like’ is much like the Reichsmark in Germany in 1923;
if the ‘like’ were a small piece of paper, one would need a wheelbarrow
to carry around a few minutes’ worth of ‘likes.’ This suggest that, as with

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0006
 Richard Nash

any debased currency, it is not necessarily very good at reflecting actual

value. The gap in commitment between saying you like a book and actu-
ally having to read the thing is 10s of 1000s to one in a ratio. Can one
really perceive and trust the value of a like in this scenario?
To the consumption graph and the social graphs, we add the taste
graph we explored in our Netflix discussion. These three graphs are seri-
ously limited in their ability to usefully drive book consumption. As I
like to say: ‘Novels break algorithms.’
However, although I’ve been more or less arguing that novels break
algorithms for a year or two now, I’ve recently begun to rethink that.
In December 2012, I spoke with a group of engineering students, many
of whom are in the business of generating algorithms. Naturally I was
a little nervous about discrediting their entire activity! What I began to
realise – and this is a tentative realisation – is that the novel may in fact
not so much break the algorithm but be the algorithm. That narrative is
a process by which we process data. We process information about the
world and it is a working through of social, emotional, aesthetic prob-
lems that uses not mathematics, but narrative.
Garry Linnell is very firm on the idea that if journalism is going to
survive it will be because skilled writers are telling stories with emotional
impact.4 The thread that connected the serious stories that were success-
ful on their website with the successful albeit trivial celebrity stories, was
that the writer had found a way to connect with the readership through
the power of narrative.
So the text itself, the narrative itself, as it processes human experience,
as it processes social conditions, may very well be the algorithm that
matters the most. There are some ways in which technology has begun
to aid this process. Take for example the website http://infiniteatlas.
com/, a website that uses Google Maps to allow you to identify every
single location on the planet which David Foster Wallace mentions in
Infinite Jest. There is http://www.annotated-oscar-wao.com/, a blog that
has annotated, usually with two to three, maybe even five, instances per
page, the Juno Diaz novel The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao going
through slang, going through Latin American pop stars of the 1950s,
going through obscure Dominican Republic political figures, and so on.
http://spotirama.blogspot.com/2010/04/record-store-day-nick-hornbys-
high.html is a blog that lists all the songs in Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity.
http://scenesfromripitupandstartagain.blogspot.com/ lists all the songs in
Simon Reynold’s Rip It Up and Start Again.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0006
 Culture Is the Algorithm 

I’m now working at a company, Small Demons, that is systematising

this kind of ad-hoc behaviour. We index books, identifying all the cul-
turally significant references in them, and then display that information
on our website. So, to take the Infinite Jest example, the Infinite Jest page
shows all the people in the book from Churchill to Nixon to Serena
Williams; all the places mentioned in the book, both at the level of a map
and at the level of images; the music, the movies, the TV, and radio. If
you mouse over the image you see a quote that shows you the context in
which it’s mentioned. The books, the art, the food, the drink, the gadgets,
the periodicals, the clothing, and – my favourite – all the tobacco and
drugs. If you click on any one of those, on Planet of the Apes, say, you see
information on Planet of the Apes and all the other books that mention it,
from Train Spotting to Bret Easton Ellis to Sue Grafton. Any mention of
a song, you can actually listen to the song itself, via a number of digital
music services like iTunes and Spotify.
What we believe this allows us to do is, in some way, uncover that
processing of culture that storytelling does, that novels include all these
details. Narrative, nonfiction, history, biography, memoir, and more nar-
rative books around music, politics, society, and so on, all use details.
They mention people, places, and things. A narrative is used as a kind of
a processing tool to create something that is emotionally powerful.
What Small Demons is designed to do is surface that information
more explicitly and allow people on this website, and as we start to actu-
ally feed the data to other companies that could use it, library websites,
book retailers, restaurant reservation websites, and travel sites, to be able
to use the book as much as a source of cultural discovery as opinions
about the book, as your habits of what books you bought.
As the process of writing becomes less solely based on a supply chain
that has an author at one end and an agent and an editor and a publisher
and a wholesaler and a retailer and the reader at the other end, we start
to see that writer and reader are not individual people but are rather activi-
ties. The process of reading intelligently is often a process of writing, is a
process of not-taking, is a process of talking about the book.
Simultaneously, the activity of writing, as any writing teacher will tell a
student, has to do with reading. To become a great writer, you have to be
a great reader. Conversely, as any teacher of literary criticism will be told,
to be a great reader of books you need to be able to write about them.
In terms of what that means for the day-to-day life of a writer, let me
offer an experience from my own professional life. I ran an independent

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0006
 Richard Nash

press, Soft Skull, that accepted unsolicited submissions – that is, submis-
sions directly from writers, without requiring an agent intermediary. This
was unusual, and considered to be a very open approach. Nevertheless,
most manuscripts would be read by one or two interns and then sum-
marily rejected. That was the only way we could get through 10,000
manuscripts per year.
These writers would send cover letters in which they would describe
why they were sending the manuscript to this particular press, Soft Skull
Press. They would mention they had read Eileen Myles, an author we
published. ‘I read Lynne Tillman or Lydia Millet or the name of some
other author we published.’ ‘I really love that book.’ ‘I got given it by my
older sister.’ ‘I saw her read it.’ ‘I’ve read two other books by your press.’ ‘I
would love to be a part of your press.’
These people were clearly our best customers – our most passionate
fans. What did we do when they contacted us with something they had
spent five years of their life crafting? We emailed or mailed them back
a generic rejection. They sent us their heart and we sent it back with a
form rejection slip attached to it with a dagger. It was as if a shoe retailer
on receiving an order from a customer told them: ‘No, we’re not going to
sell you a shoe, your feet are too fat.’
The key transformation that will need to occur in publishing will be,
in some ways, to find ways to incorporate the entire universe of the audi-
ence, the people formerly known as the audience, into our culture-making
activities. To free ourselves of the onus of being a content producer hoping
third-party algorithms will boost our books, and instead become a culture
maker, realising that the stories we help produce are all algorithms them-
selves, processing human emotion and social relations, which I think is a
much more powerful and empowering position to be in.

Notes
 Correspondence with staff, R. R. Bowker Books in Print, 14 May 2013.
 Ibid.
 http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/magazine/16-03/mf_netflix?currentPage=all
(accessed 20 May 2013).
 ‘Storytelling in the Digital Age’, Chapter 8 in this book.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0006
 2
When the Web Is the World
Kate Eltham

Abstract: Eltham proposes that the boundary between our

physical lives and our digital lives is becoming permeable and
will soon disappear altogether. This is particularly true, she
argues, in the intersection of internet and publishing. In a
networked reality, books and stories can no longer be bounded
by containers, either print or digital. The future of publishing,
Eltham declares, lies in creating and curating the relationships
between nodes on the network, including people and data.

Keywords: boundary; network; node; web

John Potts. The Future of Writing. Basingstoke: Palgrave

Macmillan, 2014. doi: 10.1057/9781137440402.0007.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0007 
 Kate Eltham

Danny Hillis invented something called massively parallel processing,

which ushered in the supercomputer age. He was once an ‘Imagineer’
for Disney Corporation. He established The Long Now Foundation
and started building The Clock of the Long Now, a Stonehenge-sized
timepiece that would tick once a year, chime once a century, and cuckoo
every millennium.
In 1993, Danny Hillis gave an interview to Wired magazine in which he
commented that the chronically short horizons with which we view the
future are only getting shorter:
When I was growing up in the 1960s everyone talked about what would
happen in the year 2000. And now it’s 1993 and people are still talking about
what will happen in the year 2000. So the future has been kind of shrinking
about one year per year for my whole life. People now realize that 2020 is
just going to be so different, that they can’t even think about it. Whereas
in 1960, 2000 seemed like you’d be able to get to it just by extrapolating
1960.1

It feels very true that as the pace of technological change accelerates, and
particularly digital innovation, our horizons are getting closer. There’s a
veil between us and the future we can’t penetrate, but instead of that veil
separating us from next century, it separates us from next year. There has
been such profound and disruptive change in the book industry in the
last two years that looking even that far into the future seems like a kind
of astrology.
When people ask me to write about the future of books, invariably
what they want to know about are things like ebooks, digital publishing,
book apps, and transmedia.
These are not the future of books. They are the present of books.
To consider the future of books, we must imagine the future of media.
We must imagine the future of the web. And for that we must lift the veil
and step into the post-digital.

Hyperconnectedness

In Greg Bear’s seminal science fiction story ‘Blood Music’, biotechnolo-

gist Virgil has developed ‘noocytes’, simple biological computers based
on his lymphocytes. His employer is nervous about the dangers of his
research and so orders Virgil to destroy his work. Virgil injects himself

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0007
 When the Web Is the World 

with the noocytes in order to smuggle them out of the laboratory and
continue his work elsewhere. But inside Virgil, these biological machines
quickly multiply and evolve. They form a self-aware network, a nanos-
cale civilisation that transforms Virgil and others as well. The noocytes
are useful. They can fix myopia and high blood pressure. They can create
useful mutations that enhance human abilities. But they are also utterly
uncaring of the sovereignty of each human being they have colonised,
and end up assimilating the entire biosphere of North America into a
single networked organism 7000 km wide.
Unlike the noocytes, the internet hasn’t yet managed to fix my short-
sightedness. But it can be thought of as a kind of single networked entity,
and one that is quickly colonising our physical lives.
Guardian reporter Oliver Burkeman observed this at SXSWi 2011 and
said ‘the internet is over’. I prefer the term post-digital, an existence in
which the boundary between our physical lives and our digital lives is
becoming transparent and permeable and will, quite soon I think, disap-
pear altogether. In a post-digital world we will experience ubiquitous
computing and hyper-connectedness.2
We can already see this emerging around us as the internet moves to
mobile devices, tablets, and smartphones that we carry around in our
pockets. But even in a society with a high penetration of smartphones,
the internet is still inside the device. It’s separated from our physical exist-
ence. We think of ‘going online’ and ‘using the internet’ as though the
web is another country that we visit. But in another decade or two, this
may look more like wearable technology and bio-implants, where the
internet is more of us.

A post-digital world has no edges

Our concept of books and book retail is defined by its boundaries. A

book is a bounded thing, whether a print artefact, an app, or an elec-
tronic file. It is discrete, transferrable, and finite.
However, just like the colonisation of Virgil by the noocytes, when
the web is the world there are no edges. Anything can be a node on the
network: a human, an advertising billboard, a train, a tree. When the
web is the world, a link between any two nodes on the network can be
some type of transaction: a commercial sale, a social exchange, a transfer

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0007
 Kate Eltham

of knowledge. When the web is the world, there are no edges placing
boundaries around time, physical space, or memory.
Within this context, a bookstore can be a physical bricks-and-mortar
location on a busy high street that has existed for 50 years, but a bookstore
can also be a dinner party, or a conversation between two co-workers or
an airplane mid-flight. Physical location places no limitation at all on our
ability to find, access, pay for, talk about, share content. This confounds
not just booksellers, but also publishers who have built their business
models on trading publishing rights for various geographic regions and
formats.
In the post-digital world, even the individual book’s boundedness
blurs and dissipates at the edges. When books and reading are net-
worked, then words can connect with each other. In his keynote address
at O’Reilly Tools of Change in 2009, Peter Brantley of the Internet
Archive said:
an environment of participatory engagement is emerging across books.
Digital words can be described by other words, joined across books, linked
with data.
digital words can be –
described by other words
joined across books
linked with data3

Publishing as a service

If the idea of ‘boundedness’ loses relevance, what happens to the tradi-

tional structures that hold up publishing?
For one thing, we may discover that opening our books to the network
creates infinitely more possibilities for the discovery, sale and sharing of
them. Just as the noocytes set about improving, scaffolding, linking, and
strengthening cells inside Virgil, readers and fans are capable of doing
the same for our networked literature.
Canadian author William Gibson saw this in action when he published
his novel Spook Country:
every text today has a kind of spectral quasi-hypertext surrounding it.
...When I published Pattern Recognition within a few months there was
someone who started a Web site. People were compiling Googled refer-
ences to every term and every place in the book. It has photographs of

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0007
 When the Web Is the World 

just about every locale in the book – a massive site that was compiled
by volunteer effort. But it took a couple of years to come together. With
Spook Country the same thing was up on the Web before the book was
published.4

New startups like Small Demons seek ways to commercialise this kind of
service.
In the unbounded networked reality of books, the most valuable serv-
ice a publisher can provide is not to make whole books available to the
world, but to create new and interesting relationships between things on
the network: between words and other words, between books and other
books, and between readers.
But none of this has to happen exclusively in the strange foreign
country of the internet, an other-place where we ‘go online’. When the
web is the world, these relationships exist seamlessly and indistinguish-
ably between digital and physical things too. A non-fiction text that is
discussed by a class of secondary school students in a shared physical
space (the classroom) and shared time (third period – Modern History)
may be annotated by other readers, now and in the future, here and
elsewhere, who contribute to the very same discussion. In such an
environment, the value from the publisher is not in providing the
original text, but in creating services, tools, and platforms that make
it easier for this distributed, networked, asynchronous conversation to
flow.
Other structures of traditional publishing also melt and shift in a
networked world. If books are not containered ‘things’ – be they physi-
cal or digital – our existing understanding of concepts such as stock,
retail, returns, distribution, rights, licences, and even authorship are all
challenged.
The smart publishers today talk about the format-neutral workflow.
They have realised that creating a thing, to be converted into another
thing, is an inefficient way to serve up content to a very large number of
people who wish to exercise their personal choice over how, when, and
in what format they experience books.
But as the web becomes the world, the publishing of the future needs
not only to be container-neutral, but containerless. Not a manufacturer
of the telephone or even the wireless signal, but the 1930s radio operator
constantly plugging and replugging wires to put people in contact with
one another. The post-digital concierge who creates meaningful experi-
ences by connecting us with ourselves.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0007
 Kate Eltham

Notes
 http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.01/kay.hillis_pr.html (accessed 18 May
2013).
 http://bit.ly/HBwafA (accessed 20 May 2013).
 http://www.toccon.com/toc2009/public/schedule/detail/7395 (accessed 22 May
2013).
 http://wapo.st/HsWcg7 (accessed 22 May 2013).

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0007
 3
Me Myself I: Revaluing
Self-Publishing in the
Electronic Age
Sherman Young

Abstract: This chapter examines recent developments in self-

publishing. In the book trade, self-publishing has traditionally
been dismissed as little more than an exercise in vanity. But, as
Young demonstrates, the possibilities of e-books have thrown
up examples that force us to rethink the role and reputation of
self-publishing.

Keywords: e-book; internet; self-publishing; technology

John Potts. The Future of Writing. Basingstoke: Palgrave

Macmillan, 2014. doi: 10.1057/9781137440402.0008.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0008 
 Sherman Young

Self-publishing in the age of print

The book publishing industry is a venerable one – with attitudes rust-

ed-on over centuries of tradition. One example is a derogatory approach
to authors who dare to publish their own works without the critical
intervention of an established publishing house. To the book trade, such
ventures impinge on the quality of published output, their self-declared
gatekeeper role being essential to ensure literary merit.
This contempt extends to those publishers who derive income from
authors rather than sales. The term ‘vanity publishing’ was coined by
Jonathan Clifford in 19591 to describe those in the industry who encour-
aged the creation of printed objects from writing that they had little
intention to market – a practice that continues in areas like academic
publishing, where recent PhD graduates receive unsolicited requests
from particular German companies offering to publish their theses for
a fee.2
Exemplifying this (continuing) contempt is the recent comment by
best-selling novelist Sue Grafton, who described self-published authors
as ‘too lazy to do the hard work.’ She cast self-published books as ‘often
amateurish’, and compared self-publishing ‘to a student managing to con-
quer Five Easy Pieces on the piano and then wondering if s/he’s ready to
be booked into Carnegie Hall’.3 Techno-thriller author Brad Thor agreed,
writing: ‘The important role that publishers fill is to separate the wheat
from the chaff. If you’re a good writer and have a great book you should
be able to get a publishing contract.’4
Reinforcing this view of publishers as being determinants of quality,
literary awards exclude those titles which haven’t been nominated by
a respected publishing house, further cementing the division between
those inside the tent and those unable to gain entry.
Of course, the motivations for publication of particular books are com-
plex. Respected trade publishers build kudos with literary critics on the
one hand, while making their profits from celebrity cookbooks released
for the Christmas gift-giving season on the other. The gap between the
two extremes often results in other authors on their list (the so-called
mid-list) getting little attention, or interesting – and viable – authors not
getting a contract at all.5
Self-publishing has always filled that gap to an extent. In some spe-
cialised fields, authors have no other option. The Guardian provides the
example of Mark Barrett whose Fenland Pike was self-financed and

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0008
 Me Myself I 

self-published – and widely accepted in the niche pike fishing market

which no trade publisher would otherwise touch.6
In reality, book publishing is (at least in part) about the commodifica-
tion of the written word, and the term ‘self-published’ simply describes
those authors who have found mechanisms to commodify their work
without using the traditional publishing companies. Of course, they have
still required other intermediaries – to print, distribute, and market their
titles – but they have bypassed the publisher gatekeepers. And authors
who didn’t manage to meet a publisher’s hurdles for publication have
long gone their own way – for example, Mark Twain, Walt Whitman,
and Anais Nin.7

The coming of e-books

The new media technologies have changed the possibilities for authors.
Their impact is not necessarily to uncover completely new ways of doing
things – but rather, the greater access to tools (of publication, distribu-
tion, and marketing) has acted as an accelerator pedal for self-publishing.
In particular, the digitisation of texts and the rise of the e-book have trig-
gered increased possibilities for self-publication. Simultaneously, there
are new opportunities of new intermediaries who are less concerned with
playing a gate-keeper role, and more concerned with linking authors
with readers to progress their own profit margins.
Two things changed the self-publishing landscape in the last few years,
both enabled by the technologies of personal computing and the internet.
The first was accessible print on demand – and distribution resources
such as Lulu – which not only produced beautiful printed objects, but
provided an online bookstore for printed and electronic books. The
second was the eventual rise of the e-book – and the opportunities that
provided for self-publication and distribution directly into enormous
ecosystems with huge audiences.
Older models of self-publishing required the printing and distribution
of printed objects. And because distribution mechanisms for print were
(and continue to be) aligned with the traditional publishing companies,
self-published authors struggled to get access to bookshops and other
retail outlets. While direct sales were a possibility, they required a facility
for warehousing and maintaining stock and shipping goods when pur-
chased. Again, the traditional book industry intermediaries were seldom

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0008
 Sherman Young

geared towards working with individual authors – they worked at scales

with aggregators of content: the publishers.
The ability to print single copies on demand (with a quality compa-
rable to the trade) combined with an increasing acceptance of online
shopping, has changed the landscape. New intermediaries like smash-
words and Lulu act as shopfronts and shipping agents for authors, who
can use self-service internet-driven mechanisms to publish their con-
tent. Importantly, unlike a traditional publishing deal where an author
typically hands over their intellectual property rights in exchange for
royalties on sales, these new intermediaries act purely as mechanisms for
publication. Authors own all the rights, control the pricing and timetable
for publishing and make all editorial decisions themselves. Inverting the
business model, it is the intermediaries who make their profits by taking
a cut of the sales.
While the combination of print on demand technologies and the
internet’s reach and ease of access has expanded the opportunities for
the self-published printed book author, the major opportunity has arisen
with the complete digitisation of the writing – publishing – and reading
experience with the broadening acceptance of e-books.
It has taken e-books over a decade to gain traction. But the introduc-
tion of Amazon’s kindle (and its e-ink competitors, the Nook, the Kobo.
and others) and tablet computers exemplified by Apple’s iPad has pushed
reading on electronic devices into the mainstream. The iPad has sold in
the hundreds of millions and while Amazon refuses to disclose actual
sales figures, the kindle in its various forms has gained broad acceptance
as the default e-book reader of choice.
Amazon (the self-proclaimed world’s largest bookstore) now sells
more electronic kindle titles than paper books8 – and in the United States,
electronic titles now make up the largest proportion of the book publish-
ing industry. While global growth is less rapid, there are clear signs that
electronic books will eventually dominate the publishing industry. Just
as the displacement of the physical music CD with downloadable mp3
files heralded the demise of the high street record store,9 it’s possible to
map a similar trajectory for the future of books.
Importantly for authors, the popular e-books don’t merely exist as dis-
crete digital objects, but as part of an ecosystem – or platform – which
incorporates the entire publishing chain. So, Amazon’s kindle platform
is not just for readers: Amazon (through its kindle direct processes) pro-
vides mechanisms for authors to format their writing in the appropriate

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0008
 Me Myself I 

e-book format, upload to the Amazon kindle store and have their title
available for purchase by anyone with access to kindle hardware or soft-
ware. Indeed, the stores are built into the e-book devices themselves –
distribution mechanisms are now global, instantaneous, and portable.
The old problem of getting books into people’s hands has disappeared – if
it’s published on the appropriate platform, it’s already there.

The rise of self-publishing

The immediate consequence of increasing access to e-book platforms has

been an increase in self-publishing. In a 2012 report on self-publishing,
America’s ISBN agency, Bowker, counted 235,000 self-published titles
compared to 148,242 the year before. Of these, roughly 45 are fiction
and e-books are the fastest growing part of the self-published sector with
129 year-on-year growth.10 Beat Barblan, Director of Identifier Services
for Bowker said:
Self-publishing is now supported by a sophisticated and highly accessible
support structure. It’s provided everyone who has a story to tell with a
method for sharing it and leveled the playing field to an unprecedented
degree. This is no longer just vanity presses at work – self-publishing is out
of the dark corners and making its way into the mainstream. Notable suc-
cess stories include a number of self-published authors landing their titles
onto the prestigious New York Times bestseller list for ebook fiction.11

The reasons for the rise are apparent. Not only is the mechanism for
publication easily accessible, it is rapid and makes financial sense. In
order to make their e-book available on millions of kindle devices
around the world, an author simply has to upload their work in the
appropriate format – a task for which there is plenty of online guidance
available. That done, a price can be set and the work is published. This is
in stark contrast to the amount of time required to shop a book around
publishers, get contracted, submit a manuscript, and progress it through
the various stages of a book publisher’s workflow – a process which can
often take years. What’s more, Amazon or Apple take a much smaller cut
of the author’s pie: a self-published title can often earn an author 70 of
the cover price. Of course, there is still marketing to be done – and get-
ting exposure for a self-published book is a challenge. It’s easy for a title
to get lost in the mass of titles available, and while the new media forms
have enabled concomitant opportunities to promote an e-book online,

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0008
 Sherman Young

there is much work involved. Of course, a traditional book publisher sel-

dom does much in the way of marketing for most authors; the common
expectation is that even contracted authors will be mastering the arts of
social media and search engine optimisation on their own.
While it can’t be argued that the self-published e-book ecosystem is
a panacea for enabling struggling authors to achieve fortune and fame,
there are numerous examples of authors whose self-published e-books
have been extremely successful. Adam Croft self-publishes thrillers in
both e-book and paperback format. He has reached the top of Amazon’s
best seller lists and The Guardian estimates he sold 250,000 books in
2011. Croft is an unabashed champion of self-publishing, stating:
Publishing, up until now, has been one of the only real closed markets in
a free market economy. Why do we have publishers who have positioned
themselves as the ‘experts’ on what we should and shouldn’t be able to
read? This is particularly relevant in the world of art, as it is criminal that
the world should not be able to create and share art (including literature)
freely.12

Also in the United Kingdom, Kerry Wilkinson has sold more than
250,000 copies of his three-book Jessica Daniel series of detective novels.
He became the top seller on Amazon’s UK Kindle store for the last quar-
ter of 2011.13 At one stage, two of the titles were in the top five – and for
a period in late 2011, Wilkinson was outselling established, contracted,
authors such as Lee Child, James Patterson, and Stieg Larsson in the
e-book charts. Wilkinson never set out to publish traditionally, and sim-
ply started by writing something he thought he would like. Interestingly,
his books are priced low – from 98p to £2.79 – but because of the royalty
structure of the Kindle store, he still sees a good return – between 35
and 70 depending on the specific title. The £2 earned per title is similar
to royalties that many authors earn from their traditional publishers –
with a significant difference in sales.
Of course, some authors still aspire to a traditional publishing
contract – and a self-published e-book (or e-books) can often be a
calling-card to being picked up. The most notable example of this
is Amanda Hocking, a young indie writer who published a series of
teen-vampire books on the Amazon ecosystem. Her nine books, with a
cover price of $3 each, managed to achieve sales of 100,000 copies in a
month.14 In a move that was not without controversy, Hocking signed
a $2 million deal with St Martin’s Press, at the time rejecting a higher

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0008
 Me Myself I 

bid from Amazon (who are in the process of establishing themselves

as direct competitors to publishing houses as well as intermediaries for
self-published authors). Her reasons for the switch centre on a desire
to get a distribution mechanism for printed versions of her books, and
being able to devote more time to the actual writing – as opposed to
the other work that self-published authors need to do. Hocking is not
alone: there are numerous examples of authors making the jump from
self-publishing – and traditional companies are now actively seeking
and courting self-published authors to add to their lists.

The new slush pile

Hocking’s example is indicative of an emergent trend: the use of self-

publishing as the new slush-pile by traditional publishers. That term was
typically referred to by trade publishers as the roomful of unsolicited
manuscripts that accumulates with regular postman deliveries, only
attended to when the occasional unpaid intern having nothing more
productive to do, was delegated the task.
Electronic self-publishing has allowed publishers to cherry-pick from
a vast slush-pile, having outsourced the selection process to the market.
Adding to the Amanda Hocking experience are authors such as Sara
Fawkes whose self-published erotica sold hundreds of thousands of
copies and was on the United States bestsellers list. Fawkes was picked
up by Macmillan in what was described as a significant deal. And Jamie
McGuire (another ‘racy romance’ author) whose self-published Beautiful
Disaster was a New York Times bestseller, signed with Simon and Schuster.
And of course, there’s Fifty Shades of Grey. Now the fastest-selling book
of the century, EL James’s phenomenon was originally self-published as
an e-book, before its reputation spread virally and it was picked up by
Random House imprint, Vintage.15
The emergence of self-published crossovers has led to some publishing
companies establishing more formal ways to engage with new authors
in the digital environment. For example, in 2012 Penguin in the United
Kingdom bought Author Solutions – a provider of what would once
have been called vanity publishing. At the time of the purchase, the CEO
of Penguin noted that ‘self-publishing has moved into the mainstream
of our industry’.16 In late 2011, they also launched author community site
bookcountry.com which initially encourages aspiring authors to connect

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0008
 Sherman Young

with each other and to share their ideas and feedback, before providing
mechanisms for creating and publishing e-books. According to Penguin,
by early 2012 Bookcountry had ‘about 4500 active members and nearly
1000 manuscripts on the site ... being workshopped’.17
Critically, those forays into ‘monetising the slush pile’ have had mixed
reviews. While still new, the services initially came under fire from self-
published authors who took issue with the money charged. For example,
Bookcountry takes a cut of 30 of royalties on top of the royalties charged
by the retailers. Author Joe Konrath writes: ‘I’ve sold 500,000 ebooks.
If I’d published with Bookcountry, they would have taken $290,000 in
royalties from me. That’s just awful.’18 Despite this, there are examples
of crossover. Kerry Schafer uploaded her novel to the Bookcountry site,
where it attracted the attention of an editor at Penguin, with a resultant 2
e-book deal. The first of these was be published in 2013.
This new engagement with the digital slush-pile also occurs at a
similar site from Harper Collins at authonomy.com which they describe
as ‘an online community of discovery where writers become authors.’
Launched in 2008, the site promises that each month Harper Collins
would read the top five community-ranked manuscripts and by 2011 it
had published six titles that originated on the site.19

Shifting the balance of power

Notwithstanding new engagements with the slush-pile and the number of
self-published authors crossing over with mainstream publishing deals,
there is a demonstrable shift in the balance of power between authors
and publishers that has created interesting new tensions. While many
self-published authors have been keen to sign with a trade publisher,
there are also many who are not tempted by the traditional publishing
system.
One example is Ruth Cardello, who made the New York Times
bestseller list with Bedding the Billionaire. Quoted in The Huffington Post,
Cardello turned down a publishing deal saying: ‘I estimated how much
my books were likely to make over the next four years and compared
that to the deal I was offered. When I crunched the numbers, the deci-
sion was easy.’20
Another example is thriller writer Barry Eisler, who turned down
a $500,000 deal to self-publish. Interviewed in March 2011 by fellow

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0008
 Me Myself I 

self-published author Joe Konrath, Eisler was clear about his motiva-
tions. The advantages of a virtual bookstore – with infinite space – is one.
Clearly digital technologies reconfigure relationships with space and time
and Eisler compares the digital shelf to a real-life bookstore arguing:
Often, my books are crammed spine out, in section – and I’m lucky if they
have a copy of each that are in print. Many times they only have a few, and
sometimes none at all. But a virtual shelf ... all the time. And I don’t have to
compete with a NYT bestseller who has 400 copies of their latest hit on the
shelf, while I only have one copy of mine.21

Likewise, the other key advantage of publishing digitally is a reconfigura-

tion of constraints of time. Publishers can take an extraordinary amount
of time to move from manuscript to publication. While the traditional
argument is that this time ensures the quality of the book before release,
it can still prove frustrating to an author. As Eisler suggests:
This was one of the reasons I just couldn’t go back to working with a legacy
publisher. The book is nearly done, but it wouldn’t have been made avail-
able until Spring of 2012. I can publish it myself a year earlier. That’s a whole
year of actual sales I would have had to give up.22

But it’s not just time to publish. The traditional printed book trade works
on a narrow window for sales success. Titles are generally given a short
period of time in bookstores before publishers will happily accept a
return on an unsold book:
In a bookstore, you have anywhere from a few weeks to a few months to sell
your title, and then it gets returned. This is a big waste of money, and no
incentive at all for the bookseller to move the book. But ebooks are forever.
Once they’re live, they will sell for decades ... Currently, my novel The List
is the #15 bestseller on all of Amazon. I wrote that book 12 years ago, and
it was rejected by every major NY publisher. I self-published it on Amazon
two years ago, and it has sold over 35,000 copies.23

While those arguments relate primarily to the advantages of e-books

over print, the added control that self-publishing allows an author is the
critical additional factor. Not only does it allow authors to determine
where and when their books are published, but they are also able to set
prices – and respond to changing market conditions instantly. Konrath
provides an example from his own experience:
I originally self-published The List in April of 2009. It went on to sell 25,000
ebooks at $2.99. Now, two years later, I lowered the price, and it’s selling 1500

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0008
 Sherman Young

copies a day. Things like that don’t happen in paper. But in self-publishing,
I’m seeing more and more books take their sweet time finding an audience,
then take off.24

While traditional publishers still dominate the book industry, the new
technologies have empowered authors to be able to survive – and thrive –
without them. There are clear parallels with the music industry – which
has a long history of musicians releasing music independently of the
major record labels. For many musicians, the digital spaces have opened
up a range of new collaboration and distribution possibilities. The same
is true for e-books. As CUNY Professor Bernard Starr writes:
Fact is that authors no longer need a publisher. And more and more writers
are awakening to the realization that if you are not a high-profile author
who can command large sales, a traditional publisher will do little for you
beyond editing and printing your book. While it’s true that they will also
distribute it to the waning number of brick-and-mortar bookstores – self-
published books are not usually available in bookstores – the number that
actually land on the shelves is surprisingly small. And the argument that
self-published books are not widely reviewed in mainstream publications
loses steam when you realize that only a tiny percent of traditionally pub-
lished books are reviewed at all.25

Disruption?
Clayton Christensen writes about disruptive technologies in The
Innovator’s Dilemma, arguing that disruptive technologies are ‘innova-
tions that result in worse performance, at least in the short term’.26 Instead,
consumers embraced the new approaches, generally because they were
usually cheaper and easier to use, rather than better-performing in the
traditional sense. For authors, there is a clear case that the new tech-
nologies make self-publishing both easier to use and potentially more
lucrative than traditional publishing, with the added benefit that a trade
publisher is more likely to consider someone who has already had some
success as a self-published author.
Christensen also writes that people don’t buy products and services,
but they hire them for a particular job to be done. He uses the example
of the fast food milkshake, where he argues that its sales are not depend-
ent on the flavour or quality of the shake itself, but because purchasers
wanted a filling, non-messy breakfast that was commute (cupholder)

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0008
 Me Myself I 

compatible.27 For publishers, the new technologies make the job-to-do

question problematic. Publishers would argue that their role is quality
assurance: they control the selection of manuscripts and their editorial
processes ensure that the best version of the best choices get published.
In addition, they provide design, production, distribution, and sales and
marketing services for the author.
Arguably, authors can source all of the sales and production services
elsewhere, and get better value from providers like Amazon. And while
those don’t provide the quality assurance role, it is something that
authors don’t actually want. In many cases, they see themselves as being
sufficiently competent to ensure that the book reads and looks the way it
should. Indeed, the only job that the publisher appears to be able to do
that an author cannot source elsewhere is to provide a certain credibility
of having been published by a reputable publishing house. This cred-
ibility remains something of real value in particular circles. Academics,
for example, are often still required to publish with ‘reputable’ publishers
before their work is taken into account as accredited research, and the
culture surrounding literary awards and festivals can still tend to empha-
sise the credibility of the author’s publisher.
But self-publishing has the ability to perform all the other required
jobs. This raises the suggestion: if credibility is all that publishers can
contribute, could traditional publishing companies now be considered
the new vanity press?

Notes
 Johnathon Clifford, in Vanity Publishing – Advice and Warning, http://www.
vanitypublishing.info/ (accessed 18 March 2013).
 Brian Leitner (2008), ‘Publishing One’s Dissertation with a Lesser-known
Publisher’, in Leiter Reports, http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2008/12/
publishing-ones.html (accessed 16 March 2013).
 Richard Curtis (2012), ‘Grafton Apologies to Indies’, in Digital Book World,
http://www.digitalbookworld.com/2012/grafton-apologizes-to-indies-will-
they-accept/ (accessed 22 March 2013).
 David Vinjamuri (2012), ‘Publishing is Broken ...’, in Forbes, http://www.forbes.
com/sites/davidvinjamuri/2012/08/15/publishing-is-broken-were-drowning-in-
indie-books-and-thats-a-good-thing/ (accessed 19 March 2013).
 Sherman Young (2007), The Book is Dead, Long Live the Book, Sydney: UNSW
Press.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0008
 Sherman Young

 Simon Crump (2010), ‘Is It Vanity to Self-publish’, in The Guardian, http://

www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2010/feb/04/vanity-self-publish.
 Bill Henderson (1975), Independent Publishing Today and Yesterday in The
Annals of The American Academy of Political and Social Science, 421(1), 93–103.
 Claire Cain Miller (2011), ‘E-Books Outsell Print Books at Amazon’, in The
New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/20/technology/20amazon.
html?_r=0.
 Alexis Petridis (2013), ‘HMV and the Death of the British High Street: Why
Do We Care?’, in The Guardian, http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2013/
jan/15/hmv-death-british-high-street.
 Self-publishing sees triple-digit growth, http://www.bowker.com/en-US/
aboutus/press_room/2012/pr_10242012.shtml.
 Alison Flood (2012), ‘Self-publishing Sees Massive Growth’, in The
Guardian, http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/oct/25/self-publishing-
publishing?CMP=twt_gu.
 Ibid.
 Alison Flood (2012), ‘Self-Published e-book Author Becomes Amazon’s
Top Seller’, in The Guardian, http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/feb/08/
self-published-author-amazon-ebook.
 Guiliano Long (2012), ‘Self-Publishing: Second Class No More?’, in
Huffington Post, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/03/self-publishing-
traditional_n_1937229.html.
 Sarah Fay (2012) ‘After Fifty Shades of Grey, What’s Next for Self-publishing?’
in The Atlantic, http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2012/04/
after-fifty-shades-of-grey-whats-next-for-self-publishing/255338/.
 James Bridle (2012), ‘Why Self-publishing Is No Longer a Vanity Project’,
in The Guardian, http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/aug/26/self-
publishing-vanity-project-penguin.
 Jeremy Greenfield (2012), ‘Book Country’s First Signed Author:
Never Considered Self-Publishing’, in Digital Book World, http://www.
digitalbookworld.com/2012/book-country’s-first-signed-author-‘never-
considered-self-publishing’/.
 Joe Konrath (2011), ‘Book Country Fail’ in A Newbie’s Guide to Publishing,
http://jakonrath.blogspot.com.au/2011/11/book-country-fail.html.
 Katie Allen (2011) ‘Pack New authonomy.com Publisher’, in The Bookseller,
http://www.thebookseller.com/news/pack-new-authonomycom-publisher.html.
 Guiliano Long (2012), ‘Self-Publishing: Second Class No More?’, in
Huffington Post, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/03/self-publishing-
traditional_n_1937229.html.
 Joe Konrath (2011), ‘Ebooks and Self-Publishing – A Dialog between
Authors ...’, in A Newbie’s Guide to Publishing, http://jakonrath.blogspot.com.
au/2011/03/ebooks-and-self-publishing-dialog.html.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0008
 Me Myself I 

 Ibid.
 Ibid.
 Ibid.
 Bernard Starr (2012), ‘The New Vanity Publishing: Traditional Publishing’, in
The Huffington Post, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bernard-starr/the-new-
vanity-publishing_b_1821945.html.
 Clayton Christensen (1997), The Innovators Dilemma, HarperBusiness
Essentials, p. xviii.
 Carmen Nobel (2011), ‘Clay Christensen’s Milkshake Marketing’, in Working
Knowledge, Harvard Business School, http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/6496.html.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0008
 4
Book Doomsday: The
March of Progress and
the Fate of the Book
John Potts

Abstract: In this chapter, Potts considers the future of the

printed book. The claims that the printed book will soon
become obsolete, replaced by e-books and online publishing,
proceed from a belief in technological progress. According to
this doctrine, the old media form must inevitably be usurped
by its more advanced, more convenient, more modern
technological successor. Potts traces the march of progress in
the publishing context, evaluating the prospects for the e-book
as well as the printed book.

Keywords: e-book; print; progress; technology

John Potts. The Future of Writing. Basingstoke: Palgrave

Macmillan, 2014. doi: 10.1057/9781137440402.0009.

 DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0009
 Book Doomsday 

Objects made of paper and ink: your time is up. If you were animals,
you’d be put down in acts of mercy. If you were characters in a film, you’d
be described as ‘washed up’, ‘has-beens’, grizzled, over-weight, self-indul-
gent, and far from pretty: much like Orson Welles’s character in Touch
of Evil, fallen in the trash, his ‘future all used up’. The print newspaper
is down and almost out, printed magazines are decidedly unhealthy. If
newsprint is not long for this mediasphere, then the book cannot be
far behind it. Why should the plant-matter book survive, when its suc-
cessor – environmentally friendly, convenient, opening to a vast digital
immaterial library – is already here?

In the cloud

The future of reading, we are told by the proponents of tomorrow, is in

the cloud. The cloud is the datasphere, the immaterial zone where digital
words, images, and sounds reside, waiting to be accessed. There will be
no need to turn trees into paper, no need to clutter homes with dust-
gathering books. All that will be needed is a receptacle: small, hand-held,
portable, stylish, an essential part of your digital ensemble. This device
will bring the cloud down to the reader: any book, newspaper, magazine,
poem, essay, or chapter, in electronic form, will find its wireless way onto
your device and into your hands.
We can see how digital reading will work by noting the path already
taken by music. The downloading of music files has been the intermedi-
ate phase in the trajectory that extends from record store to the cloud.
Consumers of music download digital files from iTunes or other online
stores – or from file-sharing sites. The former is the legal option, in which
consumers pay a small amount to download each track; the latter is the
free and illegal option, laughing in the face of copyright. For several years,
the breech of copyright has been the biggest – or at least loudest – story
in this domain, led by cries of outrage from the record companies and
their battalions of Intellectual Property lawyers. But now the situation is
settling down, as many young consumers agree to part with a couple of
dollars for legally acquired songs. The next phase of music consumption
has moved beyond downloading to online subscription services such as
Spotify, which offer unlimited access to a vast online music library. In
this scenario, there is no need to download, because the virtual music
collection is always on, always available, a ‘celestial jukebox’.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0009
 John Potts

We can now take in the features of this new ethereal landscape, including
the losses and casualties of the digital transformation of music consump-
tion. The object is gone, or at least well on the way to oblivion: the compact
disc, like the vinyl record before it, has no reason to exist. With it have
gone the small record stores and specialist music shops that once stocked
these objects. Instead of objects, there is now a vessel – the iPod, iPhone, or
equivalent device. The vessel accesses thousands of songs or pieces of music;
it can download them as files or immaterial objects, if that is the preferred
mode. Millions more wait in the cloud to be transferred to the vessel.
Hifi is another casualty: nobody, apart from a few old-timers, cares
much about audio quality. The digital audio file is inferior in sound quality
to the CD, which was inferior to the vinyl record. Music is heard through
cheap ‘lossy’ ear buds that reduce even further the listening experience:
we have taken great steps backwards in acoustic quality. The priorities
have changed: quantity, availability, and portability – access to the great
jukebox in the sky – are deemed more desirable than sound quality.
If the music industry has drifted into the cloud, the publishing indus-
try must – according to digital logic – follow. The CEO of Amazon,
Jeff Bezos, has declared ‘that the physical book and bookstores are
dead’.1 Their replacement, in the vision of Bezos and his fellow captains
of information, is the vessel for digital text. Amazon’s candidate is the
Kindle, launched in 2007; Bezos claimed that a digital sales ‘tipping
point’ had been reached in June 2010, when Amazon sold more e-books
than hardbacks for the first time.2 There are many other reading devices,
designed and marketed by electronics corporations such as Sony. The
most publicised e-reader, however, has been Apple’s iPad.

Dematerialising my library

What accounts for the zeal of this contemporary narrative, in which the
book is so disrespectfully hurried to its own doomsday? Much of this
terrible enthusiasm emanates from corporate PR and the blogs of ama-
teur IT cheerleaders: it is the language of boosterism, which celebrates
only the path that leads to the new and away from the old.
Hype is short for hyperbole, which courses through this rhetoric. The
grandiloquent claims made for a virtual future double as promotion for
the devices marketed in the present: you too can be part of the glorious
tomorrow by purchasing your Kindle or iPad today. The bold vision of a

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0009
 Book Doomsday 

celestial library glosses over the many obstacles in its path, most notably
the conflicting demands of rights-holders. The world’s music and book
libraries are still owned by the world’s record companies and publishers:
these powerbrokers pose legal and economic challenges – rather than
technological ones – to Google, Amazon, and Apple as they attempt to
build their respective virtual libraries. The contentious Google Book
Settlement of 2008, which divided authors’ groups and publishers, is
indicative of the difficulties inherent in this area.
More generally, the onward drive to a digital future is generated from
the engine-room of modernity itself: the doctrine of progress. This
doctrine is now focused almost exclusively on information technology,
which in part explains the ferocious intensity of claims made for this
sector. The language of progress has defined modernity since its origin
in the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, when progress meant
the creation of fairer and more just societies through the application of
Reason.3 Progress became aligned with technological progress during the
Victorian period, when new railway stations were hailed as cathedrals of
progress, and technologies of transport, communication, and industry
were celebrated as the drivers of an ‘age of improvement’.
The fusion of progress with technological innovation was most
sharply expressed in the twentieth century. In the early decades of that
tumultuous century, industrial production, rationalisation, advertising,
and marketing converged in the creation of the new: in the manufacture,
promotion, and selling of a new range of commodities, and in the notion
of the new itself. The high point of industrial progress was the 1960s, its
zenith 1969, when rocket technology reached all the way to the moon,
the space age beckoned, energy knew no limits, and popular culture
brimmed over with optimism.
The media sage of the 1960s, Marshall McLuhan, observed the march
of progress in the new age of electronic media: TV, radio, rock music,
advertising, the satellite. The swarming energy, spontaneity, and ‘electric
speed’ of the new media were sweeping aside the staid, linear, predict-
able world of printed media. McLuhan saw the generation gap and
counter-culture in media terms: when Bob Dylan sang, in ‘Ballad of a
Thin Man’, ‘Something is happening here, but you don’t know what it is’,
McLuhan heard ‘you’ as the older generation, and ‘it’ as electric media.4
For McLuhan, the fate of old media was to become the content of new
media: plays become the content for films; films become the content for
TV; newspapers become the scripts of radio and TV news. This process

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0009
 John Potts

was inevitable, as new communication technology created the ‘global vil-

lage’ of electric media. Anyone lamenting these radical changes – or failing
to understand them by focusing on the mere content of media – was guilty
of ‘the numb stance of the technological idiot’.5 The logic of media progress
espoused by McLuhan would see the old medium of the book become the
content of the new online media technology, the celestial library.
McLuhan’s uncompromising rhetoric has been absorbed into the
corporate language of the internet age; indeed McLuhan has been hailed
as the prophet of networked culture.6 The McLuhanite division of gen-
erations along media lines is also evident in contemporary culture, in
which the ‘digital natives’, who have grown up with the internet, mark
themselves off from older generations by means of digital technology.
Members of Gen Y reject the newspaper in favour of online information;
they audio-cocoon themselves in public space with iPods and earphones,
preferring the online community of social networking; they scandalise
their parents with a brazen disregard for privacy, as manifest on social
media, blogs, and reality TV shows.7 If social media outlets such as
Facebook become colonised by older generations, including parents,
the younger generation moves on to other outlets such as Instagram or
WhatsApp: this was the finding of a 2014 study of the social media use of
16–18-year olds in eight EU countries.8 This generation, and succeeding
ones, will – according to the imperative of progress – leave the newspa-
per and book behind and embrace the universe of immaterial text.
This narrative culminating in the great collective gathering in the
cloud has a pronounced utopian aspect. The utopian ardour was present
in McLuhan’s rhapsodising of 1960s youth living ‘mythically’ under the
auspices of electric media, but it can also be traced in earlier visions of
techno-utopia. The Italian Futurist leader, F. T. Marinetti, dreamed in
1915 of a future city in which electrical energy is transmitted without
wires, and ‘intelligence finally reigns everywhere ... Every intelligence
grows lucid’.9 In the 1930s, H. G. Wells argued for an ‘integrated, world-
wide information service’ that he named the ‘World Brain’.10
These utopian longings, from within the age of industrial modernity,
have been realised to some extent in the post-industrial era, in the
form of the internet. The contemporary rhapsodising of the ‘collective
intelligence’, of which enterprises such as Wikipedia are early expres-
sions, has been led by Pierre Levy and many other writers and com-
mentators.11 But the fundamental difference between today’s hymns
of progress and those of Marinetti, Wells, and McLuhan, is that faith

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0009
 Book Doomsday 

in industrial progress has long since expired. It went into terminal

decline around the same time as the Apollo space program, in the
1970s. Industry became associated with pollution, waste, environmen-
tal disaster, and finally global warming. Progress has gone so far into
reverse in the industrial zone that the future is now viewed not with
hope but with trepidation, and industrial pollution plays the role of
villain. Recycling, sustainability, and alternative energy are all attempts
to undo the damage wrought by previous generations’ unquestioning
faith in technological progress.
This means that the doctrine of progress has now swung fully behind
information technology. Progress is now measured in terms of faster,
smaller, and more flexible. The post-industrial world of information
is depicted as clean and free of industrialism’s sins: e-books save trees.
Corporations can pursue the strategies honed in the first decades of
industrial modernity – such as planned obsolescence – while trumpeting
their credentials as model green corporate citizens. Each new genera-
tion computer or smartphone renders its predecessor out-of-date; at the
same time, each new model is a step towards the utopian future: wireless,
energy-efficient, sustainable, and increasingly immaterial.
With so much force – economic, ideological, technological – behind
this march of digital progress, will the book – the old-fashioned, mate-
rial, paper-and-ink book – become one of the future’s casualties?

Talking back to progress

The trouble with the logic of progress is that it’s not really logical. The
ardent proponents of progress speak with emotional fervour and with
religious finality. Progress is a language of discontinuity, in which the
old is thought to be obliterated by the new, which is inherently superior.
But there is no reason for the old to disappear completely. According
to the pitiless imperative of progress, radio should have been replaced
by TV, which was such an advance on its predecessor that it amounted
to ‘radio with pictures’, thereby consigning mere radio to oblivion. But
radio in the 1950s simply adjusted its priorities – playing to its strengths
of talk and music – and survived. Similarly, films may have become the
content of TV, but cinema did not die. Rather, it defined its difference
to the newer audio-visual media, and prospered; the latest incarnation
of this strategy is the most recent, highly successful, adoption of 3-D.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0009
 John Potts

History is a conversation between past and present, and media history

is no exception: the mediasphere contains new media and old, the latter
having stubbornly declined to retire.
Progress also provokes a counter-force, of individuals and groups
actively resisting the new. During the Industrial Revolution, such contrary
souls were deemed ‘Luddites’ and criminalised. In the digital age, temporal
rebels and conscientious objectors to progress have abounded. Their theme
is an embrace of tradition, craft, the slow, and the analogue. The slow food
movement celebrates local produce, traditional cooking, and the hours it
may take: it is the opposite of fast food and the microwave. The steampunk
movement – straddling music, fashion, art and literature – incorporates
the Victorian era in an ironic counter to the digital regime.
In pop music, many young musicians have adopted an ‘anything but
digital’ credo: the preference is for acoustic instruments, folk and tradi-
tional musics, a lo-fi approach, and a look and sound very similar to 1971.
‘The old ways are the best ways,’ is the attitude of these new traditional-
ists12 – and that includes the old technology of vinyl records. By the logic
of progress, the vinyl record should have become extinct decades ago.
Its successors, the digital CD and the immaterial music file, are more
convenient, more flexible, less prone to wear and damage, and take up
far less space. But vinyl never died and today it flourishes. Young music
fans as well as nostalgic baby boomers buy vinyl albums, including new
releases. This revival of a seemingly obsolete technology defies progress;
it testifies both to the persistence of old media alongside the new, and to
the prioritising of quality over convenience.
The convenience argument, which is also mobilised in support of the
Kindle and other reading devices, is a staple of the doctrine of progress.
Why carry bulky books and unwieldy newspapers when an e-reader
is so much more convenient? Yet this argument had its heyday in the
1950s and 1960s, when advertising persuaded consumers that instant
coffee was more convenient and therefore better than real coffee, frozen
food more convenient than fresh. It has less sway today, when quality of
experience has been re-asserted as a priority.

Objects

The architects of tomorrow propose a world of digital reading for us –

but that world comes at the expense of two central aspects of reading

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0009
 Book Doomsday 

and owning books: the objecthood of books themselves, and the differ-
ence built into individual libraries. If we abandon books and read only
from the cloud, then we all have the same library. We participate in the
‘world brain’ envisaged by Wells, but we erase individual difference –
and the difference between libraries is what makes them interesting. A
person’s book collection is a display, a reflection of the self. It is a record,
in material form, of the works that have helped shape that self: the ideas,
arguments, knowledge, narratives, characters, and poetry drawn from
those books over many years.
The books carry pieces of the person’s self with them, slices of personal
history. The books age along with their owner, showing creases, wear,
signs of character. When Walter Benjamin refers, in his essay ‘Unpacking
My Library’, to the ‘very mysterious relationship to ownership’13 exercised
by the book collector, he is looking beyond the books’ function and use
value to something more ‘intimate’: the memories attached to each book.
These are memories of when and where the books were found, bought,
read, discussed, housed, and transported: the role they have played in
the owner’s life.
These memories are triggered by the material presence of the books;
Benjamin lovingly describes the smell, the dust, the feel of the volumes
as he unpacks them. Books engage more than just the visual sense in
the act of reading; they jostle all the senses (with the possible exception
of taste). We touch and hold the paper and cover; we smell the book’s
interior, especially when it’s new; we hear the rustle of pages as they
turn. Cover design, which has become increasingly important in recent
years, also entrances the visual sense. Much of the pleasure of owning
and reading books resides in this multi-sensory experience, as well as
in the appreciation of books’ material properties: binding, paper stock,
design, and font.
This materiality evaporates in the cloud: the only material object in
this scenario is the e-reader. The sensory experience of reading then
becomes focused on the receptacle of digital text.

Future and past

When the e-reading device is as aesthetically appealing as the iPad,

many readers may accept the terms of the new digital reading. Apple
has forged its market position largely due to superlative design: it has

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0009
 John Potts

defined the look of post-industrial communications technology. Apple

design looks like the future. In the 2008 animated film WALL-E (which
depicts the future environmental devastation wrought by industrialism)
the desirable advanced robot EVE has the translucent gleam and smooth
casing of an Apple iPod. She represents information, and the hope vested
in a post-industrial future, in contrast to the ragged, mechanical, wires-
showing industrial appearance of WALL-E, fit only for menial labour.
Apple design has intoxicated users with a love of technology, a love
of applications, and a love of sending messages: the iPad and other
e-readers in its wake will encourage many users to read from its glamor-
ous touch-screen. But only the most dedicated technophile will jettison
books altogether.
The disciples of progress see only tomorrow; if the past is viewed at all,
it is with distaste and impatience. But it’s hard to dismiss the past of the
book, which, like the wheel, has sheer longevity on its side. The codex
form of the book – sheets bound between covers – has existed since the
first century, when it was invented by the Romans as an alternative to the
papyrus scroll.14 The mass-produced printed book has proliferated since
the development of the printing press in the mid-fifteenth century. Mass
literacy – and with it enormous shifts in political, scientific, and religious
thought – rose as printed books became widely available in the centuries
after Gutenberg. The printed book distributed knowledge to masses in
an entirely new way; the book carries the weight of this intellectual his-
tory in its form.
We have already seen some of the strategies employed by publishers –
exploiting the backlist classics, foregrounding cover design – in response
to the digital environment. The success of Penguin classics, sold for less
than ten dollars, has drawn on the retro, history-laden character of books.
This has appealed across the generations, including young readers who
delight in the lo-fi material object of the book. The generations that have
rejected the newspaper have not also rejected the book. There is a firm
distinction made between the old-fashioned media technology of the
newspaper – ephemeral, representing (literally) yesterday’s news – and
the old-fashioned media technology of the book, which is still respected
as an object of lasting merit, deserving to be owned, kept, and stored in
a personal library.
A 2013 UK survey found that 62 of 16–24-year-olds prefer printed
books to their e-book equivalents, a finding that surprised many media
observers. Survey respondents noted the emotional connection to

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0009
 Book Doomsday 

physical books, a connection not apparent to digital material. ‘I like to

hold the product’ was the most commonly cited reason for preferring
traditional books. The desire for a library of print books was also evi-
dent in these young readers: ‘I want full bookshelves’; ‘Books are status
symbols, you can’t really see what someone has read on their Kindle’.15
Certain media objects of the past – books – can perfectly well co-exist
with the new media forms of the present.
Jeff Bezos of Amazon has confidently predicted that the physical book
will shortly be dead, but he and other prophets of the book’s demise seem
somewhat laughable in the light of the book’s long history. Two thousand
years is a solid record of persistence. The material form of the book has
survived since the Roman Empire; it has been loved as object as well as
container of knowledge. The book is not going to disappear because of a
few digital doomsday predictions. Its future is not yet all used up.

Notes
 Quoted in Ken Auletta, ‘Publish or Perish: Can the iPad Topple the Kindle
and Save the Book Business?’, The New Yorker, 26 April 2010, p. 26.
 Sydney Morning Herald, 22 July 2010, p. 24.
 Of the many studies of the history of progress and its genesis in the
Enlightenment, the classic work is J. B. Bury, The Idea of Progress: An Inquiry
into Its Origin and Growth. New York: Dover, 1955 [1920].
 McLuhan develops this idea in The Medium is the Massage (with Quentin
Fiore) Penguin, Hammondsworth, 1967 where he quotes this Dylan lyric on
p. 105.
 Marshall McLuhan, ‘The Medium is the Message’, in Understanding Media.
London: Abacus, 1974 [1964]), p. 26.
 Paul Levinson makes this argument in Digital McLuhan. London: Routledge,
1999.
 Emily Nussbaum argues that differing attitudes to privacy define a new
generation gap in ‘Kids, the Internet and the End of Privacy’, The Weekend
Australian Magazine, 24–25 March 2007, pp. 23–27.
 Jemima Kiss, ‘It’s Not Cool When Mum Likes Your Post’, The Guardian
Weekly, 10 January 2014, p. 33.
 F.T. Marinetti, Selected Writings, ed. R. W. Flint, New York: Farrar, Strauss &
Giroux, p. 106.
 Patrick Parrinder, Shadows of the Future: HG Wells, Science Fiction and
Prophecy. Liverpool University Press, 1995, p. 136, referring to Wells’s World
Brain (1938).

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0009
 John Potts

 Pierre Levy, Collective Intelligence: Mankind’s Emerging World in Cyberspace,

trans. Robert Bonomo. New York: Plenum, 1997.
 Ben Knox Miller of The Low Anthem, interviewed in Jaan Uhelszki,
‘Children of the Evolution’, Uncut Magazine, March 2010, p. 36.
 Walter Benjamin, ‘Unpacking My Library: A Talk about Book Collecting’, in
Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn, London: Fontana, 1982,
p. 60.
 Des Crowley, and Clare Williamson, The World of the Book. Melbourne:
Miegunyah Press, 2007, p. 9.
 Liz Bury, ‘Young Adult Readers “prefer printed to ebooks”’, The Guardian, 26
November 2013 at www.theguardian.com/books/2013/nov/25/young-adult-
readers-prefer-printed-ebooks (accessed 13 January 2014).

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0009
 Part II
Creative Writing

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0010
 5
Multigraph, Not Monograph:
Creative Writing and
New Technologies
Nigel Krauth

Abstract: Krauth surveys recent electronic publication of app

and web books, finding in them both a different type of writing
and a different type of reading. These electronic works no
longer house a linear text-only writing, but feature image and
sound as well as text, while also adding background material
and gloss on the text. Krauth provides many examples of these
works, arguing that the app and web book is not a monograph
but a new form of multigraph.

Keywords: app; e-book; multigraph; multimodal; web

John Potts. The Future of Writing. Basingstoke: Palgrave

Macmillan, 2014. doi: 10.1057/9781137440402.0011.

 DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0011
 Multigraph, Not Monograph 

Introduction

We talk about novels and books of poetry as monographs, as stand-

alone or singular products. But the mono in monograph implies ideas
which the twenty-first century rejects across a wide range of discourse.
Oneness, exclusivity, solitariness – these no longer apply positively to
culture, narrative, or publishing. Multi- is the message now. The book
today is not expected to have a single perspective or author, a single
narrative strategy or thesis, a single plot development, a single thrust
into the readerly world, or a single point of publication, editorial and
commercial management. The book is less a published object and more
a writerly and readerly set of processes, which complements its publica-
tion status.
Its place in the culture is now deeply influenced by base-readers’
written responses, further authorial activity in the digital paratext, and
the developing multiple technologies for which it may be suited. Recent
publishing in app form – for example, versions of Burgess’s A Clockwork
Orange, Eliot’s The Waste Land and Shakespeare’s sonnets – has revitalised
classic works in ways that emphatically embrace multiplicity. Through
availability on several platforms, provision of diverse textual versions
and audio readings, exegetical discussions with authorial and other
expert interpretations, and so on, these canonical monographic works
have been given new lives and new positions in the culture.
A democratisation has occurred. A different hierarchy is now formed
by writer, publisher, book production, and reader. In essence, it is not
now a hierarchical arrangement at all, but a rhizomic paradigm where
the contributions of each element are much more equal. The new inter-
activity between reader and book, and reader and writer, has significantly
penetrated the mysteries in which publishers previously shrouded their
processes. For example, publishing houses now agree that they cannot
handle an emerging writer’s publicity and marketing on their own: they
need the writer to help.1 A writer’s self-generated web presence across a
range of activity (author blogs, websites, videos, podcasts, facebook fan
pages, tweeting, and webinars) is an essential element in marketing a
book.
The disruption to centuries-old conventions of the monograph have
also occurred in what the product looks and feels like. We now have
books readable on browsers and e-book readers, and downloadable
to iPads, tablets, phablets, and the growing number of smart devices.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0011
 Nigel Krauth

This technological progress in delivery platforms signifies changes in

the reception of creative writing, but the really interesting changes are
occurring to the literary work itself at levels where the possibilities of
narrative are greatly enhanced by hypertext, and where the potential of
the page has been greatly enriched by hypermedia. The era of the page as
a wall of black text is contested; the page for normal reading is the screen
now, and it involves text, image, colour, and sound working together
to produce multimodal narratives. Literary publishing (of the novel,
poetry, short stories, etc.) faces significant challenges in orienting to the
new possibilities.
The new reading, associated with screens, is a different sort of
reading. The migration, from linear text-only reading traditionally
associated with the monograph, towards the spatial, multimodal text +
image (+ audio) reading associated with screens, has been studied
by educational linguist Gunther Kress.2 According to Kress’s analysis
of multimodal literacy, where the way we read has changed due to
our exposure to screen-driven culture, we now interact with diverse
incoming channels to produce a rich orchestration of meaning. Not
only is the visual more pervasive in communication, but also, we are
much more accepting of the idea that visual and written (or spoken)
texts will operate in unison (a good example is the TV advertisement).
It started with our recognition that – at the simplest level – gestures
and facial expressions accompany speech as part of the message. With
the proliferation of screens to be read we are now required to master
multimodal text + image + audio reading in order to know about and
survive in our world.
It cannot be said that the new technologies have snuck up on creative
writing and ambushed it. The possibilities for writing fiction and poetry
available in the digital age have been imagined by fiction and poetry
writers for centuries. Multimodal literary writing in English traces its
roots back to novelist Laurence Sterne in the eighteenth century and
poet George Herbert in the seventeenth century. Their experiments – in
combining the textual with the visual – were intensified and augmented
by the Surrealists and other groups in the early twentieth century. Then,
a further stream of twentieth-century avant-garde writers provoked the
literary establishment with experiments in a broadening array of radi-
cal writing techniques clearly seen now as precursors to hypertext and
hypermedia writing.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0011
 Multigraph, Not Monograph 

This chapter takes four perspectives on how to view the interaction

between new technologies and creative writing. First, there is an account
of hypermedia literary productions marketed by adventurous publishers
and individual writers since 2011, including a focus on the app and web
novel. These pioneering works give us a significant taste of the future for
serious creative writing.
Second, since 2000 an upsurge of writing and publication in response
to the digital possibilities of print production has resulted in a number
of mainstream paper novels incorporating multimodal elements. This level of
experimental publishing by mainstream publishers has never been seen
before. Significant writers W. G. Sebald, Umberto Eco, and Jonathan
Safran Foer, among others, are involved. As a new direction for publish-
ers who previously did not support multimodal experimental writing,
this is an indication of the future where print books will look more like
hypermedia app books, because publishers will need to exploit both the
textual (paper) and hypermedia (digital) possibilities of a creative work
in the new publishing landscape where the paper and the digital co-exist.
Developments here indicate that previously avant-garde writing is now
part of the mainstream, and that the category of experimental writer on
the fringe is coalescing with the literary every day.
Third, initial responses to the potential of writing electronically in the
1990s came from creative web users themselves. This section reviews
fanzines, hypertext prose, and other digital writing phenomena of the
1990s, including the pioneering work of writers associated with Eastgate
Systems’ publishing. The idea that the reader can write back, and that
works of literature are not published from inaccessible literary towers
but involve interactive discourses, is now part of the literary landscape.
In this section I look at interactivity as a principle of literature in the
future, in the context that the hypertext fiction and poetry era was a
way-point in the development of hypermedia writing.
I end with an account of multimodality, the theory of reading proposed
by Gunther Kress which indicates that the way of reading we now apply to
the everyday world is the way we will read literature in the future. I consider
this in conjunction with a highly selective look at the history of radical liter-
ary ideas underpinning new avenues and dimensions for the literary book.
Especially I look at Laurence Sterne, Paul Éluard and Man Ray, and William
Gass: a group of iconoclastic thinkers from different eras who foresaw a
very different kind of writing fit for a very different publishing world.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0011
 Nigel Krauth

Current publishing: app and web literary works

The contentious Google Books project and the emergence of e-books

and e-readers in the mid-2000s did little for serious creative writers
apart from appalling them at Google’s disrespect for copyright, while
providing them with the understanding that print-published poetry and
fiction could be adapted to electronic delivery in ways which possibly
meant fewer royalties. Of much more interest, some six years later in
2011, was the news that Touch Press, a pioneer in literary app publishing,
had combined with Faber & Faber to produce a remarkable version of
Eliot’s The Waste Land in app form.3 This app quickly became an inter-
national bestseller, and also received enthusiastic critical reviews. The
hypermedia form – combining a multiplicity of notes, readings, videos,
and perspectives – allowed more avenues of entry than had previous
text-only publication of the poem. Adam Hammond wrote in the Toronto
Review of Books:
What the Waste Land app has made me see is that if the poem had somehow,
anachronistically, originally appeared in electronic form, it would have a
very different reputation today. The Waste Land app’s marvelous feat ... is to
have rescued a vibrant and dynamic poem from a print medium that had
entombed and shrouded it, for nearly a century.4

Next followed Touch Press’s Shakespeare sonnets app book5:

Now, Touch Press, collaborating ... with Faber, has produced a dazzling app
of Shakespeare’s sonnets. You can read each one as it is, clean and simple.
Touch a button, though, and the 1609 original quarto appears. Or tap a line
and you bring up the Arden notes, or a little box to jot your own thoughts
in. With another tap, you can watch each of the 154 poems being performed
by [an all-star] cast of actors ... Touch another button and you’re in a gallery
of films showing a half-dozen Shakespeare scholars talking you through
the poems.6

Then Heinemann and PopLeaf released an app version of A Clockwork

Orange,7 the first app novel for adults combining interactive text, archival
documents and video and sound recordings in ‘a lavish production that
for once warrants the words “unique” and “spectacular” in the press
release ...’. Critic Anna Baddeley enthuses further:
You don’t have to adore the novel (I prefer the film) for the app to make you
a mad-eyed evangelist, prone to shoving your iPad in strangers’ faces. ‘Hey,
check out the integrated glossary of Nadsat slang! Listen to Tom Hollander

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0011
 Multigraph, Not Monograph 

narrate it! Watch Martin Amis talk about the controversial last chapter! Hear
Burgess being interviewed! Look at his doodles on the original typescript!’...
Anyone who still believes new technology will turn us all into illiterate
morons needs to be marched off to a correctional facility, strapped to a chair
and given the Clockwork Orange app to play with. It may well cure them.8

These app works are the products of a very different kind of publishing
thinking. In bringing together many diverse elements, it is more like the
thinking required for film production.9 But in spite of the app being suc-
cessful because it does so many things that print can’t do, Henry Volans,
head of digital publishing at Faber, says:
The ‘e’ prefix [in e-book] is misleading. The term book is all that mat-
ters ... The devices are not the content ... Some of the most interesting content
will be the content that is produced with the capabilities of the devices in
mind ... In the longer run, what we are about [at Fabers] is authored works,
and for them to have primacy and centrality ... 10

So the resources seen in these earliest apps are the resources to be avail-
able to creative writers in the future. Such works of fiction or poetry
include non-fiction, history, and the exegetical; they are richly illustrated
with photography, graphics, and digital cleverness; they incorporate
performances by the authors and music soundtracks. In reading these
app books, the reader has the feeling of a variety of texts and a variety of
reading experiences combining. In a way, it’s like reading in three dimen-
sions – it does for the novel or the poetry book what Cinerama, then
3-D and Sensurround sound, did for film. These pioneering, high-end
hypermedia books provide an indication of the publishing possibilities
and the resources available for creative writing in the future.
Clearly the classics and dead authors’ works will provide a rich vein
for publishers to mine and fashion into app books. But works by living
authors are finding their way to hypermedia publication too, especially
some written for children. Michael Morpurgo’s War Horse, in an app
version, won the 2013 Bologna Children’s Book Fair prize,11 and William
Joyce’s The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore – significantly
a story about a writer living through a storm which scatters his words
and then sees their revitalisation as a book that can fly – started as an
Oscar-winning short film then morphed into an iPad app as well as a
traditional paper picture book.12
This array of new publishing gives creative writers plenty to think
about: the creative possibilities of writing original material and

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0011
 Nigel Krauth

adaptations for hypermedia are significant. Reif Larsen, in his insightful

2011 article ‘How to Make an e-Book that Could Not Be Made’, a com-
mentary on the app version of his experimental novel, The Selected Works
of T.S. Spivet,13 says of the relationship between technology and creative
work:
What I didn’t realize until actually experimenting with a touch screen
tablet is that this literal contact with the text allows for a certain kind of
intimate interaction between the reader and the word that we have never
seen before.14

This intimacy of contact – an updated version of the ‘feel’ of the paper

book – is accompanied by another sort of response and involvement:
[My] novel also seems to encourage participation in mapping one’s own
world. Already, there have been various homegrown group mapping exer-
cises and competitions inspired by Spivet. So we’ve built in a function for
readers to submit their own maps and diagrams into a notebook that can be
seen by other readers: essentially an online mapping community, linked by
the common pursuit of displaying the world in T.S.’s spirit. Submitting your
own creation unlocks extra ‘secret’ content, another feature that e-books
offer which print books do not.15

Larsen’s statements contradict the idea that hypermedia publication

divorces the reader from the imaginative and sensual involvement expe-
rienced with the paper book. Another example of hypermedia fiction –
in this case a collaborative internet novel by Kate Pullinger and Chris
Joseph called Flight Paths16 – shows the potential of the digital novel form
in a less expensive and less labour-intensive form than that needed for
high-end app publishing, and shows that do-it-yourself hypermedia
publishing is perfectly feasible.
Flight Paths is a novel about a Middle Eastern stowaway who lands
unexpectedly in a London car park and disrupts the normal life of a
British family. It provides, in my opinion, an excellent, simple way for a
reader to test their multimodal reading skills. I find as I read Flight Paths,
with its strong integration of text, images, and soundtrack, that I begin
to interpret the visuals as text – to accept that the images are replacing
text paragraphs of setting and description, so I process them in that
way. Similarly, I deduce that the music soundtrack is about atmosphere
and emotion, and I interpret it as replacing a textual commentary on
the characters’ situations and feelings. I change, expand and re-interpret
these different modes, or channels, of meaning, into a hybrid narrative

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0011
 Multigraph, Not Monograph 

‘reading’, an orchestration of input strands. I’m not watching film or

listening to music, I’m reading the combination of text, image, and sound
as text.

Since 2000: mainstream multimodal publishing on

paper

There is a long, rich history of illustrated books where reading involves

response to different kinds of input: the linear reading of the textual com-
ponent, the spatial reading of the visual component, and the marrying
of these together. In this history, most extant illuminated manuscripts
in codex form survive from the Middle Ages, but in Egypt as early as
the twelfth-century BC there were ancient papyrus rolls where images
accompanied text, and in Greece and Rome following that. All these
were works produced for adults.17
Upon its invention, printing did not leap immediately into the form we
associate it with today where a slab of words takes up the page. Caxton’s
earliest printed books in English were for adult reading and included
editions with images to illustrate the text (e.g. The Canterbury Tales, 1483)
or to give the appearance of an illuminated manuscript (e.g. The Recuyell
of the Historyes of Troye, 1474).18 Caxton’s adult books involved images not
only because they appealed to the illiterate, or the not-perfectly-literate,
who were sophisticated visual readers, but also because the literate
themselves were used to narrative being enhanced whether in the form
of illuminations/illustrations or the actions and dramatisations provided
by the storyteller/preacher/orator in the oral tradition. Following the
advent of print, the skills required to understand narrative multimodally
(through text + image + sound side-by-side) declined among literary
readers as the high culture printed book became more and more text-
only.
Twentieth-century convention held that illustrated books were either
for children, were novelties or avant-garde fringe experiments, or were
text books or technical manuals, and were seen to be on a level with
comics and newspaper publishing. Readers just 15 years ago found it
hard to associate serious adult literature with the printed image: high
and low cultures which the two represented simply did not mix. But the
screen’s domination of all aspects of reading via television, computers,
and smart devices in the twenty-first century means that we now do

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0011
 Nigel Krauth

most of our reading in forms consistent with multimodal layout and

design. We are getting sophisticated (again) at reading more than one
mode at a time. Since 2000 this has been reflected in new publishing
trends. Mainstream literary publishers such as Penguin, Bloomsbury,
and Secker and Warburg along with bestselling writers like W. G.
Sebald, Umberto Eco, and Jonathan Safran Foer have produced highly
acclaimed novels which incorporate visual elements (graphics, typo-
graphics, photographics) to explore the possibilities of multimodal
fiction in print.
N. Katherine Hayles thinks novels like Sebald’s Austerlitz (2001) and
Foer’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (2005) reflect the perception by
print authors that ‘they are in danger of becoming obsolete ...’:
This anxiety of obsolescence has a complex relation to the recent explo-
sion of creativity in contemporary print novels. On the one hand, print
authors fear that print might be regarded as old fashioned and boring in
the face of new media, especially electronic texts that can dance to music,
morph to suggestive shapes, and perform other tricks impossible for the
durable inscriptions of print. On the other hand, print itself is capable of
new tricks precisely because it has become an output form for electronic
text.19

Hayles points out that while we persist in saying that the digital novel
has not yet quite arrived, in fact all aspects of the text-writing process –
from the author’s keyboard to the printing press itself – are electronically
organised.20 However, she does not mention that the post-2000 experi-
mental print novels are not necessarily a product of the technological
imperative, but were preceded by a long rehearsal conducted on the
fringes of literature where the restrictions of the paper page and the
conventions of poetry and fiction publishing have been challenged
repeatedly. But I will come to that.
In 2001, W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz was published in German and
translated into English in the same year.21 Austerlitz’s plot concerns a
Czechoslovakian-Jewish man fostered to a family in Wales at the age
of five to escape the Holocaust. Fifty years later he returns to Europe
seeking his history and identity. Appearing regularly throughout the
novel are black-and-white photographs recording his search and the
tragic history it traces. So powerfully juxtaposed are images and text, the
reader cannot but weave the ‘evidence’ of the photographic images into
the reading of the novel. With suspension of disbelief, we accept that
the textual fiction portrays reality, but the ‘authenticity’ and ‘tragic detail’

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0011
 Multigraph, Not Monograph 

of these photographs hammer the reality of the message home. Placed

precariously in a zone between fact and fiction, and influenced by how
we learn history from screen footage and photographic images, Austerlitz
investigates how our ‘reality’ is produced by the intertwining of two dif-
ferent reading modes – the textual and the visual.
Umberto Eco’s The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana,22 another search
for a war-time European childhood, uses visual images in a way quite
similar to Austerlitz. But Leanne Shapton’s Important Artifacts and Personal
Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including
Books, Street Fashion, and Jewelry takes the concept much further.23 In this
work, the narrative has disappeared from the text. Presented in the form
of an illustrated auction catalogue, the fiction itemises 332 lots for sale –
including documents, clothing, household objects, books, personal pos-
sessions, and so on – which, photographed and tersely described, build
into a detailed and moving account of the history and experience of the
four-year relationship (2002–2006) between Lenore and Harold. While
displaying no overt narrative characteristics whatsoever, Shapton’s work
proves how text and imagery tightly woven together – even presented
in dispassionate catalogue form – can produce a gripping personal
narrative.
The most astonishing bestseller to involve multimodal reading
in this period is Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly
Close.24 It focuses on a ‘new’ Holocaust, the 9/11 Twin Towers tragedy,
and follows the search of a young boy for his dead father. There is not
room here to address all aspects of this tour de force among multi-
modal novels, nor to analyse in depth the complexity of interactions
it sets up between text, layout, typography, design, graphics, colour,
photography, literary forms, and the structure of the codex itself.
Reference to just one passage in the novel will suffice. Having collected
a sequence of 15 published photographs for his Stuff That Happened to
Me scrapbook which shows page by page the frames in a film of a man
falling from the World Trade Centre on 9/11 – possibly, in fact, his own
father on the hellish way down – nine-year-old Oskar rips the pages
apart and re-arranges them in reverse order. These are reproduced at
the actual novel’s end as a 15-page flip book: the reader can flip them
and produce their own ‘film’ of the man falling upwards (although
the reverse of the reversal can be performed too ... for those who want
a tragic ending). In a salute to Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow, the final
textual sequence of the novel has the newly un-fallen man come back

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0011
 Nigel Krauth

down in the lift after the plane has flown backwards out of the closing
hole in the building, then he catches the train backwards home, then
gets into bed backwards with his son who says ‘Dad’, which sounds
the same backwards as forwards.
Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close provides the most complete investiga-
tion of the multimodal possibilities of the paper novel, but also provides
an investigation of how fiction will transfer to the hypermedia modes
available in app technologies. It is a farsighted work, in line with Hayles’s
prediction that ‘digital literature will be a significant component of the
twenty-first century canon’.25 However, not all critics were impressed.
The New York Times reviewer called it ‘irritating’ and singled out Foer’s
‘attempts to employ razzle-dazzle narrative techniques: playful typogra-
phy, blank pages ... and photographs’:
Clearly Mr. Foer has used these techniques ... to try to get traction on hor-
rific events that defy both reason and conventional narrative approaches,
but all too often his execution verges on the whimsical rather than the
galvanic or persuasive. In fact, “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close”
tends to be at its most powerful when Mr. Foer abandons his willful use of
experimental techniques and simply writes in an earnest, straightforward
manner, using his copious gifts of language to limn his characters’ state of
mind.26

This ‘irritation’ occurs rather frequently to reviewers of multimodal

paper works for major newspapers, perhaps indicating some residual
establishment antagonism towards the avant-garde. For comparison, see
Tim Adams’s review of The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet in The Observer,
which complains that this richly diverse work creates ‘what might be
called “curiosity boredom”: the kind that is allied to unstinting inven-
tion, an excess of precociousness’;27 or Ginia Bellafante’s New York Times
review of the same book which calls it ‘exhausting’ and notes: ‘Following
some of the marginalia requires repositioning the book, turning it
around and sideways, making it something for neither the formalist nor
the arthritic.’28
Clearly there is an old guard resistant to the new reading associated
with new media, and its hackles rise further when confronted with the
possibilities of hypermedia being rehearsed in sacrosanct print form. But
the multimodal is here to stay; its virus has spread from the screen back
onto the printed page, in spite of the fact that the idea of co-existence
and cross-fertilisation between paper and digital is still not on the old
guard’s agenda.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0011
 Multigraph, Not Monograph 

The reader writes back: electronic writing from the

1990s onwards

In the 1990s, before the potential of hypermedia was realised, the advent
of hypertext provided the breakthrough for readers to enact (perhaps
ironically) some version of Barthes’s ideas about the reader creating the
work. To poetry and fiction, hypertext introduced linked glossaries, plot
pathway choices, parallel narratives, character back-story files, primitive
graphics, and so on. It was a large-scale assault on linearity in writing,
and also on the relative isolation of the published creative text. On the
one hand this brave new world of writing and reading produced the
beginnings of a niche-based literary community using multimedia (e.g.
the CD-ROM) along with pioneering websites for serious publishing of
original works. On the other hand, it created a lively and massive web-
based fanzine community who used (and still use) the internet to write
together in response to, and to influence, popular culture products.
Regarding the fanzine community, the creative writing produced by
fandom in the 1990s and before was analysed by Henry Jenkins in Textual
Poachers. In the updated edition of his classic study, Jenkins says:
what is powerful about fan fiction is that it is ‘unpublishable’. That is, it is
not bound by the constraints that shape commercial media production. But
the bounds between what is and is not publishable are constantly shifting.29

The ‘unpublishable’ publishing space he identifies is the radical space

occupied by avant-garde writers for at least a century. Now, due to the
internet, readers can step into it: ‘fandom offers us a powerful model
for understanding how widespread grassroots creativity may persist
despite (or perhaps even because of) limited opportunities to directly
profit from one’s own labour.’30 For fan reader/writers, ‘writing becomes
a social activity’ and a ‘source of collective identity’. In a number of ways
fan practices ‘move beyond the status of criticism and interpretation’.31
Like avant-garde writers of the past, fans attempt to change the canon
to make it ‘more central to the community’s experience’, to map ‘specific
conventions through which the community constructs its stories’.32 This
rebellious democratisation of critique, and demystification of publishing,
have had their effect on the multimodal development of the literary text.
The audience for poetry and fiction in the digital age is more vocal and
visible, more present at the writer’s desk in the sense of being just a click
or two away from her keyboard, home page, or blog.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0011
 Nigel Krauth

Regarding serious literary endeavour in the 1990s, Robert Coover’s

brilliant 1999 keynote address to the DAC 1999 conference is the best
summing up of early hypertext work by writers such as Michael Joyce,
Judy Malloy, Stuart Moulthrop, and Shelley Jackson:
These pioneer narrative hypertexts explored the tantalizing new possibil-
ity of laying a story out spatially instead of linearly, inviting the reader to
explore it as one might explore one’s memory or wander a many-pathed
geographical terrain, and, being adventurous quests at the edge of a new
literary frontier, they were often intensely self-reflective.33

Coover singles out Jackson’s Patchwork Girl, based on Mary Shelley’s

Frankenstein, as ‘[p]erhaps the true paradigmatic work of the era’. He
goes on:
The very choice of the central metaphor of Patchwork Girl was alone a stroke
of genius: the patching together of a new body, whether of flesh or text, from
linked fragments of other bodies, also of flesh, also of text, once dead, now
given new life, new form, if somewhat strange and ‘monstrous.’ The work
is divided, like the senses, into five linked sections, and one of these is the
raiding of the graveyard for body parts – and for the stories attached to their
previous owners. Thus, from the outset, this patching together of a physical
body from disparate but harmonious parts was linked to a similar patching
together of story materials, the body becoming text, text body, a traditional
theme given its true hypertextual configuration with this multiply coded,
larger-than-life patchwork girl.34

Another Eastgate Systems publication, Michael Joyce’s afternoon: a story,

is acknowledged as the prototype hypertext novel.35 A fragmented nar-
rative about the fragmented state of mind of a man who has lost his
son in a car accident, afternoon: a story introduced readers to the way
hypertextuality could de-centralise and de-linearise a narrative, and how
the hypertext work of fiction could endlessly avoid closure. Writers such
as James Joyce, Julio Cortázar, Marc Saporta, Robert Coover, and B. S.
Johnson had tried in various ways to avoid narrative closure with the
resources available to the paper book – even attempting publication of
novels in loose leaf from, without binding, so that the pages of the work
could be read in an infinite order. Following these earlier experimenters,
Michael Joyce and his peers showed that the layering, disjointedness,
and circularity of reading hypertext better reflects the nature of life as we
live it than does the logically developed narrative which conforms to the
constraints of the spine-bound page.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0011
 Multigraph, Not Monograph 

Some 25 years after Michael Joyce’s work, web-based electronic lit-

erature has become highly sophisticated. As an example among many,
digital poet Jason Nelson’s website, Secret Technology, epitomises the pos-
sibilities for poetry as text, art, and video combined. He uses self-drawn,
original images, and found images (photography from advertising,
institutional, and family sources); self-made, original video and audio,
and sampled video and audio; his own and found texts; and sampled,
re-worked hypermedia programs and engines to drive his interfaces.
So integrated are the components and modes in this multimodal poet’s
work, there is no way to quote him other than refer to his website (http://
www.secrettechnology.com/)36 and let the reader/viewer/listener – the
user – experience for themselves.

Past experiments in multimodal writing

Kress refers to the retrospective application of ideas born out of multi-

modal literacy studies to the construction of texts in the past. He uses
‘modular composition’ – the compositional principle in ‘semiotic pro-
duction of all kinds’ – to apply to the making of paragraphs, chapters, and
so on in text, the composing of images within a frame, and the joining of
musical phrases and movements in the selecting/assembling/designing
aspects of meaning creation. He also applies it to radical, non-traditional
cutting/pasting, collage and sampling techniques. As compositional
principle it underlies the process of ‘[w]hat is to be “glued” and how –
and what not’ in meaning-making. It is ‘subject to different forms and
degrees of regulation at different times and in different places’.37
Modular composition provides us with a single set of perspectives for
talking about the semiotic elements involved in the making of creative
works in different modes (writing, art, music) in different eras. It also
gives us insight into how multimodal reading and writing occur.38 There
is no space here to elaborate on Kress’s theory, but two central points need
mentioning. The first is, that reading in different modes involves different
‘reading paths’. For example, the traditional reading path for writing is
linear, chronological, and causative, while that for images is spatial, jux-
tapositional, and comparative. In multimodal productions, these reading
paths intertwine with each other, and vary each other’s shapes and effects.
In experimental writing since Herbert and Sterne, the operation of these
paths, and the challenging of them, has been a central focus of attention.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0011
 Nigel Krauth

The second point relates to the imagination’s role in reading and writ-
ing. While reading paths within modes use the imagination as the ‘glue’
for meaning-making in ways conventional to that mode and its time,
Kress insists that the imagination is also the glue in the ‘transmodal
process’ where meaning is being created multimodally.
In multimodal ensembles, of writing and image, or of writing, speech,
image, music and so on, the possibilities of supplementing messages
with meaning multiply, and incorporate the demands and the potentials
of imagination of all the modes involved. To this we must add the never
absent process of synaesthesia, the transduction inwardly, in interpretation,
between modes – from spoken to visual, from sound to colour, from image
to smell, and so on.39

Thus, in the multimodal, the imagination works harder and with more
reward; it doesn’t wither away as some critics have supposed. It deals with
the greater interactivity involved as the reader/viewer/listener negotiates
the meaning of the work. This means richer experience for readers and
greater possibilities for writers.
A brief survey indicates for how long and how devotedly experimental
writers have been fascinated with the multimodal. In the 1760s Laurence
Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1760–1767)
included a black page (both sides of the page, in fact) to intensify experi-
ence of a confronting death in the narrative; a marbled page (again both
sides) to enact the difficulty of reading a complex text; and a blank page
to allow the reader to draw their own version of a character (a beautiful
woman) in the story.40 In terms of how we understand multimodality
and use hypermedia interactivity today, these investigations of the page
250 years ago are highly sophisticated.
The focus of Sterne’s pioneering interest was taken up internationally
in the early twentieth century. From 1915 onwards, Dada, then Surrealism
and later Oulipo, brought writing, visuals, and performance together
in many combinations and many artforms. One work from the 1930s
indicates how subtly the Surrealists investigated multimodal produc-
tion. In 1935 Paul Éluard and Man Ray published a book that combined
12 poems with 12 photographs.41 Facile was not a simplistic catalogue
of two different practitioners’ works, nor was it a simple illustrated
poetry book. Mary Ann Caws, in her survey of Surrealism, calls Facile
‘a unique example of these two forms coming together in a remarkable
integration’.42 It was a collection of love poems by Paul Éluard about,
and addressed to, his wife Nusch Éluard. It was also a collection of love

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0011
 Multigraph, Not Monograph 

photographs (if one may coin such a category) taken of Nucsh by Man
Ray, who employed her regularly as photographic model. It might best
be described as a set of love poems expressed both in writing and in
photographic forms. The really interesting thing is not just that the two
forms were brought together, they were brought together in such a way
that the reader/viewer could experience the same emotional and artistic
motives expressed through two different processes. In my opinion, it is
clear that both men were in love with this woman, and what we can trace
here is how each of them read her – her actions, her mind, her body, her
presence – and how each of them transposed that reading into a differ-
ent mode of telling. This correlation of two poetic approaches allows the
reader/viewer to read Nusch in two different ways at the same time. The
text poem and the visual poem are each enhanced by their proximity to
and interweaving with the other: the photographs operate as narrative,
the body morphs into a text and the text into a body. As a project, Facile
was about artistic process in different modes and, indeed, the ease with
which multimodal reading can occur.
Finally an example from the 1960s: William H. Gass’s pioneering
novella Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife (1968).43 This work explored many
of the possibilities of the fiction narrative page which became available
to it with mid-twentieth-century technologies, and can be truly called
a precursor to hypermedia. Gass used the page as a site for multimodal
interactions between text, fonts, graphics, and photography. He saw the
material character of the book as full of exciting potential – ‘another kind
of muse’44 – because it is a staging point in negotiations between writer
and reader in dealing with another kind of book. Each page and double-
page spread in Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife involves masterful nuancing
of typographical variety, dynamic orchestration of space, image, and
text, deft management of a complex set of diegetic levels (where the main
first-person narrative is handled both above and below the footnotes
line), and a mélange of forms (stream-of-consciousness, direct address
to the reader, playscript, quotation, speech bubble, marginalia, random
fragment insert – not to mention the photographics and the coffee-cup
stains integrated into the mix). Looking at Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife
in the twenty-first century, one recalls the complexity of hypermedia
screens, which in itself is impressive for a work created in the 1960s. But
this novella is not just superficial, forward-thinking fireworks. It is an
investigation of the juxtaposition of media in life and in reading, and
their effects on writers’ and readers’ bodies.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0011
 Nigel Krauth

Conclusion

In a speech in 1983 in bold anticipation of the launch of the iPad 27 years

later, Apple co-founder Steve Jobs said:
What we want to do is we want to put an incredibly great computer in a book
[my italics] that you can carry around with you and learn how to use in 20
minutes ... and we really want to do it with a radio link in it so ... you’re in
communication with all of these larger databases and other computers.45

This powerful book, as portable as the codex but so much more talented,
is now available to writers and readers. Jobs and Apple saw it as a book.
Creative writing has begun to see it so too.

Notes
 See Wiley, John & Sons, Wiley Author’s Guide to Online Marketing and Publicity
(2010), http://authorguide.wiley.com/about-online-marketing/ (accessed 16
January 2014).
 See Gunther Kress, Multimodality: A Social Semiotic Approach to Contemporary
Communication, London: Routledge, 2010 and Literacy in the New Media Age.
London, Routledge, 2003. Cybermedia theorists Gregory L. Ulmer (2002) and
Jan Rune Holmevik (2012) call their version of hypermedia literacy: electracy.
See Gregory L. Ulmer, Internet Invention: From Literacy to Electracy. New York:
Longman, 2002 and Jan Rune Holmevik, Inter/vention: Free Play in the Age of
Electracy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012.
 See Touch Press, ‘The Waste Land for iPad’ (2013), http://www.touchpress.com/
titles/thewasteland/ (accessed 10 November 2013).
 Adam Hammond, ‘How Faber’s App Rescues Eliot’s Masterpiece from the
Waste Land of Print’, Toronto Review of Books (17 April 2012), http://www.
torontoreviewofbooks.com/2012/04/how-faber-and-fabers-ipad-app-rescues-
t-s-eliots-masterpiece-from-the-waste-land-of-print/ (accessed 12 January
2014).
 Touch Press, ‘The Sonnets by William Shakespeare’ (2013), http://www.
touchpress.com/titles/shakespeares-sonnets/ (accessed 10 November 2013).
 Collins, Robert, ‘Touch of Class’, Weekend Australian Magazine (1 September
2012), http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/features/touch-of-class/story-
e6frg8h6-1226458983091# (accessed 13 November 2013).
 Random House, ‘A Clockwork Orange App’ (2012), http://www.randomhouse.
co.uk/lp/aclockworkorangeapp (accessed 19 January 2013).

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0011
 Multigraph, Not Monograph 

 Anna Baddeley, ‘A Clockwork Orange to Scare You All Over again’, The
Observer (30 September 2012), http://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/
sep/30/clockwork-orange-burgess-app-ipad (accessed 12 January 2014).
 See Max Whitby, co-founder and CEO of Touch Press, and Henry Volans,
Head of Digital Publishing at Fabers, talking about production of app books
at ‘Max Whitby, Henry Volans at the TOC Frankfurt 2011’, YouTube (24
October 2011), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k0IahmSMNbk (accessed
20 January 2014). The range of Touch Press’s multiple production partners can
be seen at http://www.touchpress.com/about/ (accessed 20 January 2014).
 Henry Volans, ‘The Digital Innovators: Henry Volans of Faber Digital’,
YouTube (1 September 2010), http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uqb_
XLIwasY (accessed 20 January 2014).
 See Egmont Press, ‘War Horse’ (2013), http://www.egmont.co.uk/ebooks-
and-apps.asp?item=war-horse (accessed 13 November 2013).
 See Moonbot Studios, ‘The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore
app’ (2012), http://moonbotstudios.com/the-fantastic-flying-books-of-mr-
morris-lessmore-storybook-app/#.UtttvNJAqih (accessed 19 January 2014).
 Reif Larsen, The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet. New York: Penguin, 2009.
 Reif Larsen, ‘How to Make an e-Book that Could Not Be Made’, Penguin.com
(31 March 2011), http://www.us.penguingroup.com/static/pages/features/
ts-spivet/ (accessed 04 January 2014).
 Ibid.
 Kate Pullinger and Chris Joseph, Flight Paths: A Networked Novel (2012):
http://flightpaths.net/ (accessed 10 November 2013).
 John Harthan, The History of the Illustrated Book: The Western Tradition. New
York: Thames & Hudson, 1997 [1981], pp. 12–14.
 Ibid., pp. 65–66.
 N. Katherine Hayles, Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary. Notre
Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame, 2008, p. 162.
 Ibid., p. 159.
 W. G. Sebald, Austerlitz, trans. Anthea Bell. London: Penguin, 2001.
 Umberto Eco, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana: An Illustrated Novel, trans.
Geoffrey Brock. London: Secker & Warburg, 2005 [2004].
 Leanne Shapton, Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection
of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion, and Jewelry.
New York: Sarah Crichton Books/Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2009.
 Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2005.
 Hayles, Electronic Literature, p. 159.
 Michiko Kakutani, ‘Boy’s Epic Quest, Borough by Borough’, The New
York Times Books (22 March 2005), http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/22/
books/22kaku.html?_r=0 (accessed 15 January 2014).

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0011
 Nigel Krauth

 Tim Adams, ‘Travels with the Kid Cartographer’, The Observer (3 May 2009),
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/may/03/reif-larsen-selected-
works-ts-spivet (accessed 4 January 2014).
 Ginia Bellafante, ‘Map Quest’, New York Times Sunday Book Review (19
June 2009), http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/21/books/review/Bellafante-t.
html?_r=0 (accessed 04 January 2014).
 Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture.
Updated Twentieth Anniversary Edition. New York: Routledge, 2013.
 Ibid., pp. xxx–xxxi.
 Ibid., pp. 154–155.
 Ibid., p. xlii.
 Robert Coover, ‘Literary Hypertext: The Passing of the Golden Age’, Keynote
Address, The Second Annual Digital Arts and Culture Conference (DAC ‘99),
Atlanta, Georgia (29 October 1999): http://www.nickm.com/vox/golden_age.
html (accessed 15 January 2014).
 Ibid.
 See Eastgate, ‘afternoon: a story, Michael Joyce’ (2011), http://www.eastgate.
com/catalog/Afternoon.html (accessed 15 January 2014).
 Jason Nelson, Secret Technology (nd): http://www.secrettechnology.com/
(accessed 16 January 2014).
 Kress, Multimodality, p. 147.
 Ibid., pp. 170–172.
 Kress, Literacy in the New Media Age, p. 170.
 Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, New
York: The Odyssey Press, 1940 [1760–67], pp. 33, 227 and 471.
 See Paul Éluard, Excerpt from Facile, photography Man Ray, PHLiT (2011
[1935]), http://phlit.org/press/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/facile.pdf (accessed
12 September 2013).
 Mary Ann Caws, Surrealism, London: Phaidon, 2011 [2004], p. 128.
 William H. Gass, Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife, Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive
Press, 1998 [1968].
 William H. Gass, ‘Designing the Tunnel’, Dalkey Archive Press website, Context
No. 18 (2008 [1995]), http://www.dalkeyarchive.com/designing-the-tunnel/
(accessed 18 December 2013).
 Matthew Panzarino, ‘Rare Full Recording of 1983 Steve Jobs Speech
Reveals Apple Had Been Working on iPad for 27 Years’, The Next Web (2
October 2012), http://thenextweb.com/apple/2012/10/02/rare-full-recording-
of-1983-steve-jobs-speech-reveals-apple-had-been-working-on-ipad-for-27-
years/#!svWqp (accessed 18 January 2014).

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0011
 6
On the Art of Writing
with Data
Chris Rodley and Andrew Burrell

Abstract: Rodley and Andrew Burrell explore the potential

of ‘big data’ writing in their chapter. They offer examples of
data-driven literature that search and reconfigure textual
information in real time. This recently emerged form of non-
linear or dynamic writing, drawn from massive databases, is
presented as a mode of writing highly suited to the internet
age, one which may become more timely in the future.

Keywords: data; database; dynamic; non-linear; writing

John Potts. The Future of Writing. Basingstoke: Palgrave

Macmillan, 2014. doi: 10.1057/9781137440402.0012.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0012 
 Chris Rodley and Andrew Burrell

1.

In his short story ‘The Aleph’, Jorge Luis Borges introduces a poet, Carlos
Argentino Daneri, who receives his creative inspiration from a remark-
able source. In the cellar of his Buenos Aires house, Daneri possesses an
Aleph: a point at which all other parts of the world are visible simultane-
ously. The skeptical narrator of the story visits the basement to see the
Aleph for himself. Looking into a small iridescent sphere, he glimpses a
world of endless wonders:
I saw the populous sea, saw dawn and dusk, saw the multitudes of the
Americas ... saw clusters of grapes, snow, tobacco, veins of metal, water
vapor, saw convex equatorial deserts and their every grain of sand, saw a
woman in Inverness whom I shall never forget, saw her violent hair, her
haughty body, saw a cancer in her breast, saw a circle of dry soil within a
sidewalk where there had once been a tree, saw a country house in Adrogué,
saw a copy of the first English translation of Pliny ... 1

More than one commentator has noted the parallel between the Aleph
and the World Wide Web: another portal that allows access to a vast
realm of global data within the screen of a smart phone or a Google
Glass lens.2 We would like to draw a parallel with another part of
Borges’ story: the writer Daneri. Just as he viewed the conduit to the
world’s information as a source of poetry, so a number of today’s writers,
programmers and media artists are focused on exploring the literary
potential of Big Data. But unlike Daneri, who describes what he sees in
a turgid epic titled “The Earth”, these practitioners let the data stream
speak for itself.
One example is David Hirmes’s website The Aleph: Infinite Wonder/
Infinite Pity, a homage to the Borges story that displays a list of sights
from across the world which echo the passage above. But Hirmes’s
stream of marvels is not static like Borges’s text; it is an infinitely scroll-
ing list dynamically generated by searching Twitter and/or the Project
Gutenberg literature library for instances of the phrase ‘I saw’:
I saw a pregnant woman smoking. thats SO disgusting like why should
YOUR baby suffer because youre too selfish to quit for 9 fucking months ...
I saw ’twas she, but said no word, And silent fled into the night. I saw a
box of poptarts and it made me miss youth force ... I saw Lucien Bonaparte
brought out of the hall, where the latter assembly was sitting, by some
grenadiers, sent in to protect him from the violence of his colleagues. I saw
a whooping 2 fireworks tonight. Wooo ...3

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0012
 On the Art of Writing with Data 

It joins a growing number of data-driven literary works which search,

appropriate, and reconfigure digital information. They form part of a
wider movement of data-driven creative practice that also includes data
art and data visualisation.4

2.

The idea of accessing vast amounts of textual information in one

place – of creating a multum in parvo, to use Borges’s phrase – is not new.
Renaissance philosophers Giordano Bruno and Giulio Camillo both
conceived of elaborate structures for representing and enabling universal
access to the world’s corpus of knowledge. During the Enlightenment,
encyclopedists such as Diderot made an earnest attempt to array the
sum of human wisdom in a comprehensive, systematised way for the
first time.
But it was not until the twentieth century that technologies were
developed to represent large amounts of information in a dynamic way,
with the text capable of updating as new data was received. An early
appearance of such technology came in 1928 when the Motograph News
Bulletin on Times Tower in New York City lit up with its first headline,
‘HERBERT HOOVER DEFEATS AL SMITH’.5 The news zipper, as it
became known, was an array of 14,800 lightbulbs fixed to the building’s
fourth floor and controlled by a moving conveyor of metal letters.6 The
New York Times trumpeted the awesome power of its invention to cap-
ture and display global information: ‘Letters Will Move around Times
Building Telling of Events in All Parts of the World.’
In the 1950s came a new textual display system: the Solari board,
wheels of metal flaps printed with letters and numbers which flipped
over to show destinations and times at increasingly busy airports and
railway stations. Then, 20 years later, the television information service
Teletext was launched in Britain, showing news, weather, and sports
results in a single, constantly updated page.
Of course, digital technologies have made these innovations mostly
obsolete. Dynamically updating text is everywhere on the Internet, from
search engines to news websites to social platforms such as Twitter,
Facebook, and Tumblr. (Curiously, perhaps, the basic modes of display
have not changed much since the twentieth century; many websites and
mobile apps that present dynamic text reinscribe the textual practices of

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0012
 Chris Rodley and Andrew Burrell

either scrolling, like the zipper, or refreshing, like the Solari board.) Such
tools have become vital for sorting and making sense of the vast amounts
of digital information being produced each day. In such a context, it is
not surprising that literary works have begun to emerge which also sort
and make sense of data via dynamic text.

3.

Data-driven literature has not gained widespread acceptance as a discrete

field of practice. An introduction to e-literature by N. Katherine Hayles
from 2008 does not recognise this type of writing as a category,7 though
she notes that the interrelated category of generative text – creating new
texts or remixing existing ones through computer algorithms – is a flour-
ishing genre. But Holly Dupej, in her dissertation on poetry generators,
does recognise the category of works that manipulate Internet text.8 And
a typology of e-literature by Noah Wardrip-Fruin refers to the category
of ‘environmentally interactive’ digital writing that relies on scraping
external data. However, he notes that there are few examples of it, even
though data visualisations are a thriving area of non-text-based digital
art.9
We believe that a growing number of projects may now be said to fit
into the category of data-driven literature. These works are reconfiguring
a diverse variety of data in a diverse variety of ways. Common to almost
all of them is the salience of three key elements of digital writing iden-
tified by Wardrip-Fruin: the content of the data itself; the algorithmic
processes set loose upon the data by the writer; and the interaction with
the external data stream, which changes the state of the work.10
Some notable examples have sought to explore or conceptualise data
streams themselves. In Mark Hansen and Ben Rubin’s seminal work
Listening Post (2001–2003), fragments of text on newsworthy or mundane
subjects were sourced in real time from Internet chat rooms and forums
and sent flickering across a grid of 231 small screens. The data visuali-
sation project We Feel Fine (2007) by Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar
was inspired by Listening Post.11 It trawls blogs for the phrases ‘I feel’ or ‘I
am feeling’ and organises the results into a visually striking, interactive
‘almanac of human emotion’. Such works invite us to see the patterns
and trends in data by adopting a distant reading posture; Ben Rubin has
explicitly asked readers to take such an approach to his Holzer-esque

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0012
 On the Art of Writing with Data 

work And That’s The Way It Is, which projects live news feeds interwoven
with transcripts of broadcasts by Walter Cronkite onto a building at the
University of Texas at Austin.
Other, more intimate, works of data-driven literature invite close
rather than distant reading; they do not seek to conceptualise the data
stream as a whole, but to make sense of the flotsam and jetsam within
it. Daniel Howe and Aya Karpinska’s No Time Machine crawls the web
for variations of the phrase ‘I don’t have time for’ and combines them
algorithmically with other found text to construct a ‘poetic conversation’
about time.12 Missed Connections by Cristobal Mendoza fetched recent
posts from Craigslist.org’s Missed Connections RSS feed and removed
either all the functional words with little lexical meaning, or all the
content words. In asking readers to reconstruct these fragmented narra-
tives, it invited a comparison with the interrupted human relationships
of Missed Connections personal ads.13 And Bill Kennedy and Darren
Wershler’s Status Update replaced the subjects of social media updates
with the names of dead writers in a playful commentary on the banali-
ties of modern life.14,15

4.
A sense of playfulness often pervades works of data-driven literature. The
quality is especially noticeable in the recent rise of bots which harvest
digital information then reconfigure and rebroadcast it. As Leonardo
Flores has noted, bots have flourished as a field of creative practice since
2012, in line with the growing popularity of social media, the availability
of Big Data (and APIs which allow it to be easily manipulated), and the
prevalence of distant reading as a strategy in the digital humanities.16
(Flores wonders whether the technique of data-mining online text might
be considered a kind of ‘distant writing’.17)
Some popular bots reconfigure online text into traditional poetic
forms. Ranjit Bhatnagar’s Pentametron searches Twitter for lines which
fit iambic pentameter, then composes them into rhyming couplets.18 In a
similar vein, the New York Times’ Times Haiku turns excerpts from the
newspaper’s archive into haiku. Another variety of bot mashes up differ-
ent sources of data. Darius Kazemi’s Twitter bot Two Headlines remixes
headlines from Google News to create dispatches from a dystopian world
in which corporate brands wield greater power than nation states19 – for

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0012
 Chris Rodley and Andrew Burrell

example, ‘Google to buy Syria in $3.2 billion deal or ‘US has concerns
about Pizza Hut-Russia oil-for-goods swap reports’. Mark Sample’s Walt
FML Whitman Twitter bot mashes up excerpts from Walt Whitman with
disgruntled tweets that include the hashtag #fml, while anonymous
Twitter bot KimKierkegaardashian mixes the sayings of Kierkegaard with
the tweets of Kim Kardashian. Bots which interact with the reader’s
own data are especially popular. What Would I Say?, created by a team
at Princeton’s annual hackathon, uses Markov algorithms to generate
customised Facebook status updates based on the user’s social media
output; That Can Be My Next Tweet! does the same for Twitter users.
All these examples offer readers the pleasure of discovering serendipi-
tous meaning and personal resonance within data generated by algorith-
mic and aleatory processes; as such, they follow in the tradition of Flarf
and spam poetry from the early 2000s, two early forms of data-driven
writing. These works often function both at a poetic level and simultane-
ously as diversions, jokes, or games. Acknowledging the unclassifiable
nature of such projects, Darius Kazemi places his bots on his website
under the heading ‘Weird Internet Stuff ’.

5.
One exciting aspect of data-driven literature is watching how practition-
ers deal with the challenge of representing large amounts of real-time
textual data in dynamic ways, and seek alternatives to the established,
twentieth-century techniques of scrolling and refreshing.
Some works have developed novel user interfaces, such as We Feel
Fine or Lot Amorós’s Massive Comprehension Machine, which let readers
traverse the divergent semantic networks of the Israeli and Palestinian
media. Others have fabricated new physical environments and platforms.
Chiara Passa’s video installation Talking in String envelops the audience
in a cylinder of swirling tweets. Ben Rubin, Mark Hansen, and Jer Thorp
have created a ‘data chandelier’ that hangs over a bar in a New York City
theatre and displays recombined quotes from the plays of Shakespeare.20
Yet others have devised novel ways to integrate data into familiar
digital environments. In The Impermanence Agent, by Noah Wardrip-
Fruin, Brion Moss, Adam Chapman, and Duane Whitehurst, a shadowy
narrator known as the Agent wrote a story in a small browser window;
the Agent’s tale was personalised for each reader by incorporating text

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0012
 On the Art of Writing with Data 

and images from the web pages they clicked on.21 The application News
Reader, by Noah Wardrip-Fruin, David Durand, Brion Moss, and Elaine
Froehlich, progressively altered Yahoo.com news stories by interpolating
reports from the alternative press. The Firefox extension Tumbarumba,
by Ethan Ham and Benjamin Rosenbaum, was designed to insert frag-
ments of short stories into web pages, inviting readers to discover the
fictional incursion.
New ways of interacting with data, including through virtual and
mixed reality environments and mobile media devices, will no doubt
emerge shortly.22 Perhaps literary practitioners will overcome the chal-
lenge noted by Borges of depicting masses of simultaneous information
in the spatially, temporally successive medium of text.23

6.
Data-driven literature clearly has much in common with conceptual
poetry, which is often created by sourcing and processing found text. The
leading theorist of conceptualism, Kenneth Goldsmith, has described
himself as a ‘word processor’ and his technique has been likened to
filtering an online ‘flow’ of information.24 Marjorie Perloff has compared
the conceptual poet to a programmer who constructs and tends a writ-
ing machine.25 Both data-driven and conceptual writing seem driven by
the urge to make sense of the surfeit of information in the digital age. As
Goldsmith writes: ‘[F]aced with an unprecedented amount of available
text, the problem is not needing to write more of it; instead, we must
learn to negotiate the vast quantity that exists.’26
Some examples of data-driven writing clearly fit within the conceptu-
alist tradition. Examples include many of the entries in the 2013 genera-
tive writing competition NaNoGenMo, which used data harvested from
disparate sources – Twitter, online dream diaries, fan fiction, writers’
biographies, and Homer’s Iliad – to create 50,000 word novels that are
unlikely ever to be read in full. In a similar vein, artist Sean Raspet has
written a novel composed entirely of CAPTCHA test results transcribed
by Mechanical Turk workers.
Yet most data-driven works do not sit comfortably under the concep-
tualist umbrella. Usually, the text is designed to be read – either with a
close or distant reading posture – and not merely considered as a con-
ceptual object. Data-driven practitioners usually do not abjure authorial

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0012
 Chris Rodley and Andrew Burrell

creativity, but write imaginative code to find, sort, and display the data
stream in novel ways. Indeed, they could be said to be developing a new
poetics of search, a form of (meta-)writing with code that is in no sense
uncreative. Many works freely remix appropriated data with other found
text or traditionally authored content for maximal (not minimal) expres-
siveness. Also, most data-driven works do not situate themselves within
the context of traditionally published literature. They are not ‘distinctly
analog’;27 they are born digital. Unlike conceptualists, data-driven writers
adhere to Ezra Pound’s modernist pledge to ‘make it new’ rather than
subvert it.28
Another characteristic of data-driven literature is that it returns
unpredictable results in real time; those who write with live data have
little advance knowledge of what the content of the final work will be. In
this sense, it is similar to the constraint-based writing of conceptualists,
which also can lead to unexpected results. However, the process is very
different from the considered curation that underlies much conceptual
writing, from Vanessa Place’s Statement of Facts to Goldsmith’s Seven
American Deaths and Disasters. Perloff has described conceptual poetry
as the art of ‘moving information’, a term that captures both how the
writer moves information around and also the power of that informa-
tion to move readers.29 In contrast, data-driven literature might be better
described as motile information: once the code is in place, the stream
writes itself.
This hands-off nature of data-driven literature means that it offers the
possibility of creating a more radical form of the heteroglossic discourse
recognised by Mikhail Bakhtin. For in data-driven literature, the author
does not merely ventriloquise the voices of others but lets them speak
in their own tongues. Sometimes, this can allow for unexpected or mar-
ginalised voices to be heard. On viewing the installation Listening Post
just after the demonstrations against the looming Iraq War, one critic
remarked on being startled by the appearance of the phrase ‘I am a
Muslim and am afraid of nothing’ upon one of the screens.30
Other data-driven literature projects explicitly invite readers to
add their own voices to the work in an act of co-creation. Jeff Crouse’s
Interactive Frank project asked the user to write a sentence then searched
the web for relevant text in order to generate a story. Our own work
Enquire Within Upon Everybody, displayed above a public plaza in sub-
urban Sydney, depicted a conversation with the Internet hive mind in
which crowd-sourced answers were generated from the data stream in

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0012
 On the Art of Writing with Data 

real time. Passers-by could join the conversation by submitting their

own questions to be answered by the stream – or disrupt the work with
concerns or objections.
Thus writing with data can be (to borrow the words of an Australian
collective of virtual artists) both hybrid and participatory; it offers
opportunities for ‘replacing the monumental truths projected by older
media cultures’.31

7.

Finally, perhaps most importantly: writing with data is also a tool for
thinking about and critiquing the hegemonic forces that control, moni-
tor, and police the Internet’s information portals. While data surveillance
and accumulation has long been the prerogative of corporations and
governments, it has massively expanded in scope as digital technology
has matured. Access to data is mediated and often tightly controlled by
the portals’ gatekeepers. The access points that do exist are therefore
important sites of creativity for artists and writers who wish to explore
issues raised by data in today’s digital Enlightenment, from privacy to
the commodification of online text.
The latter issue is the focus of John Cayley and Daniel Howe’s impres-
sive installation, Common Tongues. At the heart of the work is text-reading
software of their own design. The program scans a section of the novel
How It Is by Samuel Beckett, highlights short phrases and then searches
for appearances of these fragments in other contexts across the corpus of
the web. Beckett’s writing, notorious for being tightly controlled by his
estate, is therefore read in the vernacular of ordinary people.32
According to the artists, the work is meant in part as an act of resist-
ance against the forces that control information and are fencing off our
‘linguistic cultural commons’. They write: ‘Paradoxically we use the same
mechanisms of big software that are, as we speak, enclosing language,
in order to find the words of an authorised text where they are still, if
only momentarily, associating freely.’33 In creating the work, they faced
technical challenges that confront many of those who use data creatively:
the gatekeepers of information impose strict limits on automated search
processes. We agree with Cayley that creative artists should reserve
the right to push those limits; as he writes: ‘it seems as if we are simply
retrieving access to our own linguistic culture.’34

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0012
 Chris Rodley and Andrew Burrell

8.

The preceding is an attempt by us as practitioners to engage in a dia-

logue that helps define this emerging practice. Of course, the practice
will develop and change as the space it is located in is shifting rapidly.
Writers and artists need to be nimble in order to adapt their poetics of
search to constantly changing hardware, software, and protocols such
as APIs. New strategies will also need to be developed to maintain or
archive data-driven works; the problem of transience in e-literature is
well-recognised,35 but it is particularly challenging for data-driven litera-
ture which is reliant on third-party platforms for its very existence.
In the Borges short story ‘Funes, the Memorious’, the hero has an ina-
bility to forget and ultimately loses the ability to process the enormous
volume of knowledge he possesses: ‘to think is to forget a difference, to
generalise, to abstract’, Borges writes.36 Data-driven literature can help
us achieve this by letting us see the patterns (as well as the detail) in the
data swirling around us. Of course, writing with data is not the only way
of doing this, but we think it is one important strategy whose time has
come. It can inform and empower by speaking in a unique voice, which
is composed of many voices.

Notes
 Jorge Luis Borges, The Aleph and Other Stories, p. 130.
 David M. Levy, Scrolling Forward: Making Sense of Documents in the Digital Age,
p. 202.
 David Hirmes, The Aleph (online).
 Mark Hansen, ‘Data-driven Aesthetics’ (online).
 New York Times Timeline 1911–1940 (online).
 Amy Norcross, ‘Motograph News Bulletin Debuts in New York City’
(online).
 N. Katherine Hayles, Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary, pp. 5–30.
 Holly Dupej, Next Generation Literary Machines: The “Dynamic Network
Aesthetic” of Contemporary Poetry Generators, pp. 112–144.
 Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Five Elements of Digital Literature, p. 41.
 Ibid., pp. 47–48.
 Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar, We Feel Fine: Methodology (online).
 Daniel C. Howe and Aya Karpinska, No Time Machine (online).
 Cristobal Mendoza, Missed Connections (2007) (online).

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0012
 On the Art of Writing with Data 

 Kenneth Goldsmith, Uncreative Writing, pp. 3–4.

 Brian Joseph Davis, ‘Status Update: “Emily Brontë and her Playstation are
overly friendly these days”’ (online).
 Leonardo Flores, ‘Genre: Bot’ (online).
 Leonardo Flores, ‘ “Pentametron” by Ranjit Bhatnagar’ (online).
 Ibid. (online).
 Darius Kazemi, ‘@TwoHeadlines: Comedy, Tragedy, Chicago Bears’ (online).
 Mark Hansen, ‘Data-Driven Aesthetics’ (online).
 Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Brion Moss, The Impermanence Agent: Project and
Context (online).
 Jörgen Schäfer and Peter Gendolla (eds), Beyond the Screen: Transformations of
Literary Structures, Interfaces and Genres, pp. 13–14.
 Borges, The Aleph and Other Stories, p. 130.
 Darren Wershler-Henry, ‘Uncreative is the New Creative: Kenneth
Goldsmith Not Typing’, p. 165.
 Marjorie Perloff, quoted in Kenneth Goldsmith, Uncreative Writing, pp. 1–2.
 Kenneth Goldsmith, Uncreative Writing, p. 1.
 Ibid., p. 4.
 Marjorie Perloff, Unoriginal Genius, p. 23.
 Marjorie Perloff, quoted in Goldsmith, Kenneth, Uncreative Writing, p. 1.
 Peter Eleey, “Mark Hansen and Ben Rubin” (online).
 Justin Clemens, Christopher Dodds and Adam Nash, The Manifesto of Virtual
Art (online).
 John Cayley and Daniel C. Howe, Common Tongues: Technical Notes.
 Ibid.
 John Cayley, ‘Writing to Be Found and Writing Readers’, section 28.
 N. Katherine Hayles, Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary, pp.
39–40.
 Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths, p. 94.

References
Borges, Jorge Luis, Labyrinths. Melbourne: Penguin Books, 1970.
Borges, Jorge Luis, The Aleph and Other Stories. Melbourne: Penguin
Books, 2004.
Cayley, John, ‘Writing to Be Found and Writing Readers’, Digital
Humanities Quarterly, 5(3), http://digitalhumanities.org/dhq/
vol/5/3/000104/000104.html20Writing (accessed 3 July 2013).
Cayley, John and Howe, Daniel C., Common Tongues: Technical Notes, http://
elmcip.net/creative-work/common-tongues (accessed 5 July 2013).

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0012
 Chris Rodley and Andrew Burrell

Clemens, Justin, Dodds Christopher and Nash, Adam, The Manifesto of

Virtual Art, http://www.acva.net.au/blog/detail/acva_manifesto_of_
virtual_art (accessed 2 July 2013).
Davis, Brian Joseph, ‘ “Status update: ‘Emily Brontë and her Playstation
are overly friendly these days’ ”, The Globe and Mail, 19 January 2009,
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/books-and-media/status-
update-emily-bronte-and-her-playstation-are-overly-friendly-these-
days/article781684/ (accessed 1 July 2013).
Dupej, Holly, Next Generation Literary Machines: The ‘ “Dynamic Network
Aesthetic’ ” of Contemporary Poetry Generators, PhD dissertation,
University of Calgary, 2012.
Eleey, Peter, ‘ “Mark Hansen and Ben Rubin’ ”, Frieze, Issue 75, March
2003, http://www.frieze.com/issue/review/mark_hansen_and_ben_
rubin/ (accessed 1 July 2013).
Flores, Leonardo, ‘Genre: Bot’, I Love E-Poetry, http://iloveepoetry.
com/?p=5427 (accessed 8 February 2014).
Flores, Leonardo, ‘ “Pentametron” by Ranjit Bhatnagar’, I Love E-Poetry,
http://iloveepoetry.com/?p=48 (accessed 8 February 2014).
Goldsmith, Kenneth, Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the
Digital Age. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011.
Harris, Jonathan and Kamvar, Sep, We Feel Fine: Methodology, http://
www.wefeelfine.org/methodology.html (accessed 1 July 2013).
Hansen, Mark, ‘Data-Driven Aesthetics’, The New York Times, 19
June 2013, http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/19/data-driven-
aesthetics/ (accessed 1 July 2013).
Hayles, N. Katherine, Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary.
Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame, 2008.
Hirmes, David, The Aleph, http://hirmes.com/aleph/ (accessed 5 July
2013).
Howe, Daniel C., and Karpinska, Aya, No Time Machine, http://
turbulence.org/Works/notime/about.html (accessed 1 July 2013).
Kazemi, Darius, ‘ “@TwoHeadlines: Comedy, Tragedy, Chicago
Bears’ ”, The New York Review of Bots, http://nybots.tumblr.com/
post/64693944409/twoheadlines-comedy-tragedy-chicago-bears
(accessed 9 February 2013).
Mendoza, Cristobal, Missed Connections (2007), http://www.matadata.
com/projects.php?id=14 (accessed 1 July 2013).
New York Times Timeline 1911–1940, http://www.nytco.com/company/
milestones/timeline_1911.html (accessed 1 July 2013).

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0012
 On the Art of Writing with Data 

Norcross, Amy, ‘ “Motograph News Bulletin debuts in New York City’ ”,

EDN.com, 6 November 2012, http://www.edn.com/electronics-blogs/
edn-moments/4400674/Motograph-News-Bulletin-debuts-in-New-
York-City--November-6--1928 (accessed 2 July 2013).
Levy, David M., Scrolling Forward: Making Sense of Documents in the
Digital Age. New York: Arcade, 2001.
Perloff, Marjorie, Unoriginal Genius: Poetry By Other Means in the New
Century., Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2010.
Schäfer, Jörgen and Gendolla, Peter (eds), Beyond the Screen:
Transformations of Literary Structures, Interfaces and Genres. New
Brunswick: Bielefeld, 2010.
Wardrip-Fruin, Noah, ‘Five Elements of Digital Literature’, in R.
Simanowski, J. Schäfer and P. Gendolla, Reading Moving Letters:
Digital Literature in Research and Teaching. A Handbook. Germany:
Transcript-Verlag, 2010.
Wardrip-Fruin Noah and Moss, Brion, The Impermanence Agent: Project
and Context, http://www.impermanenceagent.org/agent/essay2/
(accessed 20 June 2013).
Wershler-Henry, Darren, ‘ “Uncreative is the New Creative: Kenneth
Goldsmith Not Typing’ ”, Open Letter, Twelfth Series, No. 7, Fall 2005,
http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/goldsmith/Goldsmith-Open_Letter.
pdf (accessed 6 July 2013).

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0012
 7
The Design of Writing:
29 Observations
Kathryn Millard and Alex Munt

Abstract: In their essay, Millard and Munt explore hybrid

or multimodal writing forms. This includes writing that
incorporates visual images or sound and image into textual
design. Millard and Munt take ‘text’ at its literal meaning
of weaving, and describe the many innovative modes and
techniques with which hybrid writing has developed.

Keywords: dynamic; hybrid; image; multimodal; text

John Potts. The Future of Writing. Basingstoke: Palgrave

Macmillan, 2014. doi: 10.1057/9781137440402.0013.

 DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0013
 The Design of Writing: 29 Observations 

1.

In the heady early days of digital technologies, it was frequently claimed

that the book’s days were numbered; it was only a matter of time before
digital books completely replaced their print counterparts. Yet change
rarely unfolds as a decisive break with the past, and a new media never
simply replaces older media. The future practices of writing have turned
out to be surprisingly like certain aspects of past practices. Rather than
digital media replacing books, the two are co-existing side by side and
transforming each other.

2.

Digital technologies and mindsets highlight the composition and design

aspects of writing on both pages and screens. ‘Writing with text is just
one way to write ... The more interesting ways are increasingly to use
images and sound and video to express ideas.’1

3.

There has been much discussion about the implications of digital technolo-
gies for reading and publishing via new platforms such as tablet computers
and e-book readers. By contrast, there has been relatively little discussion
about shifts in writing practices as a result of these technologies and proc-
esses. Media theorists Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen identify a drift
towards multimodal texts, stressing that ‘most texts now involve a complex
interplay of written text, images, and other graphic or sound elements’.2

4.

The word text derives from the Latin word textus, to weave.

5.

We live in a world awash with images’ according to Stephen Apkon.3

In his view, the moving image has become the primary mode of

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0013
 Kathryn Millard and Alex Munt

communication and, in the electronic realm, writing involves working

with images. From a camera phone, one can shoot, edit and share image,
video, text – instantly. The digital convergence of media marks a shift
from verbal to visual literacy, fuelled by the ubiquity of video-sharing
portals like You Tube and the focus on the image in social media realms
such as Facebook and Instagram. In the global conversation, words and
images are intertwined: ‘the time has come to rebuild the idea of “visual
literacy” – not to overthrow it, but to expand it’.4 The age of caméra-stylo,
or camera-pen, has truly arrived.

6.

Instead of sorting words and images into separate categories, we could

consider them as part of the same conceptual field, says James Elkins.
He throws some new terms into the mix. Words like graphein, from the
Greek, which encompasses writing and drawing. Similarly, gramma,
also from the Greek, can variously refer to a picture, a written letter, or
a piece of writing. These are terms from a time when the present widely
accepted divide between words and pictures did not exist.5 They provide
traces of an earlier time when writing did not only involve words.

7.

‘We may have books that we watch, and television that we read.’6

8.

W. G. Sebald saw images as essential to generating and shaping his

books. The writer made a habit of always carrying a small camera.
Typically, he began writing by collecting old postcards and photographs
he found rummaging in thrift shops. These pictures became the launch
pad for his books. ‘When writing you recognise possibilities: to start by
drawing out stories from the images, to walk into these images through
the telling of stories.’7 Alongside their written texts, Sebald’s books incor-
porated a vast array of the visual ephemera he collected: photographs,

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0013
 The Design of Writing: 29 Observations 

children’s drawings, newspaper clippings, film stills, postcards, ticket

stubs, visiting cards, and evenpages torn from day-planners. In a pas-
sage in The Emigrants, he embedded two low-resolution black-and-white
photographs.8 One depicted the mountains of Crete and the other a man
collecting butterfly specimens. Far from simply providing documentary
evidence, the blurred image of a man with his butterfly net raised as
many questions as it answered. Was this book’s narrator, Dr Selwyn?
Or the photograph of Vladimir Nabokov he discussed? Like so much
contemporary writing, Sebald’s speculative stories and essays give tra-
ditional genres the slip. They lie on the borders between travel, history,
memoir, and fiction.

9.

In his influential manifesto Reality Hunger, David Shields collected,

arranged, and riffed on quotes from writers and artists he saw as breaking
more and more chunks of reality into their work. The linear plot-driven
novel did not reflect the realities of our lives, Shields claimed. Genres
were blurring and blending ‘Our lives aren’t prepackaged along narra-
tive lines and, therefore, by its very nature, reality based art – under-
processed, under-produced – splinters and collages.’9

10.

‘Our society has reorientated itself to the present moment. Everything is

live, real time, always on.’10 This is how media theorist Douglas Rushkoff
sees presentism. ‘Narrativity and goals are surrendered to a skewed notion
of the real and the immediate; the Tweet; the status update.’11

11.

Words themselves need no longer be read in a linear way. Instead,

remixed media ‘may quote sounds over images, or video over text, or text
over sounds’.12 As more and more writing is produced on and for various
kinds of screens, new possibilities for hybrid writing are on offer.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0013
 Kathryn Millard and Alex Munt

12.

Are we blowing up the book, asked a journalist reviewing swag of

enhanced e-books in the ‘Wall Street Journal’? E-books, incorporating
still and moving images, audio, pop-up graphics, 3-D, and anima-
tion, were the new frontier for books, he suggested.13 To date, though,
enhanced books designed to be read on tablet computers and smart
phones have been most popular in the educational sector. Non-fiction
e-books, such as biographies and histories, are increasingly enhanced
with still photographs or video footage. A digital version of The Beautiful
Forevers, Katherine Boo’s composite portrait of the residents of a Mumbai
neighbourhood, incorporated stills, and research footage.14 Boo shot the
video herself on a low-resolution Flip camera designed for bloggers.15
Such materials essentially expand the traditional photographic insert in
biographies. The increasing use of visual and audio materials in digital
books suggests that non-fiction writers will need to add photography,
videography, and sound recording to their basic skills set or collaborate
with media producers.

13.

Narrative exhaustion is Paul Schrader’s diagnosis. He cites this in relation

to the rising stream of ‘counter-narratives’ drifting across our screens:
reality television; anecdotal narrative; re-enactment drama; videogames;
micro dramas; and the explosion of documentary forms.16 Delivered on-
demand and 24/7. ‘What’s a writer to do?’ he asks.

14.

Ross Gibson’s book 26 Views of the Starburst World (2012) offers a set
of refracting views about the English astronomer William Dawes in
Australia.
Arriving in Australia in 1788, Dawes soon trained his telescope on the
southern skies. He exchanged knowledge and ideas with the traditional
landowners, the Erora people, while keeping track of scientific discover-
ies in Europe. Gibson described his approach to writing Dawe’s story as
fractural. It was inspired by a number of visual media artefacts including

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0013
 The Design of Writing: 29 Observations 

Hokusai’s series of prints Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, Francois Girard’s

documentary film 32 Short Pieces About Glenn Gould (1993) and Akira
Kurosawa’s film Rashomon (1950). Prism is a term Gibson returns to again
and again as he outlines his approach. This is what he says of Dawe’s
notebooks: ‘They generate multiple insights that reflect and refract in
the mind of the reader.’17 Like more and more contemporary writers,
Gibson, who works across screen media, the visual arts, and literature,
approaches writing as an act of composition. Gibson’s confident autho-
rial voice zooms in and out, juxtaposing the big historical picture with
an examination of details painstakingly gleaned from Dawe’s notebooks.
Look here, and here, and here, he suggests.

15.

‘The spaces in a segmented essay are like the blackouts between scenes
in a motion picture, like the fade-out/fade-in, the imageless transition
between disparate sequences of images, the slow dissolve that introduces
a flashback, the crosscutting to parallel events ... This is what the spaces
say.’18

16.
In his manifesto for the ‘post-future’ novel, Jeff Noon challenges British
writers to explore the fluid potential of hybrid texts. He asks: ‘What are
the prose equivalents of the tracking shot, the hyperlink, the remix, the
freeze-frame?19’

17.
In 2012, Scottish writer Ewan Morison published a collection of stories
about shopping malls combining fiction, analysis, anecdote, reportage,
and collage. Morrison, who had previously published several novels,
described Tales from the Mall (2012) as an attempt to explore telling
a number of inter-related stories.20 ‘They are laid out according to the
structure of a mall map, each “story” is interconnected with every other
(they are all set in different stores) and they are all linked with factual

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0013
 Kathryn Millard and Alex Munt

sections, images and retold stories from mall workers.’21 Embedded

throughout the enhanced version of Tales of the Mall are still and moving
images whose visual and musical language is derived from the worlds
of shopping, sales, market research, and television. Vivid colours, large
text, and pictograms give the images impact and evoke the experience
of navigating a shopping mall. Tales of the Mall pointing towards one set
of possibilities for the enhanced e-book in which images and sound add
other layers to the narrative rather than simply serving as illustrations or
marketing extras.

18.

For Tom McCarthy writing is transmission. He explores the ‘acoustic’

logic of writing across hybrid art practices around the novel, the screen-
play, art manifestos, and installations. To situate the writer in time is for
that individual to modulate the collective ‘set of signals that have been
repeating, pulsing, modulating in the airspace of the novel, poem, play –
in their lines, between them and around them – since each of these
forms began.’22

19.
While the memory palace system of remembering is relatively well
known, the notae system is less so. In the Middle Ages, readers were
advised to break a text into short segments and mark important pas-
sages with a note. Personal systems of notation were recommended as
most likely to fix the text in one’s mind. Some passages could simply be
marked ‘pictura’, indicating that the reader had matched a word-image
to a passage of text. The verb tractare, to draw out, was used to describe
the process of pulling out the meaningful associations in a text and com-
mitting them to memory.23 Equally, composing a text could be described
as a method of tractandum. A writer begins by collecting all the materials
relevant to a theme or subject and mentally filing them away along with
any networks of associations. W. G. Sebald’s composition method of
‘drawing out stories from images’ could be termed tractandum. A method
of writing more and more relevant to digital spaces and our print-plus
culture.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0013
 The Design of Writing: 29 Observations 

20.

‘We live daily in a web of connections, all of us becoming adept at riding

the multiple layers of information. This is the fluid society. Tracing path-
ways through this intricate landscape needs a different kind of narrative
art. It is in this spirit of adventure that I envisage the post-future novel.’24

21.

‘I started a project of low-res image capture, then I built a FileMaker

database.’ Non-fiction writer, Megan Prelinger outlined her writing
process on a recent book about advertising and the 1950s space race.
‘I’m a bit of a FileMaker hobbyist. It was a way to organize my thoughts
about the images and to be able to track which ones appeared when and
where and how often. I ultimately spent a whole year just cataloging
them, and building the database and exploring different ways to sort and
tag them. That’s how the shape and structure of the book emerged ... .’25
Her assumptions about the chapter breakdown of her book shifted as
Prelinger gradually noted the tags that were most prominent.

22.

Tao Lin’s Tapei has been described as a ‘social media novel’ in that its
form resembles a piece of social media. Lin’s autobiographical book,
informed by countless hours spent on Tumbler, Twitter, Gmail, and
Gawker, is written in a style that is half journalese and half journal
entry. Ian Sansom considers that Tapei adopts the tone of a blog in its
‘desperate desire to connect with the reader’.26 It is just one example of a
contemporary novel whose subject and form are heavily influenced by
its author’s online presence.

23.

‘In The Writing Life (1989), [Annie Dillard] describes the places and spaces
in which she wrote several of her books. Nearly always, the locations are
remote and isolated, and the physical spaces are spartan ... When I recall

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0013
 Kathryn Millard and Alex Munt

these accounts, I always think: I could never write under such condi-
tions. For better or worse, I need the constant hum of connection and
contact with other humans and the cultural artefacts they create – books,
essays, images, sounds, and, very importantly, the Internet – in order to
be able to write. What this constant contact provides is the possibility at
all times – both in the preparatory stages before writing, and during the
writing process itself – of encountering something new and useful at any
instant, of being struck at any moment by a new fascination that might
quickly find its way into the writing.’27

24.

Art curator and writer Hans-Ulrich Obrist (2011) describes his approach
to the book as the ‘production of reality conversations’. A Brief History
of Curating tells the hidden history of curating by way of a patchwork of
interview fragments. With over 2,200 hours of recorded interviews accu-
mulated since 1991,28 Obrist has hijacked the book form as an archive,
documenting his ongoing interviews with writers, artists, architects,
filmmakers, and scientists. The Interview Project, Interview Marathons
and The Conversation Series capture an ‘infinite conversation’ in book
form.29

25.

‘Who hasn’t tried, when passing by a building, or a home, at night, to

peer past half-closed shades and blinds hoping to catch a glimpse into the
private lives of its inhabitants?’30 Inspired by visual artist Joseph Cornell’s
boxes and dossiers, Chris Ware’s latest project reimagines the book as an
object. Building Stories, written over ten years, consists of 14 print arte-
facts bundled into a large box. They include books, booklets, magazines,
newspapers, pamphlets, and blueprint architectural drawings. A spatial
story, Building Stories layers time, as it explores the relationships between
a building and its inhabitants over many decades. The text on the box
states ‘Everything you need to read the new graphic novel Building
Stories.’ As readers, we are encouraged to approach Building Stories as a
DIY kit, forging our own reading paths.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0013
 The Design of Writing: 29 Observations 

For Ware, drawing is writing – and drawing is thinking. Images can

express ideas just as much as written texts since each mode has its own
set of symbols and patterns to describe reality. ‘All comic book drawings
function as diagrams, simplified word pictures ... .’31 Graphic novelist Art
Spiegelman compares his own drawing style to diagrams. Comics are to
be read, not just looked at. Ware insists; ‘The one thing I don’t want to
be is a storyteller, which to me is more or less the skill of relating events
and plots ... Writing, to me, places events in a fabric that knits them all
together with the feelings, sensations and textures of real experience, and
follows, whether directly or poetically, the development of life at which
it seems to unfold.’32

26.

Errol Morris’s book Believing is Seeing: Observations on the Mysteries of

Photography (2011) collects four essays that initially appeared online at
the ‘New York Times.’33 His book presents one example of multimodal
writing. Like Morris’s acclaimed non-fiction feature films, his essays
are structured around investigations. In this case, two photographs
prompted the first instalment. Identifying puzzling discrepancies
between two photographs of the ‘Valley of Death’ shot by Roger Fenton
during the Crimean War, Morris flew to the original location to find out
more. In his subsequent blog essay, he riffed on topics from photographic
history, philosophy, and poetry to the nature of evidence. Morris pro-
vided objects from his inquiry, encouraging readers to follow his trail of
evidence. They included photographs, maps, advertisements, interview
transcripts, and journals. Morris’s preferred method of investigation
involves flipping between the big picture and barely visible details, until
new insights emerge. As readers, we follow a similar trajectory, zooming
in and out, toggling back and forth.
Far from simply repackaging online materials as a marketing ploy, the
print version of Believing is Seeing juxtaposes different kinds of texts and
images in a collage-like assembly. While the blog essays were presented
online as long streams of text with embedded images, the book gives
more equal weight to both elements. Blogs are one of the most distinc-
tive modes of writing to have emerged in digital spaces, updating, and
personalising the broadsheet and magazine.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0013
 Kathryn Millard and Alex Munt

27.

In the 1920s, avant-garde artists (the first graphic designers) produced a

series of manifestos for the ‘new typography’ – ways to juxtapose type,
photography, and negative space in print media. The manifesto by artist-
designer El Lissitzky reads as a precursor to today, where new tools
for writing and design include In Design, Illustrator, and Photoshop.
Number 7: ‘The new book demands the new writer’.
 The words on the printed surface are taken in by seeing, not by hearing.
 One communicates meanings through the convention of words; meaning
attains form through letters.
 Economy of expression: optics not phonetics.
 The design of the book-space, set according to the constraints of printing
mechanics, must correspond to the tensions and pressures of content.
 The design of the book-space using process blocks which issue from the
new optics. The supernatural reality of the perfected eye.
 The continuous sequence of pages: the bioscopic book.
 The new book demands the new writer. Inkpot and quill-pen are dead.
 The printed surface transcends space and time. The printed surface, the
infinity of books, must be transcended. THE ELECTRO-LIBRARY.34

28.

‘Mainstream literary fiction is falling to pieces’, says jazz and literary

critic Ted Gaio. The fragmented novel is on the rise. While the form has
been popular for over a hundred years, in the last decade it seems to
have founded a particular resonance. According to Gaio, the fractured
works of the current day represent a new phase in the evolution of the
fragmented novel. He points to books such as David Mitchell’s Cloud
Atlas (2004), Jennifer Egan’s The Goon Squad (2010), and David Foster
Wallace’s The Pale King (2011). Fiction like this seeks ‘an exemplary
wholeness, a fitting together of the fragments into brilliant patterns.’35

29.

As historian Robert Darnton (2009) says in his study of the past,

present, and future of the book, ‘Whatever the future may be, it will

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0013
 The Design of Writing: 29 Observations 

be digital. The present is a time of transition, when printed and digital

modes of communication co-exist and new technology soon becomes
obsolete.’36 For writers, this is a time of testing possibilities in the digital
ecology.

Notes
 Richard Koman, ‘Remixing Culture: An interview with Lawrence Lessig’,
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/policy/2005/02/24/lessig.html (accessed 4
August 2013).
 Gunther Kess, and Theo van Leeuwen, Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual
Design, 2006, 17.
 Stephen Apkon, www.theageoftheimage.com (accessed 4 August 2013).
 Stephen Apkon, The Age of the Image: Redefining Literacy in a World of Screens, 33.
 James Elkin, The Domain of Images, 2001, 82–83.
 Kevin Kelley, ‘Reading in a Whole New Way’, Smithsonian, July–August
2010. http://www.smithsonianmag.com/specialsections/40th-anniversary/
Reading-in-a-Whole-New-Way.html (accessed 4 August 2013).
 Lise Patt and Christel Dillbohner, Searching for Sebald: Photography after W. G.
Sebald, 2007, 104.
 W. G. Sebald, The Emigrants, 1996, 14–16.
 David Shields, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, 2010.
 Douglas Rushkoff, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now, 2013, 2.
 Ibid., 6.
 Lawrence Lessig, Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid
Economy, 2007.
 Alexandra Alter’ Are We Blowing up the Book?, Wall Street Journal, 20
January, 2012, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204468004577
169001135659954.html (accessed 4 August 2013).
 Katherine Boo, Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai
Undercity, 2012.
 Janet Maslin, ‘All They Hope For is Survival’, New York Times, 30 January
2012. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/31/books/katherine-boos-first-book-
behind-the-beautiful-forevers.html (accessed 4 August 2013).
 Paul Schrader, ‘Beyond the Silver Screen’, The Guardian, 19 June 2009, http://
www.theguardian.com/film/2009/jun/19/paul-schrader-reality-tv-big-
brother (accessed 4 August 2013).
 Ross Gibson, 26 Views of the Starburst World, 2012, e-book.
 Robert Root, ‘This Is What the Spaces Say’, 2001. http://www.chsbs.cmich.
edu/robert_root/background/Spaces.htm (accessed 4 August 2013).

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0013
 Kathryn Millard and Alex Munt

 Jeff Noon, ‘How to Make a Modern Novel’, The Guardian, 10 January 2001. http://
www.theguardian.com/books/2001/jan/10/fiction.film (accessed 4 August 2013).
 Ewan Morrison, Tales from the Mall, 2012, e-book.
 Sam Jordison, ‘Not the Booker Prize 2012 Tales from The Mall by Ewan Morrison’,
The Guardian, 11 September 2012. http://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/sep/11/
not-the-booker-prize-ewan-morrison (accessed 4 August 2013).
 Tom McCarthy, Transmission and the Individual Remix, 2012 Loc. 43 e-book.
 Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture,
2008, pp. 135–137.
 Jeff Noon, The Post-Future Novel, 2001.
 Andrea Pitzer, ‘Megan Prelinger on Databases and Visual Narrative’, Nieman
Storyboard, 3 June 2010. http://www.niemanstoryboard.org/2010/06/03/
megan-prelinger-on-databases-and-visual-storytelling-“i-felt-smarter-like-
i’d-really-learned-something-about-the-material”/ (accessed 4 August 2013).
 Ian Sansom, ‘Taipei by Tao Lin –Review’, The Guardian, 4 July 2013. http://
www.theguardian.com/books/2013/jul/04/taipei-tao-lin-review (accessed 4
August 2013).
 Girish Shambu, ‘Disillusions: What Keeps a Writer Writing?’, Special Affects,
University of Pittsburgh, 13 May 2013 http://www.fsgso.pitt.edu/2013/05/
disillusions-writing/ (accessed 4 August 2013).
 Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Project Japan: Metabolism Talks ... , p. 18.
 Ibid.
 Chris Ware, Building Stories, 2012.
 Isaac Cates, ‘Comics and the Grammar of Diagrams’, in David Ball and
Martha Kuhlman (eds), The Comics of Chris Ware: Drawing Is a Way of
Thinking. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2010, 90–105.
 Thomas Bellerman, ‘Chris Ware: A Sense of Thereness’, Mono Kultur 30,
Winter 2011/12, 8.
 See Errol Morris, Believing is Seeing: Observations on the Mysteries of
Photography, 2011.
 Barrie Tullet, ‘Will the New El Lissitzsky Please Stand up?’, Eye Magazine, 16
June 2010. http://www.eyemagazine.com/blog/post/electro-library-dreams
(accessed 4 August 2010).
 Ted Giaio, The Rise of the Fragmented Novel, 17 July 2013. www.fractiousfiction.
com/rise_of_the_fragmented_novel (accessed 4 August 2013).
 Robert Darnton, The Case for Books: Past, Present and Future, 2009, xv.

References

Apkon, Stephen, The Age of the Image: Redefining Literacy in a World of

Screens. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2013.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0013
 The Design of Writing: 29 Observations 

Bellermann, Urs, ‘Chris Ware: A Sense of Otherness’, Mono Kultur 30

Winter 2011/12.
Boo, Katherine, Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death and Hope in a
Mumbai Undercity. New York: Random House, 2012.
Ball, David, and Kuhlman, Martha, The Comics of Chris Ware: Drawing Is
a Way of Thinking. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2010.
Carruthers, Mary, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval
Culture. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
Darnton, Robert, The Case for Books: Past, Present and Future. Public
Affairs, Philadelphia, 2009.
Elkin, James, The Domain of Images. New York: Cornell University Press,
2001, pp. 82–83.
Gibson, Ross, 26 Views of the Starburst World. Perth: UWA Press, 2012.
Kress, Gunther, and Leeuwen, Theo van, Reading Images: The Grammar of
Visual Design. Oxon: Routledge 2006.
Lessig, Lawrence, Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid
Economy. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2008.
McCarthy, Tom, Transmission and the Individual Remix. London:
Jonathon Cape, 2012, e-book.
Morris, Errol, Believing is Seeing: Observations on the Mysteries of
Photography. New York: Penguin, 2011.
Morrison, Ewan, Tales from the Mall. Glasgow: Cargo Press, 2012, ebook.
Obrist, Hans-Ulrich, Project Japan: Metabolism Talks ... . Berlin: Taschen, 2011.
Patt, Lise, and Dillbohner, Christel, Searching for Sebald: Photography
After W.G. Sebald. los Angeles: The Institute of Cultural Inquiry, 2007.
Rushkoff, Douglas, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now. New
York: Penguin, 2013.
Sebald, W. G., The Emigrants. London: Vintage, 2002.
Shields, David, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto. New York: Penguin, 2010.
Ware, Chris, Building Stories. New York: Pantheon, 2012.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0013
Part III
Journalism: Estate 4.0

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0014
 8
Storytelling in the Digital Age
Garry Linnell

Abstract: Linnell surveys the current state of journalism

in this chapter. He describes a world engulfed in a tsunami
of snapshots, alerts, briefs, tweets, shorts, summaries and
posts. Linnell argues that strong story-telling will have an
even greater value in the digital age.

Keywords: journalism; story; story-telling; technology

John Potts. The Future of Writing. Basingstoke: Palgrave

Macmillan, 2014. doi: 10.1057/9781137440402.0015.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0015 

 Garry Linnell

One of my favourite statistics is this one: in 1968, the average time of a

sound-bite of a politician used by the American television news programs
was averaged at 43 seconds; two decades later it had dropped to nine sec-
onds, and by 2004 it was seven seconds.1 There have been no studies on
the most US election campaign, but President Obama’s victory speech was
reduced to a sound bite: ‘the best it yet to come’. It seems we are hovering
close to the one or two second mark. Revolution is in the air.
Journalism, the craft I have practised for more than 30 years, is under
siege from falling revenues, and a shifting audience that fragments by
the day, week, month – and is no longer as loyal to the brand as it once
was. An exclusive story lasts for seconds and the way stories are being
told and passed on – and the way our readers consume them – is being
changed so swiftly that no one can keep up, much less anticipate where
it is all going.
Here’s an example. Early in 2012, late on a Saturday afternoon, I
received a text message from my daughter with a link to a Youtube video.
The video was of former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, curs-
ing about his Chinese translator. By this stage very few people had seen
it – about 300 views at this point. My daughter had been at a barbecue,
where it was passed on by someone else who had received the link on
their Facebook wall. Within 15 minutes, a dozen other people had sent it
to me via email, text, and Facebook. There was a viral storm in progress
sweeping the country. Within six hours, parodies of the original video
were sweeping the country. Ten days later, Kevin Rudd was challenging
for the right to lead the nation again.
Even a decade ago, that story’s natural home would have been in the
next day’s newspapers. On the Sunday, because of their early deadlines,
the Sunday papers could add little to what had already been said and
analysed on social media platforms around the nation and the world.
The speed and ferocity of journalism these days is a part of the storm
of change that has swept through our business and, in the heart of it,
our newsrooms. Stories as we have always defined them are now labelled
content. When Fred Hilmer, a former CEO of Fairfax, first described
journalists as content-providers there was outrage: ‘How dare you call us
content providers? We are journalists.’ Now everyone uses the word. For
some it is still objectionable, but it has become commonplace. It is not
just about delivering the news.
There have been few periods in human history where such profound
change has taken place in such a short period of time. In less than a

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0015
 Storytelling in the Digital Age 

generation we have gone from a collection of people writing long letters

to devouring 140 character tweets. And there is no doubt we are becom-
ing desensitised just a little more each day. From the moment we wake
to the moment we close our eyes at night, we are assaulted by a tsunami
of noise and competing voices. I call it the new age of babble-on. A wall
of white noise, a constant boiling cauldron of voices. Headlines, cover
lines, and blurbs designed to capture your attention, which bit by bit
peel away the layers of your imagination and your ability to feel about
the news.
My least favourite television network is the American Business
Network. They have three tickers in the background running across the
screen at any one time, constantly updating stock market prices and
news. And there is more – there is always more. There is a talking-head
in the middle of the screen, and often another box showing graphs and
charts. It is like trying to follow a conversation by my daughter and three
of her teenage friends.
Some of us are growing fatigued and jaded by this world. And the rest
of us are like drug addicts, constantly having to increase the potency of
our addiction, constantly flipping channels looking for our next hit. I am
a guilty-as-charged paid up member of the media class who is partially
responsible for this overwhelming assault on your senses. I have been
thinking that maybe what we are suffering from is not a plague of deficit
disorders, or chronic information overload. Perhaps more tellingly, it is
a lack of imagination in our storytelling. Maybe we have forgotten or
maybe we aren’t doing a good enough job in the media, when it comes
to the basic job of storytelling, which is making the audience feel
something.
Less than a generation ago, it would have been unthinkable that a 14
year-old sitting in Penrith, Sydney, with the touch of his hand would have
been able to discover the current temperature in Mumbai, the name of
the US President’s dog, the closing price of a stock in Tokyo, or even the
bikini measurements of Lady Gaga. Those are facts that it would take the
best researcher at the State Library, hours or even days to uncover. As
Daniel Pink, the author of A Whole New Mind, says:
development like that is fantastic. The sharing of knowledge has become
more egalitarian than ever. But it has enormous consequences for how we
work and how we live. When facts become so widely and instantly acces-
sible, each one becomes less valuable. What matters more is the ability to
place these facts in context, and to deliver them with emotional impact. 2

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0015
 Garry Linnell

The key words are ‘emotional impact’. When was the last time someone
read a story on a tablet, in the paper, or on a PC and actually felt some-
thing stirring? Many I suspect will struggle to come up with an answer.
That is a failure on our part. Too often we serve up the facts but we don’t
provide a context, particularly an emotive context.
The standard stock phrase for journalism is ‘just the facts please
ma’m’. But ‘just the facts’ is not good enough anymore. They are a given.
The importance of engaging with the reader was brought home to me
again recently. We are in the midst of an unprecedented upheaval in our
newsrooms. In recent months we have basically turned them upside
down, redefining the roles of editors, reporters, and artists. We are also
reshaping the way we interact with our audiences through our storytell-
ing. With our live blogging we can almost instantaneously carry reader
comments, using their advice and information to shape the story as we
go. We also pay a great deal of attention to what they want to read and
see. Thirty years ago, when I started out, we decided what they wanted
to read and see.
In 2013 we also turned our broadsheet newspapers, the 181-year-
old Sydney Morning Herald and The Age in Melbourne, into compact
size. We don’t use the word ‘tabloid’: we banned the T-word. We call it
‘compact’. Research has shown us that our readers don’t like the word
‘tabloid’ in association with the Herald. We also put up a metered sub-
scription model (we don’t use the P-word either – Paywall) around our
digital products. In the old days when we journalistic story-tellers were
the lords of the realm and controlled which facts would be dispersed
every day, we simply would have undertaken an exercise like making
our newspapers compact with little research and maybe even a lesser
understanding of the needs and wants of our readers. These days it is
different.
The importance of emotive storytelling was underlined to me in a
room almost resembling a scene from The Matrix. Dozens of long-time
readers and a few casual buyers off the street had helmets placed on their
heads with 27 connections which could read their brain functioning. For
the first time in more than 30 years, I could actually watch how people’s
brains light up when they sat and read our newspapers. This was a world
first for newspapers; television, particularly in the United States, uses it
frequently. The good news for us in this neuro-testing was that people
were more engaged with the compact version than with the broadsheet.
They were far more engaged with stories that had a human element.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0015
 Storytelling in the Digital Age 

That’s hardly breaking news. Sometimes you have to re-learn old truth: a
person is better than a chart.
We are all storytellers, and we all weave our narratives and commu-
nicate with each other by sharing stories. My point is that storytelling
is going to make a comeback in the digital age. Consider the reading
audience out there; this is a snapshot of the media world I know. Nearly
19 million newspapers are bought by Australians each week; seven
of the top ten Australian news websites are owned by old-style news-
paper publishers; 13 of Australian tablet users are already paying to
read newspapers; Australians have downloaded more than 2 million
newspaper-brand apps in the past 18 months; and The Age and Sydney
Morning Herald tablet apps, which have won international awards, have
been downloaded one million times.
Even though these are very early days, we are already seeing some
fascinating trends in how people read our stories and download our
videos. The lesson for us is that we have to be better at it than at any
other time in the past, because the audience demands it. The desire of
people for stories is bigger and larger than any time in the past. Because
of the ever-shifting technology changes and the multitude of publishing
platforms that have arisen, the heart of what we do is easily and often
forgotten. As part of that research we have conducted into turning these
newspapers into compact size, we have also conducted eyeball-tracking.
This is where a camera follows a human retina following a newspaper
page. I saw so-called hard news stories – the ones experienced journal-
ists love so much, just the facts – read for a paragraph or two, before the
reader lost interest and then moved on.
A reader can be represented by an inverted pyramid. They all start
reading the story but very quickly they fall off, line by line, paragraph
by paragraph – like a 200-metre race with Usain Bolt. But when you see
it happening on video you are reminded why we all need to be better at
storytelling. The name of the game for any author is holding the reader.
Hollywood script writers and directors are the best at it, particularly the
new generation of HBO writers and directors with HBO. Quite often
they use neuro – and eye-tracking. They plot their tales by the second,
managing to insert a mini climax just where you need it. They have
become the masters of storytelling. Journalists need to get better at doing
this.
It is not enough to shrug and say that the readers are time-poor. We
know that when something is good the readers will stay. It has to be more

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0015
 Garry Linnell

compelling: here is where we can learn another old truth. In an increas-

ingly faster paced world, we are going to try and revive the multi-part
serial as a way of telling stories in our mastheads. Instead of publishing a
three- or four-thousand-word article which during the week may find a
limited audience, we will look at breaking it up into three or four parts.
The proof, as in all serials, is how gripping the story-line is, and how we
hold the readers’ breath so they come back for the next instalment.
Everything old is new again. It is not that story-telling ever went away.
But there is evidence that its importance and relevance in our lives is
being rediscovered. Many large international companies are teaching
the art of storytelling to their managers. A suite of studies show that
people learn and retain information better when it is told to them in
story form, rather than when it is presented in a graph or a Powerpoint.
Some American companies have started hiring poets and script-writers
as consultants for their management teams, so they can be better at con-
structing a narrative around the company strategy for their employees
and outsiders.
‘What’s your story?’ has become the catchphrase for a new generation
of marketers and politicians. Consider President Obama’s re-election: all
the commentary was around how the President could craft a news story
around his second term. He needs, they say, to construct a narrative to
ensure he doesn’t become a lame duck president. And he started this by
using more Twitter and social media platforms.
I am constantly told that long-form journalism is under pressure, but
there is evidence that with a little nurturing it will continue to play a
role in our lives. I am not a great believer in the mythology that people
will not engage with long-form journalism. A generation of children
has been raised on Harry Potter; tens of millions of women have read
Fifty Shades – and probably quite a few men as well. The Good Weekend
supplement is the home of long form journalism at Fairfax, and the time
spent reading that has risen from 14 to 16.5 minutes. So much for the
maxim that long-form journalism is dead. We have re-invested almost
a million dollars in the pagination of that magazine because we believe
there is a great weekend audience for long form.
We have dramatically turned our newsrooms upside down, to better
enable us to tell our stories in a way that best suits our readers at any time
of the day. It’s been a long time coming. Like any business we have been
slow to react and change with the times. Our profits from advertising
made us lazy and very slow for many years, and blinded us for too long

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0015
 Storytelling in the Digital Age 

to the changes going on in the world around us. So now those changes
are happening very quickly. We are currently running four projects now
which many businesses would run over two years. We are doing them
over six months.
Our newsrooms are unrecognisable. Our reporters are now based in
topic areas. We have breaking news teams that start at 5 a.m., picking
up leads from overnight. The morning breaking news team in Canberra
have usually filed one or two video reports online by 8 a.m., as the
audience arrives in office towers around the country. Breaking news is
tweeted with links to the stories they just filed to our online sites. Social
media producers are curating this waterfall of content and pushing it out
on Facebook. Others are directing our mobile apps, embedding links for
the readers to our live blogs.
Journalists, even a year ago, would not even tell their editor till late
in the day if they found an interesting story. This was in order to keep
it for the next day’s paper to get the best page for it. Now the journalists
simply file their stories in order to break it first. The editors lie at the
heart of this matrix, making calls by the minute whether to run a story
and video package online, or whether to hold it for the papers and tablet
editions. Let me provide an example.
The superstorm Sandy in the United States was one of most antici-
pated live breaking stories in 2012. We previewed the storm on the front
pages of our papers around the country on Tuesday 3rd October. Then as
our online audiences started logging in after 7.30 or 8 in the morning, we
started a live blog that was anchored by a team of editors in Melbourne
and Sydney, and fed by reporters around the globe. The key to this how-
ever was social media input: photographs from Instagram, updates from
Twitter, forecasts, and alerts coming in from Facebook and stories about
people and their struggles. Then the fake photos started circulating on
the web very quickly. This became an engaging secondary story for us:
the web audience love that sort of story. At around 10 a.m. we changed
our headline, as we often do, and traffic jumped accordingly, reaching
a peak at around 1 p.m., as lunchtime office workers logged in to fol-
low New York’s predicament. By the end of the day this one blog had
garnered almost 2 million hits, boosted by huge social media traffic.
You can’t get mesmerised by numbers – but sometimes I do. It is
something we do on breaking political news. The 2013 misogyny debate
involving then Prime Minister Julia Gillard was covered on our blog
The Pulse. That received over a million hits. This was pleasing, from

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0015
 Garry Linnell

our point of view, as there has been some scepticism over the years that
online readers will ever engage with deep, worthy national affairs topics.
This example shows that if you touch the right nerve, online readers will
get involved and will spread the news about it. The live blog about the
re-election of President Obama generated 2.5 million hits; there was also
over a million views of his acceptance speech.
What is critical in all this is originality. In a vanilla world you need
some flavours. In a sea of mediocrity and an overabundance of infor-
mation, you need voices and styles that make you pause and think and
make you want to read or see more. Another pleasing thing we see with
our online audience is that people like Ross Gittins, our economics com-
mentator and probably one of our most revered columnists. He has a
huge following online, particularly among educationalists and students
who have all made the change to online.
One of our major battles at the moment is transferring our print audi-
ence and taking them with us online and into the digital world. At the
moment we have about a 15–20 crossover: that is, the people who read
print who also read online. Clearly we have very different audiences on
all platforms. Our digital audience overall is younger, more educated
and far more affluent than our print audience. This is where we hope the
dollars will be down the track, if we can come up with a model that will
pay for the journalism.
We journalists were once the kings of scarcity. We were just like the
music labels. We controlled the flow of breaking news, determining what
was fit to publish. In many ways we still do, but now there is a churning
sea of news and information. The need to get it right and be the first to get
it right, and tell it in more interesting ways, is now becoming extremely
important to all of us. Digital storytelling resembles a cannibalising orgy.
Content farms have sprung up all over the internet, particularly over the
last five years. They scrape, retrieve, and then realign, re-skin, and re-tell
other people’s stories as soon as they are posted. It’s an endless factory of
recycling, a snake devouring its own tail.
In a world like this, originality has become more important than ever.
I like to use Fifty Shades of Gray this around the office as an example:
clumsily written, hackneyed, nothing but soft porn for middle-age
women. But it was fresh, new, and different. If you walked into a book-
store you saw racks and racks of direct copies. Within six months the
market was flooded with 25–30 new titles which all looked exactly the
same as Fifty Shades.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0015
 Storytelling in the Digital Age 

Like music, journalism is becoming platform-agnostic: we are no

longer print-centric. Recently I spoke to one of our young editors in
Melbourne. I asked her, ‘Do you understand this digital-first philosophy
that we are about to embark on? Do you really understand why we need
to do this to change culturally, but also to change the way we break
news?’ And she replied, ‘Yes, but when I get a really good story I’ll hold
it back for the paper.’ She is no longer editing, but she is doing something
that is far more suitable for her. That’s why we use digital first. What we
really are is audience first. We used the phrase ‘digital first’ because we
needed to bring about massive cultural change – because we were print-
focused. Part of that is the legacy operation inside Fairfax Media, where
the digital empire was kept behind a brick wall. Digital and print never
worked together until recently. Now we are bringing the two cultures
together, and they are very different. One is obsessed with data. They
are digital but are very driven by data and audience, and they have a
greater understanding of their audience and who they are, than the print
journalists. No one says it is easy – but we are getting there.
I have said that storytelling for journalists will change. It already has
changed dramatically. Even five years ago, the idea of the national affairs
editor or reporter anchoring a blog was probably unthinkable. A blog
was something that those weird people did outside, passing themselves
off as journalist and reporters. We are already seeing a lot of this nascent
story-telling appearing on our sites and tablets. Interactive graphics are
becoming a huge factor, and finding the talent to do it is becoming a big
issue. We are starting to go through the universities and graphics schools
looking for the next few geniuses graduating, so we can pick them up and
put them in our newsrooms. We need graphic artists who are storytellers
working alongside our reporters. There is no longer just one by-line on
a story. A lot of our former subeditors are now called producers, in the
true television sense of the word. They anchor stories, report them, edit
them, to make sure we get lots of Google hits. They are responsible for
the audio insertion and the captions: the whole package.
My favourite quote is from Michael Schudson, a US Professor of
Communications:
The ground journalists walk upon is shaking. That is the experience for
those working in the field, and for those outside studying it. It is dizzying.3

At the heart of great story-telling lies great reporting: picking up the

nuances of the subject, having a great ear for dialogue. We read things

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0015
 Garry Linnell

every day, and sometimes we journalists are bad at quoting people, run-
ning long slabs that are meaningless. Our journalists have to get better –
they have to develop a better ear for dialogue, like novelists. That is a
much better way of engaging the reader than just presenting a massive
grey type.
When I was working at the Bulletin, I asked Kerry Packer, ‘What do
you want to do with the Bulletin? It’s losing 3.5 million dollars a year. It’s
a financial basket case, but I know you love it. Do you want it to break
even? I don’t know how I will do that without losing all the staff ’. He said,
‘Just make ‘em talk about it.’ Kerry Packer wasn’t a journalist. But he had
a great instinct for what the average person out there wanted and what
drove them. At one stage he asked, ‘What do you think people out there
get paid?’ I replied, ‘About $48–50,000.’ He said, ‘Well I don’t know how
they survive on that.’ His instincts were spot-on. And that phrase ‘Just
make ‘em talk about it’ has always stayed with me, has always resonated.
When I am talking in the newsroom with our journalists, I always say
that this is one of the guiding principles of what they do. Are the readers
talking about what you do, in a good way? Not ringing up about factual
errors – but actually talking about it? It has to be the underlying principle
in any form of storytelling.

Notes
 Roy Greenslade, ‘The Wisdom of Shorter Political Soundbites’, at http://www.
guardian.co.uk/media/greenslade/2011/jan/04/newspapers-us-press-publishing
(accessed 9 July 2013).
 Daniel H. Pink. A Whole New Mind: Why Rightbrainers Will Rule the Future.
New York: Riverhead Books, 2005, p. 3.
 Michael Schudson, The Sociology of News (2nd edn). New York: W. W. Norton,
2005, p. 205.

References

Pink, Daniel H., A Whole New Mind: Why Rightbrainers Will Rule the
Future, New York: Riverhead Books, 2005.
Schudson, Michael, The Sociology of News (2nd edn). New York: W. W.
Norton, 2005.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0015
 9
Reading and Writing the
News in the Fifth Estate
Jennifer Beckett and Catharine Lumby

Abstract: Beckett and Lumby explore the impact of social

media on journalism. In particular they address the use of
Twitter to convey news information at extraordinary speed,
while advancing news events – or ‘stories’ – in real time.
Beckett and Lumby analyse the various challenges confronting
journalism in the age of ‘the news that never sleeps’.

Keywords: ethics; journalism; social media; speed;

Twitter

John Potts. The Future of Writing. Basingstoke: Palgrave

Macmillan, 2014. doi: 10.1057/9781137440402.0016.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0016 

 Jennifer Beckett and Catharine Lumby

The Western world will remember 15 April 2013 as the day two bombs
detonated in Copley Square, Boston, at the finish line of the Boston
Marathon, killing three people and injuring hundreds. It is also the day
that brought into stark relief the manner in which Twitter has changed
the face of breaking news coverage.
There are, of course, precedents for the increasingly dominant role
social media plays in the way news is written and read. The example most
often cited is the role it played in the Arab Spring uprisings, particularly
the protests in Syria and in Egypt’s Tahrir Square. In countries such
as Egypt and Syria, where everyday freedom for the press is curtailed,
reporting on such events for the local news agencies is fraught with dan-
ger. In events such as these, foreign journalists are often subject to severe
restrictions and may even be ejected – as occurred in Syria in 2011 – to
ensure control over information.1 Social media was a portal that allowed
ordinary people caught up in extraordinary events to communicate with
the outside world and give on-the-ground coverage that journalists were
unable to provide.
Twitter coverage of the Boston marathon bombings and the sub-
sequent gun battle culminating in the capture of two suspects, one of
whom died, arguably had the same impact on the coverage of breaking
news in the US domestic sphere. As one commentator observed:
The two bombs that exploded during Monday’s Boston Marathon set off
a simultaneous and sometimes just as chaotic mad dash for reliable infor-
mation. The second the news showed up on Twitter feeds, those of us who
still reach for TV remotes in such events were left to wonder why it was
taking so long for the news to show up on CNN, MSNBC, Fox News and the
broadcast networks ... 2

Stuever went on to sound a note of caution about the live feed that is
Twitter. ‘News, both as a phenomenon and a commodity, must now
travel faster than it can be verified.’3
This impact of social media on the way news stories are written is still
an emergent phenomenon and it is important to avoid the temptation to
either overstate or underestimate its influence.
The modern newsroom retains many similarities with newsrooms
before the internet. Stories still need to be completed in line with pub-
lication and air schedules and they must be clear, concise, and accurate.
But the job of a journalist is no longer complete when they file. The con-
vergent media era means that a journalist now has the task of creating a
story that is both modular and easily customised for different mediums.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0016
 Reading and Writing the News in the Fifth Estate 

A radio piece on the web, for instance, may include a longer version of
an interview and perhaps a video and photographs taken by the journal-
ist at the time. The mainstream media no longer produce media content
that is specific to a given medium. The newspaper industry, for example,
has shifted from a print focus to one where ‘journalists are expected to
enrich the reader’s experience by adding audio, video, photos, and other
types of visual data to text-based stories’.4 Online print media content
often differs markedly from the content readers encounter in their print
or tablet editions of the paper and is distributed in unpredictable ways
through social media.
The convergent media era is perhaps best defined as an era in which
the boundaries between media silos have collapsed and content moves
horizontally across multiple platforms rather than vertically from the
producer to the media consumer.5 It is an era in which the distinction
between professional journalists and ‘amateurs’ is blurring and where
mainstream media frequently draws on source material generated by
media users themselves. In this chapter, we explore the ramifications of
these changes and of the role of social media for how we conceive of news
and how we understand the process of ‘writing’ and reading the news.

The news that never sleeps

The rise of social media has not only given ‘amateurs’ a platform for pro-
ducing and distributing their own content, it has equally drawn main-
stream journalists outside the gates of their professional castles and into
the chaotic information traffic of social media. All mainstream media
organisations in Australia now maintain an official social media presence
and many journalists are themselves prominent on social media sites.
Social media, in particular Twitter, allows journalists to reach a wider
audience, to promote their ‘brand’ and their stories, to ‘converse’ with
a broad range of publics, and to break news faster than the newsroom
schedule allows.
This new ability to keep a story moving on a minute-by-minute basis
also extends to the use of live blogging, notably in areas such as political,
legal, and sports journalism as well as in the coverage of disasters.6 But does
a constant flow of information make for good news? Can it really add to
the story and what does it mean for accuracy? Even as Twitter was igniting
with news and rumour as the hunt for the bombing suspects was underway,

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0016
 Jennifer Beckett and Catharine Lumby

pundits were already debating the role social media now plays in the way
news is written. Writing in Slate, Farhad Manjoo advised people following
breaking news to run to their television and ‘make sure it’s securely turned
off ’. The next thing they should do is to ‘pull out your phone, delete your
Twitter app, shut off your email ... [and] unplug your PC’.
Manjoo, who is Slate’s technology columnist, was making the point
that new technologies make it possible to follow breaking stories too
closely, leaving a gap between facts and comprehension. The useful
distinction, he argued, isn’t by medium. The issue with any live news
coverage is that:
What ends up filling that gap is speculation. On both Twitter and cable,
people are mostly just collecting little factoids and thinking aloud about
various possibilities. They’re just shooting the shit, and the excrement ends
up flying everywhere and hitting innocent targets.7

The siege of the terrorist Mohammed Merah in Toulouse, March 2012

is a case in point. The story of Merah and his attacks on French soldiers
and three Jewish school children in the town during the month had been
followed worldwide. Finally, the French police had him cornered in his
apartment. Outside were journalists from several international news
agencies: AFP, Reuters, the BCC, France24, ABC. Everyone was tweeting
developments as and when they happened, while the BBC and France24
also maintained live blogs. To anyone following the twitter feed or the
blogs, the end of the siege was imminent – for at least 10 hours. While
the constant flow of information certainly provided a sense of urgency,
the fact is, going back over the information now, that very little new
information was added and, in fact, there were several false leads. As the
General Editors Network Storify account of the siege shows, the story
wasn’t actually moving; rather, it was being moved.8 As Susan D. Moeller
has observed, the pressure to move a story out into the public domain,
literally as it unfolds, militates against deliberation. Stories leak out by
iteration rather than arriving fully formed. She writes that the pace ‘too
often turns hysterical, blurring solid reporting with rumour and rants
into an indistinguishable and, at times, toxic slurry’.9 News, in this sense,
is no longer written, it is typed in 140 character paragraphs.
A secondary effect of this drive to cover breaking news as it happens
is that rumours spawned on social media can quickly gain the status
of facts once they are rebroadcast on mainstream media outlets. CNN
anchor Aaron Brown observes of rumours: ‘People start to talk about it

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0016
 Reading and Writing the News in the Fifth Estate 

and then Fox News talks about it, and all of a sudden something that has
absolutely no basis in fact becomes part of a story.’10 A decade ago, it was
only the dedicated 24 news channels, of which CNN was the pioneer,
which covered news around the clock. Today, all journalists are under
pressure to get news into the public domain as quickly as possible, and
this inevitably results in news that is reactive and prone to error.
There is, of course, another side to the social mediatisation of news.
Social media has allowed voices that would otherwise have been stifled
to be heard, and stories that might have been ignored to get an airing.
So great was the flow of social media reporting during the Arab Spring
uprisings that both the Syrian and Egyptian governments acted to cur-
tail internet access and to trace the IP addresses and accounts of those
involved in the campaign.11 As the Daily Mail reported at the time, in
Egypt the internet was shut down on 28 January 2011. In response, hack-
ers set up systems to bypass the state controls, and social media users
from all over the world began to work together, forming user chains, to
ensure that information still got out.12 Indeed, special phone numbers
were set up, allowing protesters to call and leave information to be trans-
lated and then tweeted or blogged for an international audience.13 As well
as this, international news agencies used social media to follow the story
and to connect with the leaders and others involved in the uprisings,
using the private messaging capacities of Twitter and Facebook to set up
interviews.14
While some of the people tweeting, blogging, and videoing scenes
of the protests with smartphones were local journalists, or in many
cases, journalism students, many were ordinary citizens who had taken
on a reporting role in the crisis. The term ‘citizen journalist’ emerged
in the first decade of the twenty-first century to describe the growing
participation of media users in media production. As Axel Bruns notes,
citizen journalism at its best is focused ‘not on the mere provision of
“facts” as determined by a small group of journalists and editors, but
instead highlights the discursive, dialogic, and even deliberatory nature
of engagement with the news.’15 Bruns argues that citizen journalism can
form a viable alternative to mainstream news sources and offer multiple
perspectives on stories that professional outlets package reductively and
even ideologically. What has been less examined is the question of how
citizen journalism is altering the news-writing and story-telling practices
of professionals. Citizen journalists are not simply alternative sources of
news; their practice is increasingly changing the way journalists, editors,

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0016
 Jennifer Beckett and Catharine Lumby

and producers understand their audiences, how they shape content to

appeal to them, and how they understand their ethical obligations.

The fifth estate in Australia: a pre-history

The impact of citizen journalism on Australian news and comment pre-

cedes the arrival of social media. It dates to the impact of the internet on
the capacity of media readers, listeners, and viewers to interact directly
with journalists. In 2000, Fairfax-based political journalist Margo
Kingston began a blog titled Webdiary which was hosted by the Sydney
Morning Herald. Kingston recalls that the blog was originally meant to
be a weekly online column on federal politics but that a year later it had
become her full-time job. At first, she was very wary of encouraging too
much reader feedback, having spent a lengthy career as a journalist who
had often had to contend with hate mail and hate voicemail. She soon
came to understand the nature of the journalistic experiment she was
engaged in, and its potential for opening up a more interactive relation-
ship between those who write the news and those who read it. In a book
chapter reflecting on the site in 2003 she wrote:
Far from an onslaught of hate mail, interesting emails – on the topic I’d
written about, other topics, and the idea of interaction between journalist
and reader – started rolling in. Most were so good I made the decision that
would transform the page: to publish them as a matter of course.16

Webdiary was the original Australian experiment in citizen journalism.

Contributors and readers were asked to assist with developing a code
of ethics for the site. Kingston invited readers and contributors to help
form the code, reflecting that:
The decision to publish readers’ contributions also transformed my ethi-
cal considerations ... When you let readers join the show and help direct it,
accountability is now longer a sham but a reality. Online ethical codes
drafted for hardcopy journalism must adapt and stretch to fit a medium
less planned, more open, faster, and much more in-the-moment.17

Kingston’s ethical engagement with readers is highlighted by her com-

ment that:
From the first day of Webdiary, in July 2000, I wrote in the first person
and asked all reader contributors to write in the first person too. I wanted
Webdiary to be a space for conversation among Australians from all different

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0016
 Reading and Writing the News in the Fifth Estate 

walks of life and from all different political points of view, I wanted that
space to be safe, and I felt I could guarantee safety by being very open about
what my beliefs are, and publishing genuine criticisms of my beliefs and my
opinions and my facts. I think the reader in the end trusts that more than a
journalist who’s pretending to be objective. (Deitz 2010, 105)

As Milissa Deitz writes in her 2010 book on the future of Australian

journalism, Kingston understands Webdiary as an experiment in ‘par-
ticipatory journalism’. As a former Canberra press gallery journalist, her
experience in blogging gave her a new appreciation of the isolation in
which elite political journalists work, saying of the gallery: ‘Once you’ve
been there for a while you tend to accept the rules; they’d lost a sense
of what they’re there for, what their meaning is in a democratic sense’
(Deitz 2010, 107).
Kingston’s prescient and critical experiment with online media and
citizen journalism underlines an often-neglected feature of how the con-
vergent and social media age has changed the way journalists write news
stories. New platforms and technologies are not simply mediums that
convey information, they are vectors which fundamentally alter the kind
of information that is available, how stories are written and the expec-
tations of the audience. In his book Virtual Geography media scholar
McKenzie Wark used the term ‘media vector’ to describe the way media
vectors traverse our lives, effectively creating a virtual geography – what
he describes as a ‘third nature’.18

Reading and rewriting the news

In his book Television Truths, John Hartley argues that we can conceive
of three eras in the history of meaning creation, which he divides into
the pre-modern (Medieval) period, the modern period and the contem-
porary (postmodern) period. He aligns these periods with three eras
of literacy: hear only, read only, and read and write. He writes that the
contemporary era is characterised by ‘redaction’ which is ‘the creative
editorial practice of bringing existing materials together to make new
texts and meanings’.19 He continues:
In the contemporary global era ... consumers exercise their own choices
(with the help of redactors like Google), carrying their own self-control
mechanisms, and navigating the means and media of meaning that they
want or can access, to deliver their own choices. 20

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0016
 Jennifer Beckett and Catharine Lumby

Media users no longer simply customise their sources of news. As Hartley

notes, they edit it, repurpose it, and redistribute it to their own networks.
The internet is a multifunction, distributed network with no central
gatekeeper. It is offering enormous challenges to journalists, media edi-
tors, and producers who have traditionally worked on a one-to-many
model of news production. As the explosion of the Twittersphere in the
hunt for the Boston bombings demonstrated, professional journalists no
longer have a monopoly on driving the news cycle. In some cases, social
media is driving them, as a memorable moment on CNN during the
hunt for the bombing suspect made clear.
There is no question that the news-cycle itself has been radically
altered, sped up by the rise of technologies such as Twitter, which allow
for the rapid dissemination of information. Not only has the push to
cross-platform journalism changed the ways in which news is written
and produced, it has also changed the way it is consumed. The addition
of ‘citizen journalists’, producers, and the advent of social media, means
that content is not only more readily accessible, it is transferrable and
open to what Hartley calls redaction. This extension has not only broken
through the usual geographical reach of a news item, rendering it imme-
diately ‘glocal’; it has also irrevocably altered the external news lifecycle.
If we take into consideration the various news outlets – papers, radio,
news, and current affairs TV – the standard news item might have had in
the past an average life of a week, in the converged media environment
that lifecycle has increased exponentially.
Put simply, stories persist. They persist in the links to content that
circulate via Twitter, that remain on the Facebook pages and websites
of news agencies and are then copied and shared between other web
users. They persist on curated news, current affairs, and ‘life story’ sites
such as Reddit, and that persistence can now last weeks or months. As
an example, let us take responses to tweets on the Twitter feed of a large
Australian newsagency that one of the authors has worked on: responses
to and retweets of an original tweet in which the agency is mentioned and is
therefore able to monitor, have occurred up to one month after the original
air date of the story. Stories from the same Twitter feed have reappeared
across several international user- curated news digests within the same
time.
In this era, the advent of ‘curated news’ is a critical and emergent new
form of writing and editing the news, because it is this practice that is
at the heart of modern news consumption. While there are several sites

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0016
 Reading and Writing the News in the Fifth Estate 

and, as noted above, individuals who curate news into digests, the prac-
tice itself could be considered a professionalisation of news consumption
behaviours by the public. While daily news and current affairs broadcasts
and papers still run to a publication schedule, we – the users – are now
able to readily sift through the news, choosing and storing stories to
read, watch, or listen to on our own news schedule. Further, the archival
nature of the web allows us to re-read, re-watch, and re-listen to stories
that we find interesting or which may have relevance to a new news item.
Indeed, a common feature on most news sites these days is the ‘relevant
stories’ that accompany content. In some instances these may be links
to stories that are years old; for example, a recent story on Indonesia’s
Lapindo ‘mud volcano’, run on the ABC’s Correspondents Report radio
program and posted on its website, includes links to stories dating back
to its first appearance in 2007.21
While self-curation is the simplest way to personalise news content,
many sites are now also tailoring links to match their users. For instance
many news sites, such as Fairfax Digital in Australia, use software that
tracks the content which individual IP addresses access, and embedded
algorithms then work to match additional content that a reader may
find of interest. Other sites such as Salon, The Washington Post and The
New York Times use ‘social reading’ apps that link to a given social media
profile and monitor not only what the reader is accessing but what their
friends are accessing, suggesting stories based on user profiles which pop
up not only when someone is using their site but when they are accessing
their social media account. Sites such as Reddit, on the other hand, are
examples of community curation – with links to news stories submitted
by users, as well as user-produced content such as blogs. But what does
this curation mean for the way in which news is written and read?
It’s a news media landscape that prompts some key questions about
the extent to which these developments enhance or limit the role of the
fourth estate in promoting informed and transparent public debate.
Certainly, the media landscape is increasingly fragmented and open
to ideological splintering in terms of what information and stories are
shared among a given user community. Yet, Jean Burgess, Marcus Foth,
and Helen Klaebe argue that rather than limiting notions of citizenship
to ‘participation in online deliberation and the “rational” discussion of
topics that are related to the traditional public sphere – that is, politics
and current affairs’, the cultural dimensions of the production and use
of media online should be considered as a form of civic participation.22

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0016
 Jennifer Beckett and Catharine Lumby

For Burgess et al., this means shifting our understanding of the public
sphere as a ‘common public sphere ... where politics and identity can be
dramatized and affect can be politicized, to everyday active participation
in a networked, highly heterogeneous and open cultural public sphere.’23
It’s a framework for understanding the evolution of the fourth estate
which, in theoretical terms, requires attention to wide-ranging work in
political theory and media studies concerning the nature of contempo-
rary democracy and participatory citizenship.24
In their exploration of the role that the internet might play in rein-
vigorating democracy, Stephen Coleman and Jay G. Blumler describe a
model they term ‘direct representation’ which would use online media
to engender dialogues that impart information and foster mutuality
between citizens and their representatives.25 They envisage a ‘civic com-
mons’ that would ‘gather the public together, not as spectators, followers
or atomized egos, but as a demos capable of self-articulation’.26 Joshua
Cohen, a key political theorist in deliberative democracy, has warned
that adopting a cyber-utopianism is not only misplaced but dangerous.27
In the field of media studies, the concept of participatory democracy
has been generative for theorists seeking to understand the ecologies of
online communities and the limits and potential of their agency.
A key question at this pass in the rapidly evolving news media land-
scape is whether media professionals and their media organisations will
use this shift as an adaptive moment for the fourth estate. As the hunt for
the Boston bombing suspects unravelled one Friday CNN broadcast an
image which may well turn out to be iconic: two CNN journalists stood
in front of a camera on a live broadcast, their heads down, checking their
Twitter feed.

Notes
 Simon Cottle (2011), ‘Media and the Arab Uprisings of 2011: Research Notes’,
Journalism 12(5), pp. 647–659, p. 652; Reporters without Borders (2011), World
Report – Syria, accessed at http://en.rsf.org/report-syria,163.html; Freedom
House (2012), Syria/Freedom of the Press 2012, accessed at: www.freedomhouse.
org/report/freedom-press/2012/syria.
 Hank Stuever, ‘In Boston Bombing a Race for Media to Slow Down’, The
Washington Post, 16 April 2013, reprinted at http://www.smh.com.au/comment/
in-boston-bombing-a-race-for-media-to-slow-down-20130416-2hxo8.html.
 Ibid.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0016
 Reading and Writing the News in the Fifth Estate 

 P. O’Donnell, D. McKnight, and J. Este (2012) Life in the Clickstream 11 – The

Future of Journalism. Media Alliance, Sydney, p. 24.
 Kate Crawford and Catharine Lumby (2011), The Adaptive Moment: A Fresh
Approach to Convergent Media in Australia. Sydney: UNSW, 2010, p. 5.
 Axel Bruns, Jean Burgess, Kate Crawford and Frances Shaw (2012),
#qldfloods and @QPSMedia: Crisis Communication on Twitter in the 2011 South
East Queensland Floods, Brisbane: ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative
Industries and Innovation.
 Farhad Manjoo, ‘Breaking News is Broken’, Slate, posted 9 April 2013. http://
www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2013/04/boston_bombing_
breaking_news_don_t_watch_cable_shut_off_twitter_you_d_be.html.
 General Editors Network (2012), Live from Toulouse: How did the media liveblog
the shooter standoff?, Storify.com, accessed at: http://storify.com/EditorsNet/
live-from-toulouse-how-did-the-media-liveblog-the.
 Susan D. Moeller (2008), ‘Media and Democracy’, in M. Boler ed., Digital
Media and Democracy: Tactics in Hard Times, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press,
pp. 167–196, p. 175.
 Dan Gilchrist, ‘The Man in the Chair’, Rake, June 2005 cited in Susan D.
Moeller (2008), ‘Media and Democracy’, in M. Boler ed., Digital Media and
Democracy: Tactics in Hard Times (2008), Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, pp.
167–196, p. 177.
 S. Cottle (2011), op. cit., p. 652; M. Ishani(2011), The Hopeful Network.
Foreign Policy. Available at www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/02/07/
the_hopeful_network.
 Access Now (2011), Help Egypt, Access Now, Help Egypt campaign accessed
at: https://www.accessnow.org/page/s/help-egypt; Daily Mail reporter (2011),
‘How the Internet refused to abandon Egypt: Authorities take entire country
offline... but hackers rally to get the message out’, Daily Mail, 30 January 2011,
accessed at: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1351904/Egypt-protests-
Internet-shut-hackers-message-out.html.
 Ishani (2011) op. cit.
 Connie Agius and Jessica Hill, Pers. Comm. 2011s.
 Axel Bruns (2008), ‘Gatewatching, Gatecrashing’, in M. Boler ed., Digital
Media and Democracy: Tactics in Hard Times. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press,
pp. 247–270, p. 256.
 Margo Kingston (2003), ‘Diary of a Webdiarist’, Remote Control: New Media,
New Ethics. Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, pp. 159–172, p. 160.
 Ibid.
 McKenzie Wark (1994), Virtual Geography: Living with Global Media Event.,
Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
 John Hartley (2008), Television Truths. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, p. 26.
 Ibid., p. 34.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0016
 Jennifer Beckett and Catharine Lumby

 Helen Brown (2011), ‘Malodorous Mud’, Correspondents Report, story accessed

at: http://www.abc.net.au/correspondents/content/2013/s3751758.htm.
 J. E. Burgess, M. Foth and H. Klaebe (2006), ‘Everyday Creativity as Civic
Engagement: A Cultural Citizenship View of New Media’, Proceedings 2006
Communications Policy and Research Forum, pp. 1–16, p. 1.
 Ibid., p. 5.
 M. Poster (2002), ‘Cyberdemocracy: The Internet and the Public Sphere’,
in D. Trend (ed.), Reading Digital Culture. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, pp.
259–271; A. Bruns (2007), ‘Produsage, Generation C, and Their Effects on
the Democratic Process’, Paper presented at MIT 5 (Media in Transition)
conference, MIT, Boston, USA, 27–29 April; Joshua Cohen(2009),
‘Reflections on Information Technology and Democracy’, presented on 28
February 2009, at an American Academy of Arts and Sciences symposium
on ‘The Public Good: The Impact of Information Technology on Society’;
T. Flew (2009), ‘Democracy, Participation and Convergent Media: Case
Studies in Contemporary Online News Journalism in Australia’, Record of
the Communications Policy and Research Forum 2009, 19–20 November 2009,
University of Technology, Sydney.
 Stephen Coleman and Jay Blumler (2009), The Internet and Democratic
Citizenship: Theory, Practice and Policy. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
 Ibid., p. 197.
 Joshua Cohen (2009), op. cit.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0016
 10
News Breakers and News Makers
in the 24-Hour Opinion Cycle
Lachlan Harris

Abstract: Harris surveys the changing relationship between

news and opinion in his chapter. He recounts the huge
structural shifts that are occurring in the political news
cycle. These include the meteoric rise of opinion, the growing
dependency on data, and the blurring of roles between ‘news
breakers’ and ‘news makers’.

Keywords: cycle; journalism; news; opinion

John Potts. The Future of Writing. Basingstoke: Palgrave

Macmillan, 2014. doi: 10.1057/9781137440402.0017.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0017 

 Lachlan Harris

In this chapter, I outline some of the broad trends I believe will shape
the future of journalism. I won’t be more specific than that, because in
media the only predictable pattern is consistent unpredictability. But
nonetheless it’s possible, with a bit of channel surfing, mouse clicking,
and paper flicking, to spot some broad trends emerging.
The first trend is the rise of opinion, and how opinion-based content
now dominates fact-based news. The second trend is a little less devel-
oped, but I believe it will grow to be even more significant. This trend is
the emergence of hybrid newsmaker/news breaker organisations that I
believe will dominate the future of news.
Before I start delving into the belly of the beast that is the modern
media cycle I would like to put something clearly on the record. I greatly
admire quality journalism, and the many talented and hard-working
journalists who make it happen. I am optimistic about the future of
journalism, and deeply respectful of those men and women who build
a career in one of the most honorable, and important, of professions.
Having worked at the coalface of politics for many years I have learnt
one thing beyond doubt: politics needs quality journalism.
Let me be entirely clear: without journalism, party politics will
descend into a corrupt and dangerous farce. The power of politics needs
the accountability of good-quality journalism. That fact alone means
journalism survives. It will, because it must.
So now to consider the opinion cycle. First of all, it is important to
understand that opinion-based content has always been part of the
media landscape. What is new is that sometime in the last decade the
opinion cycle started to compete with the news cycle for dominance, and
some time in the last five years the opinion cycle won.
There are two words that sum up perfectly the fundamental content
change that is currently remaking news and journalism. Those two
words are ‘I think’. If you look back over the last five years, almost
every single form of significant media innovation contains content
that is comfortable – some would say dependent – on those two words.
Facebook, Twitter, comment fields on news websites, Q&A, panel shows
on Sky News, 99 of blogs: these are all part of the ‘I think’ revolution,
where news is forgotten in the pursuit of someone’s, anyone’s, everyone’s
opinion. I call this explosion of opinion over fact the Opinion Cycle.
The Opinion Cycle now dominates politics, media, and the national
debate. It may sound like a trivial difference, that journalists used to write
stories which quoted experts, but now vested interests write columns

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0017
 News Breakers and News Makers 

that vilify them instead. Or that television journalists used to craft news
stories that hounded politicians, while now the politicians host low-rent
TV panel shows with journalists instead. It may sound trivial, but it is
not, because of the gulf of difference between opinion-based content,
and content that is actually news.
Opinion is not governed or restrained by any of the professional
standards that filter and balance news. This makes the opinion cycle
a much tougher, and often nastier, place to operate in. It also means
that the opinion cycle is inherently hostile to reform, and permanently
vulnerable to the debased tactics of fear-mongering and pandering to
prejudice. Australian political life has taken a turn for the worse in recent
years, and the rise of the opinion cycle can take some, but not all, of the
credit for this descent into the facile and the ridiculous.
Politics is filtered by good journalism. Politicians self-censor when
they know they have to communicate with voters via journalist. The
opinion cycle has the exact opposite effect. It motivates politicians to
over-simply, over-exaggerate, and over-expose. If journalism is a filter on
politics, the opinion cycle is a massive bullhorn on the weaknesses of the
political system.
The opinion cycle also has no room for nuance, and expert knowledge
that is a vital part of a constructive national debate. Journalism itself is
also debased by the dominance of opinion in the broader media cycle.
The process of accountability, the biggest and most important benefit of
the news cycle, has been replaced by the currency of ‘accusability’ that
dominates in the opinion cycle.
In the opinion cycle, what is – or is not – an objectively determinable
fact is no longer nearly as important as which accusations are being lev-
eled at you, and by whom. And unlike news, the volume of the accusation
is more important than the objective weight of the fact. The consequence
is that governments aren’t held to account in the opinion cycle; they are
restrained by accusation. The difference is subtle, but the consequences
for the process of governing are huge.
The second large difference between the opinion cycle and news cycle
is the different raw material that both cycles run on. The news cycle runs
on the new: new events or policies, while the opinion cycle runs on divi-
sions of opinion. As long as these fault-lines remain active, the opinion
cycle keeps circulating.
If you are a newspaper editor, you wake up every morning praying
for something to happen so you can fill up your pages. But if you are the

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0017
 Lachlan Harris

editor of the Punch or the Drum, its not new events that you really crave
to get your clicks up, it’s furious arguments. What this means is that in
the opinion cycle finding fault lines in the community, and accentuating
them is the most important skill of a modern media professional.
The best paid media identities in Australia today don’t break news,
they perpetuate debate. They don’t resolve arguments with facts, they
ignite them with emotion and accusation. This process of mining fault-
lines has nothing to do with the principles of good journalism, and has
nothing to do with news.
I have written in the past about what is causing the rise and rise of the
opinion cycle. Here is a short version:
 Fact-based news is expensive and opinion is cheap.
 Technological change has meant becoming a broadcaster is very easy.
(But fact-based journalism is still a lot of hard work).
 Customer feedback is driving the rise of opinion.
I have no doubt that in the future many people still want to watch and
read good-quality news, and they always will. So the news cycle will
remain strong, and will continue to be an important part of the media
landscape for many years to come. But the days of news, not opinion,
dominating the cycle are over.
As a consequence, journalists who resist the temptation to complement
their news content with opinion-based material will quickly become an
endangered species. Indeed some would argue that this type of journalist
is in fact already financially extinct.
So if the rise of opinion was my first trend what is my second?
The second trend I want to address is a more subtle structural change,
that I believe will grow into an even more disruptive and industry-
changing trend. This trend is the emergence of the hybrid news maker/
news breaker organisations that make and break more and more news
around the world.
If Kraft Foods revolutionised the home-cooked pancake mix industry
with its ‘Shake ‘N Bake’ technology, then the same is about to happen
to the news industry with rapid growth and proliferation of ‘Make ‘N
Break,’ news organisations. These are news organisations that don’t just
break the news, they also make it.
In my view the emergence of these hybrid ‘Make ‘N Break’ news
organisations, some of them advocacy groups acting like news organisa-
tions, and other news organisations acting like advocacy groups, is the

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0017
 News Breakers and News Makers 

next big trend in journalism. I call them Make ‘N Break news organisa-
tions, but in consultant-speak they could be called vertically integrated
change businesses. They are businesses that have adopted the processes
both of advocacy and news- breaking to pursue either the collection of
political influence, the collection of viewers, or both.
In the future, of course, this integration will not be limited to commer-
cial new organisations, or the very top of the advocacy pyramid. Political
parties, daily metropolitan news papers, NGOs, individual radio shows,
interest groups, peak bodies, and many other media-exposed business
will likely adopt the same model.
When I discuss the growth of vertically integrated change businesses,
or Make ‘N Break news organisations, I am not just talking about self-
interested individuals purchasing news organisations in order to exert
influence in the national debate. There will be plenty of that around the
world, but the odd billionaire seeking influence through purchasing
traditional news organisations is nothing new.
What I am describing is a rapid process of mutual cannibalisation,
where advocacy organisations are taking rapid steps to adopt the tools
and techniques of news organisations, and news organisations are
moving just as quickly to adopt the tools and techniques of advocacy
organisations.
Billionaire Gina Rinehart’s attempt to purchase Fairfax Media in
Australia is one very high-profile example of an attempt to create a very
large Make ‘N Break news organisation. If it succeeds it will be perhaps
the most sophisticated Make ‘N Break news organisations anywhere in
the world. Whether that is something to be excited by is an open ques-
tion to say the least.
The Rinehart example is a very obvious one, but the reality is that this
sought of vertical integration is happening on a much smaller scale in
most advocacy organisations, and most news organisations as well.
Fox News in the United States is perhaps the best-known Make ‘N
Break news organisation yet produced. It is an organisations undertak-
ing the same process of integrations as the Rinehart Fairfax merger, but
starting at the opposite end of the street. Fox is using advocacy to reduce
the cost of sourcing content and viewers for its news; Rinehart wants
to use news to reduce the cost of sourcing eyeballs and eardrums for
her advocacy. Regardless, the outcome for audiences is the same. The
distinction between the newsmakers and news breakers is eroded, and
the era of Make ‘N Break news has begun.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0017
 Lachlan Harris

Moguls have always had the capacity to throw their weight around by
purchasing a TV station. But these days you don’t need to buy a news-
paper to become a retailer of news. That is why political parties, and
interest groups such as the Minerals Council or GetUp, and others will,
more and more, break news to their chosen audience direct.
Blogs, tweets, emails newsletters, podcasts, and YouTube channels are
very early stages of this process, but in the future many of these organi-
sations will fund full-blown news services. Most will specialise, report-
ing and disseminating news of interest to their members, but I believe
the combined volume of this Make ‘N Break news will soon outweigh
traditional news content.
Given the growth of this model it is very possible that journalists in the
future will be just as likely to work for the BCA as they are The Australian,
or GetUp as they are the Sydney Morning Herald. I also believe that by the
end of the decade both major political parties in the United States, and
most likely in Australia, will partially, or fully, fund comprehensive news
services.
These Make ‘N Break news services will not be distributers of the soft-
sell propaganda political parties produce today; they will be full-blown
news services competing for viewers, not just voters.
$6 billion was just spent on the last US Presidential Election. Most
of this money was used to purchase eyeballs and eardrums from media
businesses with a news-making operation. Given the scale of that
expenditure you don’t need to be a McKinsey’s consultant to work out
that vertical integration is coming to the change business, and coming
fast. As audiences fragment, and the quality of news-based content pro-
duced by traditional news organisations declines, the barriers to entry
into the news-breaking business will also reduce.
As a result, the business case for advocacy groups to fund their own
Make ‘N Break news service will become easier to make. When Gina
Rinehart looks at Fairfax she sees a way to adapt the Fairfax model to
make it a producer of cheap change. In the years to come more and
more advocacy organisations will look at news and see the exact same
thing.
This process is not a one-way street, news organisations are just as
likely to be adopting the tools and techniques of advocacy groups as the
traffic flowing the other way. An insight into just how bizarre the new
Make ‘N Break news model can get is found via Google: footage of Karl
Rove arguing against the news projections of Fox News on air. Watch

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0017
 News Breakers and News Makers 

that footage and you will understand why I believe the age of Make ‘N
Break news has well and truly begun.
News organisations are moving quickly to adopt the tools and tech-
niques of change agents, because advocacy is a source of cheap content,
cheap relevancy, cheap exclusives, and cheap influence. In a world of col-
lapsing media business models, the advocacy magic pudding is almost
too good to be true.
Of course there is nothing new about news organisations having an
ideological identity, or running campaigns for change. British tabloids
have pursued ideological stances, and newspaper lead campaigns are as
old as the printing press. But there is a big structural shift when advocacy
becomes as important to the organisation as the news model itself.
If Gina Rinehart looked at Fairfax and saw cheap change, Rupert
Murdoch looked at the passion and paranoia of right-wing American
politics and saw cheap eyeballs and cheap content. In the future more
and more news organisations, from all sides of the political spectrum,
will look at the advocacy model and see exactly the same thing.
I am not suggesting that the Make ‘N Break model is an entirely
positive development in the news industry. To be very clear, I believe
that these organisations present a profound challenge to the quality,
and objectivity of future news. I also believe that this structural change
means we are entering into an era of complex and intertwined journalis-
tic conflict of interests.
But I have to admit that this hybrid model will ensure that journalism
will continue to be funded in the decades ahead. Whether or not these
models can adjust, and develop the processes and discipline needed to
ensure the objectivity of good-quality news is not polluted by the cer-
tainty of good-quality advocacy, remains an open question.
I for one hope so, because I believe, whether we like it or not, much of
the news we see in the future will be attempting to walk this advocacy/
reportage tightrope. Some global outlets producing high-quality news
will survive, and niche news outlets will also continue to publish and
broadcast high-quality objective news that will be well received.
But I believe much of the journalism of the future will be delivered by
vertically integrated change businesses, ‘Make ‘N Break’ news organisa-
tions which extract value from news in the currency of change, or value
from advocacy in the currency of eyeballs. But in the end, the oldest rule
in media, that quality content, including quality news content, will – in
the long term – win, gives me hope, that among all Make ‘N Break news

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0017
 Lachlan Harris

organisations of the future some will crack a model that allows high-
quality news to be produced in a sustainable and objective way.
A business model for news that sees value in change and influence,
rather than just eyeballs and eardrums, is a risky pathway forward.
Ultimately the success or failure of this model will come down to the
capacity and intention of viewers and voters, listeners and petitioners,
to demand, and consume good-quality news. If that happens the model
will work; if it doesn’t we may be in some trouble indeed.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0017
 11
Education and the New
Convergent Journalist
Mark Evans

Abstract: Evans explores the relation between education

and the new convergent journalist. The rapid emergence
of a global, converged media environment provides the
opportunity to explore innovative pedagogies, collaborations,
and professional outcomes for journalism graduates. Evans
advocates a university curriculum built on the premise that
new journalism is global, connected, networked, ethical, and
independent.

Keywords: convergence; education; ethics; journalism

John Potts. The Future of Writing. Basingstoke: Palgrave

Macmillan, 2014. doi: 10.1057/9781137440402.0018.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0018 

 Mark Evans

There is not a single information industry that has been unaffected

by the recent developments in media and computing technologies.
The flattening of access to the tools of information, production, and
distribution has altered the mediascape. Similarly the lines between
production and consumption have become blurred and the pace of
media flows has accelerated. The ability of what Jay Rosen calls ‘the
people formerly known as the audience’1 to contest what was previously
uncontested – the news – has threatened the very essence of the project
of journalism. Yet journalist Kate McClynmont has recently argued that
‘for democracy to function it is essential that we have a free and fearless
press’.2
Recent developments in the journalism landscape have been unset-
tling and unprecedented. The most pronounced changes have occurred
in the print news domain. Broadsheets have become tabloids or changed
format, tabloids have gone online only, and broadsheets and tabloids
have disappeared altogether. In fact, the rather morbid Newspaper Death
Watch website tracks all the latest ‘dispatches’.
Even staples of the printed journalism world, such as Newsweek, have
folded. While there are vague promises that it will somehow emerge as
an online presence with its sister publication, the Daily Beast, one can’t
help but feel it’s the end of that era. There are reports that The Guardian
is going to go digital only – that it will shut down its print version and
focus on its web and app products. However, The Guardian has been
extremely proactive in positioning itself for the new convergent envi-
ronment. Their ‘Three Little Pigs’ campaign won awards both as an
advertisement for confidence, as well as an idea of how cross-platform
storytelling might work: (http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/video/2012/
feb/29/open-journalism-three-little-pigs-advert).
In Australia we might question whether Fairfax and other local
outlets are doing the same important re-positioning. Recent attempts
at re-branding an online presence at Fairfax (with the Sydney Morning
Herald, for instance) may yet improve readership, though the attendant
business model remains unpredictable. In January 2013, Fairfax launched
the Sydney Morning Herald’s ‘Know No Boundaries’ online advertising
campaign,3 and The Age’s ‘Forever Curious’ campaign. Touted as one of
the biggest campaigns they had ever run, Fairfax Metro Media’s head of
marketing and communications, Robert Whitehead, claimed that the
campaign was based on research aimed at safeguarding the traditional
mastheads of the company:

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0018
 Education and the New Convergent Journalist 

We have done a great deal of work not only to understand the needs of our
audiences around news consumption but also to get insight into how we can
also best position our mastheads into this exciting and challenging time for
media.4

While the outcomes of such campaigns remain indiscernible, what we

know is that media outlets (and particularly news providers) are seek-
ing to position themselves for the new convergent landscape they now
inhabit. What do we actually know about this landscape?

Convergent media landscape

The convergent media landscape that now affects the Australian market
has been addressed officially by a couple of camps. First, from a regula-
tion point of view, the Convergence Review (released in 2012) outlined
how government and regulation boards might understand the impact of
the convergent media environment. There was an acknowledgement of
the challenges, and also the opportunities, available for those who crack
the code. Importantly, the review outlines ‘three areas of high impor-
tance identified by the Review: diversity of media ownership, content
standards and Australian content’, and it recommends:
 setting up the process for administering the public interest test for
changes in ownership of content service enterprises of national
significance;
 encouraging the establishment of the new industry-led
independent news standards body that will be the centre of the
self-regulatory scheme for news and commentary across all media
platforms; and
 increasing Australian content quotas for broadcasters as a
transitional measure.5
While there is an acknowledgment of a changing media landscape (one
that crosses platforms), this doesn’t mean the purpose of particular types
of media engagement has changed. The second point, with its emphasis
on ‘independent news’, is a clear acknowledgement of the continued
importance of the fourth estate role of journalism. Thus, even though
the regulators acknowledge that their environment is changing (and that
such an estate may now cross platforms), they remain committed to hav-
ing an independent watchdog standing at the gates.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0018
 Mark Evans

From a media industry point of view, the Media Entertainment and

Arts Alliance have also been following the impact of convergence for a
while. Their ‘Future of Journalism’ reports have tracked the changes over
the last few years, but most importantly their academic/industrial paper
‘Journalism at the Speed of Bytes’ sought to outline and address key
issues for the industry. Importantly, they addressed three main research
questions:
 What do we know about quality journalism?
 What does the transition to digital journalism mean for news
quality?
 What could journalists do – perhaps in league with readers – to
renew and extend their standards in this transition period?6
These are important questions to ask, but also important to note is the
fact that they don’t discount the need for quality journalism. It’s crucial
to remember that journalists, as distinct from entertainers or PR special-
ists, are media participants with a very specific set of skills and obliga-
tions, as well as a distinct motivation for media participation. Unlike an
entertainer or PR provider, a journalist synthesises and delivers informa-
tion on behalf, and for the ultimate benefit, of their audience rather than
for their own personal or commercial vision. As the paper’s researchers
emphasised:
Our underlying concern is how Australians will keep themselves informed
or be able to participate in democratic politics if there is a significant drop
in the current supply of original news content produced by professional
journalists.7

From an academic point of view, as we approach convergent journalism

it’s also useful to keep in mind the four modes of convergence as outlined
by Henry Jenkins (2006): technological, social, cultural, and economic
convergence.8 Keeping those four types of convergence in mind helps
keep debate about the future of journalism in perspective as – impor-
tantly – it focuses us on more than just the death of a business model
(the loss of the rivers of gold in paper print, for example). It also keeps
us from the relative fear, or over-enthusiasm, of breaking a story in 140
characters at the time that it happens (technologies such as Twitter); and
it also helps us address the challenges of meeting the expectations of an
audience used to convergence, rather than top-down, media consump-
tion (social and cultural convergence).

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0018
 Education and the New Convergent Journalist 

And readers are not just migrating to newspaper websites, they’re

heading elsewhere. Despite the relative youth of Facebook and Twitter,
data from PEW suggests that a third of young people (those under 30)
get their news from Social Media. That is a statistic commensurate with
television, and way ahead of newspapers. Of course, journalism still has
its place, but that place is being rapidly redefined.
In the 2012 Andrew Olle lecture, esteemed journalist Mark Colvin
identified a number of crises that have arisen as a result of the digital
tsumani that has hit the world of journalism. In no particular order,
they are:
 A crisis of consensus where journalists find it increasingly difficult
to find a common ground.
 A crisis of authority in which institutions that have tended to
hand down pronouncements often find themselves subject to
disagreement, abuse or ridicule.
 A crisis of credibility – as the curtain is pulled away from so-called
authorities like News Corp and the BBC to reveal the sometimes
despicable reality; and
 A crisis in finance – how in the age of digitisation can we make
journalism pay?9
Colvin went on to explain how computer-generated stories are starting
to displace many of the more mundane parts of the journalist’s stock and
trade. He cited the experiments being done by some companies to build
news narratives out of twitter feeds. As has been common in almost all
such instances of disruption, it is the ubiquity of a previously scarce good
that has triggered the change. As Colvin put it, ‘Once upon my lifetime,
the news entered my life with a thud on my doorstep at 6 o’clock each
morning, to remain unchanged until the next thud 24 hours later’.
In Australia the development of convergent journalism has begun, but
mainly through public service broadcasters who don’t need to rely on
a commercial funding model to explore and experiment. There is still
much to be learnt, however, from these successes as they can be seen to
significantly enhance reader experience, as well as provide, as journalism
always has, the ‘first draft of history’.
For example, the reporting of the Black Saturday bushfires in 2009 was
performed by the ABC across platforms and as quickly, and widely, as the
organisation could afford. Social media like Twitter was used as a basic
journalistic tool to try and spread the word honestly and quickly. Rather

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0018
 Mark Evans

than being a gimmick, it was just another way to inform the public of the
terrible events unfolding. The material delivered in this journalistic report-
ing has since formed the background for important analysis of the tragedy
as it happened, and later, in the development of a memorial for those
who were effected (and a tribute to those who were lost).10 As has since
been reported in the Australian Journal of Emergency Management, the
‘Twitterisation’ of disaster reporting such as the ABC’s Black Saturday, and
later 2010 Queensland Flood reports, presents significant opportunities.

The end of journalism?

Over this past weekend I’ve read too many last columns from friends and
colleagues who are leaving journalism; the best of the best. Melancholia
feels the only reasonable response.11

Despite tales of mass sackings at Fairfax, problems at News Limited, as

well as broadcast media travails as seen in recent restructures at Channel
Ten and the general malaise epitomised by the Newspaper Death Watch
website, at university Open Days, we are still peppered with questions
about pathways into journalism. In his Andrew Olle speech, Colvin
recounted how 1,200 people applied for a handful of ABC cadetship
positions. Christopher Scanlon, a journalism lecturer from La Trobe
University, confirms the same student demand witnessed at Macquarie
University: ‘Journalism continues to be one of the most popular courses
in universities and many attract the brightest students.’12 He goes on to
explain that:
The rise of journalism courses may seem counterintuitive, given the state of
the media business, but it’s not as paradoxical as it sounds. The same forces
that are disrupting the news business are also driving the popularity of
journalism courses ... With the massive sea of content out there, journalistic
skills are more important than ever. Audiences will still choose good con-
tent over bad, even if they no longer buy it from a news-stand ... Journalism
courses will continue to be popular as the production of content becomes
more pervasive, and skills previously seen as specific to journalism become
critical to a broader range of professions.

Whatever the reason for the continued demand for journalism educa-
tion (and it may also, in part, reflect the reality that many graduates use
their journalism training to enter the attractive Public Relations field13),
universities have a responsibility to properly equip their graduates for

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0018
 Education and the New Convergent Journalist 

reality, rather than some idealised, imagined pre-digital world of jour-

nalism. Macquarie University is one of those looking to engage with
this moment of disruption in the journalism field. In 2014 we embark
on a new offering in journalism at postgraduate level, Masters of Future
Journalism, and the rest of this chapter explores some of the ideas that
have emerged from researching this new space, and what education
possibilities might exist within it. What are the requisite skills for the
journalist of the future? How much can tertiary education contribute
to them? The answers to these questions have come through examining
what is happening in other parts of the world, and more importantly,
through interviews with experienced journalists and newsroom person-
nel here in New South Wales – those who are at the coalface, watching
the fractures in the seam lines appear.

Digital data journalism

That journalists of the future will require digital production skills is

almost a given. It is the extent and breadth of those skills that remains
in question. While there are some who argue against the so-called ‘swiss
army knife’ role of the modern journalist, their ability to wield an iPhone
camera, edit some video, do a podcast, then tweet and blog about their
story is as critical as their ability to locate and write the story itself. The
development of these skills is crucial, given the many platforms and
outlets that now constitute the journalistic mediasphere.
The emergence of so-called data journalism is just one facet of a re-
focusing of journalism skills towards interrogating the vast amounts of
information that is currently available. At The Guardian,14 the ability to
analyse, parse, and then illustrate via attractive visuals some key aspects
of modern life makes for a fascinating journalistic opportunity.
In recent times, a version of this data journalism became a huge US
Presidential election diversion when Nate Silver’s NYTime 538 blog drew
heavily upon a range of aggregated US polling data to posit probably
election outcomes – often at odds with the horserace narratives of the
more established political journalists who insisted that the political story
could not be told via statistical analysis. As it turns out, it could.
There is also a debate over whether journalists should learn to code –
and just as most journalists in the print age would have had an under-
standing of how their stories made it onto the page – via typesetting

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0018
 Mark Evans

machine through to printing press – there is an argument that journalists

should have at least a basic understanding of how their digital products
are made, to understand the constraints and possibilities of the ecosystem
in which they work. Chris Scanlon from La Trobe University sees this
tying into the concept of all modern journalists being producers. As soon
as they become the ones publishing the content they need to know the
inner workings of the operation. He notes that the journalist of the future
might ‘be a blogger. They might start a website themselves. They might go
and work for an online news business’.15 But in all of these areas, increas-
ingly, students need those skills. Even if they are maintaining a blog they
will need to know what sort of images they can upload, what file formats
to use, what are the problems with video. Working alongside these facets
will be questions pertaining to how the content gets promoted, and hope-
fully picked up, by other entities. This aspect of ‘promotion’ leads us to
the most cited aspect of convergent journalism: entrepreneurialism.

Entrepreneurial journalism
Ross Greenwood has stressed that the ‘new’ journalist needs to be entre-
preneurial. In an interview with the author he noted that ‘journalists
have to promote and sell stories as well’. And to that end, in thinking
about training the future journalists, ‘there needs to be [an emphasis on]
creative entrepreneurship and branding’. This may seem a long way from
the traditional skills of broadcast journalists, and it is. It is likely that
tomorrow’s journalists will work for themselves, that they will establish
their own brand (via a digital following and the like) and then on-sell
their material to news organisations. We can further hypothesise (rather
assuredly) that they will be required to bring their own advertisers with
them, thus satisfying the ever-present dollar bottom-line.
Charlotte Harper has written recently of the rise of what she calls the
‘journopreneur’.16 Citing US journalist and researcher Kim Nowacki,
Harper notes that:
The future of journalism and media will be defined by people who can
seamlessly mesh – and reconcile – solid journalism with business savvy,
sustainable revenue models, technological innovation and inner hustle.

She cites the following examples of existing journopreneurs: Amanda

Gome (merged with Private Media), Alan Kohler (Business Spectator and

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0018
 Education and the New Convergent Journalist 

the Eureka Report, sold to News Limited), Tim Burrowes (Mumbrella),

Renai LeMay (Delimiter), Mia Freedman (Mama Mia and iVillage.com.
au), Paula Joye (Lifestyled) and Stephen Mayne (Crikey, since sold to
Private Media) among them.
Many education providers have already started to acknowledge this
need for new training. In the United States, the City University of New
York (CUNY) recently launched a 15-week entrepreneurial course of
study designed for mid-career journalists.
The course focuses on innovative approaches to journalism, business
fundamentals, technology skills, and new business models for news.
Students develop a start-up project, present business plans, and compete
for awards from the university’s Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial
Journalism to fund further development.
Jeremy Caplan has noted:
As the field of journalism evolves and as the media industries alternate
between fragmentation and consolidation, there will be a growing demand
for journalists who have entrepreneurial spirit and a knack for innovation.17

As a demonstration of this entrepreneurial requisite, in late 2012 City

University London advertised a full-time, permanent position for a
‘Professor of Entrepreneurial Journalism’ – proof that the landscape is
changing quickly.

Ethics

If the journalists of the future are going to be independent and entrepre-

neurial, then there are obvious questions about journalistic integrity in
that entrepreneurial realm. As J. Hillis Miller (1987) points out:
if the [ethical] response is not one of necessity, grounded in some ‘must’,
if it is a freedom to do what one likes, for example to make a literary text
mean what one likes, then it is not ethical.18

Nicole Anderson (2012) goes further in detailing the responsibility of

writers and journalists:
we are not free to read [or write] how we like, or interpret what we read as
we wish. Instead ... we must be responsible...Why must we be responsible?
Because...if literature is tied closely to the public realm and institution, to
the point where it is part of the history and genealogy of democracy, then

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0018
 Mark Evans

‘literature’ [including journalism and writing] is a political, democratic

and philosophical operation...which lawfully authorizes ‘literature’ to say
‘anything publically’. Because literature can say ‘anything publically’ it
encapsulates responsibility and also the possibility of irresponsibility.19

Universities have a role to play in making future journalists aware of

that responsibility, and the ethical space in which they abide. In an
environment where there is a flood of content, increasingly institu-
tions are looked to as markers of difference, and quality, for journalism
standards. Ethical debate needs to become the cornerstone of future
journalistic practices. As the News of the World scandal has shown, the
practices by which information is obtained need to be scrutinised along-
side the way it is reported. The difference between the amateur blogger
publishing facts with no ‘responsibility’ and the journalist operating
within an ethical space may be one line of demarcation in the future.
Active participation, responsible participation, requires knowledge to
participate, and the university system should provide that. That would
include making known the various institutions and organisations that
surround the media landscape, along with the policies and ethical codes
that underpin them.
The convergent media environment is much more complex than its
predecessor, and the ethical requirements will be even more important.

Drone journalism

‘Technology is the key to the future of journalism, just as it always has

been. From its earliest days journalism has embraced technology.’20 One
of the more provoking, sinister, or exciting embraces of technology in
recent times has been the development of ‘drone journalism’. As The
Guardian’s Roy Greenslade commented:
there are wide-ranging possibilities for the use of drone journalism, such
as the coverage of conflicts and environmental disasters, and also sports
reporting. But there are many potential problems too. Will there be objec-
tions from governments and consequent regulatory oversights? Will there
be privacy issues? How should news outlets deal with third-party drone
content?21

Contention over the use of drones in society has grown fiercer with the
development of armed22 drones in combat (and non-combat) situations.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0018
 Education and the New Convergent Journalist 

Joseph Pugliese (2013) has written recently on the political imbalance

stemming from the use of armed drones:
Within this complex and contradictory configuration of state violence,
drones emerge as the prosthetics of US empire: they extend the imperial
power of the state through prosthetic weaponry predicated on violent
asymmetries of power. These violent asymmetries of power pivot on an
invulnerable/vulnerable axis: while US military personnel can conduct
their prostheticized campaigns of militarized violence from the safety of
their civil home-sites, the citizens of the countries that are targeted by
drone strikes are exposed to a violence that works to obliterate the very
difference between civil and military; between civilian and terrorist/
solider.23

Acknowledging the unethical in technological advancement is impor-

tant, and journalists will need to tread carefully in this terrain. However,
drone journalism is not pie in the sky thinking; the exploration of drone
use in journalism is serious business. In the United States, Professor
Matt Waite from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, has founded the
Drone Journalism Lab to explore the technical, ethical, and legal issues.
Although airspace restrictions there mean that the full potential of drone
journalism is still some years off, use of drones is firmly on the agenda in
other parts of the world already: ‘The BBC’s research and development
department has been working with Southampton University students to
kit out a UAV with BBC broadcast cameras.’24 In Australia, where com-
mercial drone activity has been licensed since 2002, 60 Minutes caused a
stir when it flew a small UAV over an immigration detention centre as
part of a story.
Duncan Jefferies claims that it is largely still:
activists, academics and a small army of DIY drone enthusiasts who are
really driving the nascent drone journalism movement. For example, dur-
ing the Occupy Wall Street protests, a modified Parrot AR II drone, dubbed
the ‘occucopter,’ was used to stream live footage over the internet. Protests
in Poland and Moscow have also been filmed and photographed with
drones.25

So perhaps, along with all those other skills modern journalists are now
expected to have, we might start seeing ‘drone pilot’ appearing on future
resumes. Whatever the case, journalists ignore technology at their own
peril.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0018
 Mark Evans

Conclusions

What is suggested above is that journalists of the future, rather than

coming out of university with one specialisation in an area of broadcast
journalism, will need to be familiar and competent within the convergent
mediascape. They will be technologically astute. They will be skilled in
the collection and presentation of data from – and to – the digital sphere.
Particularly, they will need to filter volumes and volumes of information
in their search for the story.
At least some things don’t change: they will need to write and write
well. Extremely well. Their words will need to be succinct and powerful
enough to cut through the static.
And finally, they will need to be independent and entrepreneurial, and
because of that, we will need them to be ethical.
Sincere thanks to Sherman Young and Liz Giuffre who both contrib-
uted considerably to the thoughts and words behind this chapter.

Notes
 See Press Think website, http://archive.pressthink.org/2006/06/27/ppl_frmr.
html.
 See article at http://www.smh.com.au/comment/where-angels-fear-to-tread-
20130503-2iy8a.html#ixzz2SU9C6ZWE.
 See the advertisement at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJ9r6QVRlCg.
As at May 2013 there were just under 3000 views of this ad online, hardly
comprehensive exposure.
 http://mumbrella.com.au/fairfax-launches-one-of-biggest-campaigns-in-its-
history-for-the-age-and-sydney-morning-herald-136222.
 Government of Australia, Convergence Report: Final Version, p. 122.
 Penny O’Donnell, David McKnight, and Jonathan Este, Journalism at the
Speed of Bytes: Newspapers in the 21st Century. Sydney: Walkley Foundation,
2012, p. 5.
 Ibid., p. 41.
 Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture. New York: New York University Press,
2006, pp. 2–3.
 Adapted from the full transcript of the lecture, online at http://www.
theaustralian.com.au/media/broadcast/andrew-olle-lecture/story-fna045gd-
1226510118708.
 http://www.abc.net.au/innovation/blacksaturday/#/stories/mosaic.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0018
 Education and the New Convergent Journalist 

 Katharine Murphy, ‘Read All about It! Journalism Has a Future’, http://www.
smh.com.au/opinion/politics/read-all-about-it-journalism-has-a-future-
20120902-2588i.html#ixzz2SUNSp8Ls.
 Christopher Scanlon, ‘Why Study Journalism – Because Web Audiences
Want Quality Too’, http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/
why-study-journalism-because-web-audiences-want-quality-too-20120717-
2289v.html#ixzz2SUGpD4dA.
 Interestingly, Tanner and Richardson (2013, p. 4) report a 2010 study by
the University of Technology Sydney’s Australian Centre for Independent
Journalism that suggests that up to 55 of material appearing in newspapers
or on radio and television news bulletins is generated PR people.
 See http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog.
 http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/mediareport/diy-
coding/4333942.
 See http://www.walkleys.com/features/8201/journopreneur-charlotte-harper.
 Quoted in http://www.walkleys.com/features/8201/journopreneur-charlotte-
harper. harperharper.
 J. Hillis Miller, The Ethics of Reading, p. 4.
 Nicole Anderson, Ethics under Erasure, pp. 30–31.
 Stephen Tanner, and Nick Richardson, Journalism Research, p. 4.
 http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/greenslade/2012/oct/29/drones-
drought?CMP=twt_fd.
 The use of unmanned aerial vehicles can be traced back to the First World
War, but it was during the Vietnam War that they became more widely used
for surveillance purposes. See Joseph Pugliese, State Violence, p. 185.
 Joseph Pugliese, State Violence, pp. 184–185.
 http://www.guardian.co.uk/media-network/media-network-blog/2012/
oct/29/drone-journalism-take-off.
 http://www.guardian.co.uk/media-network/media-network-blog/2012/
oct/29/drone-journalism-take-off.

References
Anderson, Nicole, Derrida: Ethics under Erasure. London and New York:
Continuum, 2012.
Government of Australia, Convergence Report: Final Version,
Canberra: Department of Broadband, Communications and the
Digital Economy, 2012.
Jenkins, Henry, Convergence Culture. New York: New York University
Press, 2006.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0018
 Mark Evans

Miller, J. Hillis, The Ethics of Reading: Kant, de Man, Eliot, Trollope, James,
and Benjamin. New York: Columbia University Press, 1987.
O’Donnell, Penny, McKnight, David, and Este, Jonathan, Journalism
at the Speed of Bytes: Newspapers in the 21st Century. Sydney: Walkley
Foundation, 2012.
Pugliese, Joseph, State Violence and the Execution of Law: Biopolitical
Caesurae of Torture, Black Sites, Drones. New York: Routledge,
2013.
Tanner, Stephen, and Richardson, Nick, Journalism Research and
Investigation in a Digital World. Melbourne: Oxford University Press,
2013.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0018
 Index
Age, The, 108–109, 136
algorithms, 2, 13, 19–26, 82
Amazon, 10, 13, 23, 36, 37, 39,
43, 48, 49
Amerika, Mark, 4
app-books, 5, 59–65
Apple, 36, 37, 49, 53–54, 74
Arab Spring uprisings, 116, 119
Benjamin, Walter, 53
Bezos, Jeff, 10, 25, 48, 55
big data, 2, 3, 13, 78–86
blogs, 5, 10, 99, 108, 111–112, 113,
117, 118, 120–121, 128, 142
books, 5, 6, 7, 9, 10–11, 19,
22–23, 28–30, 53–55, 91
Borges, Jorge Luis, 78–79, 86
Carr, Nicholas, 9
citizen journalism, 119–120, 122
Cloud, the, 6, 10, 47–48
computers, 2–3
convergence, 6, 91, 116–117,
137–146
Coover, Robert, 70
copyright, 19
Crystal, David, 7
Darnton, Robert, 100–101
database, 2–3
data journalism, 141–142
‘digital natives’, 10, 50
disruption, 4, 42–43, 59, 141
distraction, 9
DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0019
drone journalism, 144–145
dynamic writing, 2–3
e-books, 4, 9, 10, 35–37, 41, 48,
50, 54–55, 63, 94, 96
Eco, Umberto, 67
Eisenstein, Elizabeth, 8
ethics, 120, 143–146
Facebook, 5, 6, 10, 13, 23, 50,
106, 111, 122, 128
Fairfax Media, 106, 113, 123, 131,
136, 140
Foer, Jonathan Safran, 67–68
Fox News, 131, 132
Gibson, Ross, 94–95
Goldsmith, Kenneth, 83, 84
Google, 13, 49, 62, 78, 113,
132
graphic novels, 98–99
Guardian, The, 10, 13, 136, 141
Hansen, Mark, 2, 80, 82
Hartley, John, 121–122
Hayles, N. Katherine, 66, 80
hybrid writing, 93–101
hypermedia, 62–65, 71
hypertext, 4, 69–71
India, 11–12
Internet, 2–3, 4, 7, 29, 50, 69,
79, 84, 94, 111, 119, 120
iPad, 36, 48, 53–54, 59, 74

 Index

Jenkins, Henry, 138 progress, 49–55

Jobs, Steve, 74
journalism, 3, 11–13, 106–114, 116–124, Rubin, Ben, 2, 80, 82
128–134, 136–146
Sebald, W. G., 66–67, 92–93, 96
Kindle, 10, 20, 36, 48, 50, 55 self-publishing, 37–39, 42–43
Kingston, Margo, 120–121 Shapton, Leanne, 67
Kress, Gunther, 60–61, 71–72, 91 Small Demons, 25, 31
smartphones, 29, 50, 94, 119
Levy, Pierre, 4, 50 social media, 5, 7, 9, 11, 50, 94, 110,
literacy, 9, 50, 91, 121 116–124, 139
Lulu, 35–36 spelling, 7
Steampunk, 52
magazines, 7, 47 storytelling, 107–114, 119
Manovich, Lev, 2, 5 Sydney Morning Herald, 11, 12, 108–109,
McLuhan, Marshall, 49–50 120, 136
mobile phones, 5, 9
multimodality, 4–5, 60–61, 65–68, technology, 8, 20, 64, 91, 109, 145
71–73, 91 texting, 5, 7
Twitter, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 78, 110, 111, 116–124,
narrative, 24, 25, 60, 94, 109, 110, 139 128, 138
news, 128–134
Newspaper Death Watch, 11, 12, 136, 140 universities, 140–146
newspapers, 2–3, 4, 5, 7, 10, 11–13, 47,
54, 106, 139 vanity publishing, 34, 39, 43
New York Times, 2, 11, 13, 123 van Leeuwen, Theo, 91
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 9
Wallace, David Foster, 24
Ong, Walter J., 8 Ware, Chris, 98–99
opinion, 128–134 Wark, McKenzie, 121
Wells, H.G., 50, 53
Penguin, 54 Wikipedia, 9, 10
Perloff, Marjorie, 83, 84 Winfrey, Oprah, 22–23
printing press, 2, 8, 11, 19, 50 World Wide Web, 4, 78

DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0019