kogan's DDR paying for itself and blah
May. 2nd, 2007 08:34 am![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
dubdobdee.livejournal.com posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
poptimistsi. from 1983 to some time in the late 90s (when its management team bought it from its owner) the wire's (probably substantial) tab was picked up a sugar daddy who liked the idea of owning a fancy music mag -- basically everything i did there was tossing this guy's money down the drain (hurrah!)
ii. open question: w!re's current editorial team's mortages ride on the continued success of the mag -- does this tend to limit its freedom to play with any idea, any approach? i say yes
iii. the tale of the music papers, uk and us, is a complex hitched ride on an ad-fuelled gravy train -- the industry in the 60s needed to know "what's good?", as all around the "rules of the good" were apparently being broken by the kids, and magazines which discuss this is a way to research same, the trade-off being that you're paying for writers to say YOU SUCK (or to write stuff which is of marginal interest to you but keeps them happy and "working for you") -- in fact, "the kids" also, for the usual reasons of gang-formation, needed to know what was good and what wasn't, a self-doubt which extended from post-beatles music to post-vietnam politics, with these two constantly melting into one another
iv. does this gravy train even function now? the kids be downloadin -- hence written discussion of "what's good" is these days more like a salvage operation for i. what got lost, and therefore ii. old-skool consciences than anything trend-congealing -- what added value does writing bring? (i'm asking this feeling fairly strongly that e.g. simon reynolds's pitch for the importance of critical rumination is MISSING SOMETHING; which is why he sounds like grandad telling the kids to get off his lawn)
v. the closest thing i think currently exists to frank's dream is the us netroots -- the centre-leftish network of blogs and semi-online mags which are fighting to drag the democratic party out of its stasis and alienating dependency on big money (these taken, by the netroots, to be the same thing): they survive by a mix of reader donation -- there are constant fund-raising drives -- and ads (there's a politically simpatico group of liberal advertisers evolved, selling books, T-shirts, cmapaigns, TV shows etc). The money coming in pays the wages of the people running the sites (including, importantly, the fund-raisers and ad-managers). Daily Kos, which is the main hub for the netroots, gets half a million hits a day, sez kevin drum, with the next in line (atrios? hullaballoo? tpm? yglesias? drum himself?) getting closer to 150,000 pd or less. There's a fight on for who else can join this krew though -- some newcomers regard it as elitist and self-perpetuating, cynically operating a shut-out as its power within official dem circles grows. Atrios argues that if you write well, the readers will come (eventually). In the end, the fuel in this entire zone is liberal self-defence and self-definition, intensified by anti-bush anger -- old-fashioned politics in fact. As per net commonality, most readers probably freeload on the generosity of a few...
vi. if we took ilx etc as the DDR-feedzone, is there something in what DDR offers that's big enough and strong enough to coalesce into a drive (rather than a diversion)?
vi. in particular, can the immanent politics of the music -- i myself wd just say "of music" -- be brought back to the surface in a way that attracts rather than repels? (youtube posting has been a telling phenom in the netroots recently: "the music", cheerfully argued over, is certainly taken as a shared taste and pleasure) (also of note: atrios, i think korrektly, refers to the anti-war netroots as the "dirty fucking hippies", reclaiming as a proud self-labeling the terms of dismissal directed at anti-war commentary by the MSM liberal establishment)
vii. academia -- as frank notes wrt classical music depts -- is hugely on the defensive, as regards old-skool humanities/liberal arts ideology and "pure" research
viii. the early 70s and 80s saw a number potential new cross-disciplinary fields emerge (eg women's studies, af-am studies, queer theory, post-colonial studies, cult stud, media studies, film studies, critical theory...): this coincided (in the uk) with a huge drive to expand tertiary education -- the effects of this are complex, as, since the 80s, there have also been intense budget-tightening and rationalisation drives, in particular as regards budget oversight and measurable success... more students means more money; more departments means (in principle) more students; but also -- realistically -- more modes of potential value that can't be reduced to tabulated figures
ix. the effect of this, as aelxt noted, is a tendency for departments to reward projects which are good for the growth of the department, rather than projects which deliberately hunt in interstitial zones
x. meanwhile the academy's publishing departments are hungry for BOOKS WHICH SELL, ideally BOOKS OF QUALITY WHICH SELL
xi. 9 and 10 are a good example of the contradictory drives of commodification btw, marx-fans
xii. it seems to me that the DDR, to establish itself on-line, needs to be able to pay a wage for AT LEAST three people -- frank, as presiding spirit, provocateur, interlocutor, MC etc; the person structuring the fund-raising systems; the internet systems admin
xiii. (but i actually think it wd need an "editorial board" of more than just frank, to provide dimensionality and/or respite)
xiv. one potential route to funding no one has so far mentioned is SUBSCRIPTION -- the goodwill gathering in advance of THOSE WHO WOULD LIKE TO SEE THIS SUCCEED (and are willing to see it thrash about a bit till it finds its rhythm)
ii. open question: w!re's current editorial team's mortages ride on the continued success of the mag -- does this tend to limit its freedom to play with any idea, any approach? i say yes
iii. the tale of the music papers, uk and us, is a complex hitched ride on an ad-fuelled gravy train -- the industry in the 60s needed to know "what's good?", as all around the "rules of the good" were apparently being broken by the kids, and magazines which discuss this is a way to research same, the trade-off being that you're paying for writers to say YOU SUCK (or to write stuff which is of marginal interest to you but keeps them happy and "working for you") -- in fact, "the kids" also, for the usual reasons of gang-formation, needed to know what was good and what wasn't, a self-doubt which extended from post-beatles music to post-vietnam politics, with these two constantly melting into one another
iv. does this gravy train even function now? the kids be downloadin -- hence written discussion of "what's good" is these days more like a salvage operation for i. what got lost, and therefore ii. old-skool consciences than anything trend-congealing -- what added value does writing bring? (i'm asking this feeling fairly strongly that e.g. simon reynolds's pitch for the importance of critical rumination is MISSING SOMETHING; which is why he sounds like grandad telling the kids to get off his lawn)
v. the closest thing i think currently exists to frank's dream is the us netroots -- the centre-leftish network of blogs and semi-online mags which are fighting to drag the democratic party out of its stasis and alienating dependency on big money (these taken, by the netroots, to be the same thing): they survive by a mix of reader donation -- there are constant fund-raising drives -- and ads (there's a politically simpatico group of liberal advertisers evolved, selling books, T-shirts, cmapaigns, TV shows etc). The money coming in pays the wages of the people running the sites (including, importantly, the fund-raisers and ad-managers). Daily Kos, which is the main hub for the netroots, gets half a million hits a day, sez kevin drum, with the next in line (atrios? hullaballoo? tpm? yglesias? drum himself?) getting closer to 150,000 pd or less. There's a fight on for who else can join this krew though -- some newcomers regard it as elitist and self-perpetuating, cynically operating a shut-out as its power within official dem circles grows. Atrios argues that if you write well, the readers will come (eventually). In the end, the fuel in this entire zone is liberal self-defence and self-definition, intensified by anti-bush anger -- old-fashioned politics in fact. As per net commonality, most readers probably freeload on the generosity of a few...
vi. if we took ilx etc as the DDR-feedzone, is there something in what DDR offers that's big enough and strong enough to coalesce into a drive (rather than a diversion)?
vi. in particular, can the immanent politics of the music -- i myself wd just say "of music" -- be brought back to the surface in a way that attracts rather than repels? (youtube posting has been a telling phenom in the netroots recently: "the music", cheerfully argued over, is certainly taken as a shared taste and pleasure) (also of note: atrios, i think korrektly, refers to the anti-war netroots as the "dirty fucking hippies", reclaiming as a proud self-labeling the terms of dismissal directed at anti-war commentary by the MSM liberal establishment)
vii. academia -- as frank notes wrt classical music depts -- is hugely on the defensive, as regards old-skool humanities/liberal arts ideology and "pure" research
viii. the early 70s and 80s saw a number potential new cross-disciplinary fields emerge (eg women's studies, af-am studies, queer theory, post-colonial studies, cult stud, media studies, film studies, critical theory...): this coincided (in the uk) with a huge drive to expand tertiary education -- the effects of this are complex, as, since the 80s, there have also been intense budget-tightening and rationalisation drives, in particular as regards budget oversight and measurable success... more students means more money; more departments means (in principle) more students; but also -- realistically -- more modes of potential value that can't be reduced to tabulated figures
ix. the effect of this, as aelxt noted, is a tendency for departments to reward projects which are good for the growth of the department, rather than projects which deliberately hunt in interstitial zones
x. meanwhile the academy's publishing departments are hungry for BOOKS WHICH SELL, ideally BOOKS OF QUALITY WHICH SELL
xi. 9 and 10 are a good example of the contradictory drives of commodification btw, marx-fans
xii. it seems to me that the DDR, to establish itself on-line, needs to be able to pay a wage for AT LEAST three people -- frank, as presiding spirit, provocateur, interlocutor, MC etc; the person structuring the fund-raising systems; the internet systems admin
xiii. (but i actually think it wd need an "editorial board" of more than just frank, to provide dimensionality and/or respite)
xiv. one potential route to funding no one has so far mentioned is SUBSCRIPTION -- the goodwill gathering in advance of THOSE WHO WOULD LIKE TO SEE THIS SUCCEED (and are willing to see it thrash about a bit till it finds its rhythm)
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no subject
Date: 2007-05-02 11:11 am (UTC)i think the netroots are VERY good at linking up old-skool lengthy academic wonk-work with relatively free-fire thread discussion, via the shortish-post medium of the posters whose sites are listed (and several others i didn't list); the traffic is largely top-down still, but the mediators (see 1 below) have more moral presence now than they did even two years ago -- they are being taken seriously as intolerable gadflies at the upper level, if not as content-providers and contributors (in frank's sense they care clearly contributors, but are still seen more as hostile ranting rabble)
there's two levels of network, intimately wound into each other
1. atrios and drum and yglesias and tpm's josh marshall and hulaballoo's digby (and several others) all read each other and link and counter-link and agree and disagree, at the "established critics" level
2. they also link -- all the time -- into upper-level discourse, in journals and old-form magazines (viz New Republic) and mainstream newspapers and TV outlets, and comment on this, dissenting or affirming; also they monitor the opposition, to counter trends and explode arguments
3. at the same time, they provide a home for the next-level-down of discourse, in other words thread-commentary; the threads can be testy and uncivil, or chatty and silly (rarely ilx levels of silly, sadly), and havbe complex ecvologies of clannishness, ancients feuds, not-quite-trolls and etc etc
4. they are in a sense parasitic on old media, despite occasional "we will bury them" rhetoric, but what they actually do provide (albeit at early stages, and who knows how it will actually develop) is an articulated pressure from disgruntled old-media readers in respect of what's gone wrong with old-media commentary (and what's ALWAYS been wrong with it) -- in other words, writing about writing
*in politics, the issue of "following through on ideas" is (in the end) driven by goals rather than logic, let alone pure enquiry -- so entire strategies (and the discourse surrounding them) can vanish from the discussion, despite "ideas not being completed", when the situation makes the strategy in question just irrelevant to the goal in question**
**of course particular activists, having devoted themselves to the enactment of a specific strategy, often live out their lives making a fetish of a a clearly-outdated or even pernicious strategy -- in a sense all of politics is about judging the acceptability of the width of the gaps between practical strategy and larger goals...