The Electronic Literature Organization, whose mission is to “facilitate and promote the writing, publishing, and reading of literature in electronic media,” has a new site designed by Nick Montfort of Grand Text Auto.

Future generations, living comfortably as digital natives, may look back on the twentieth century as the big bang moment in the history of media. The big bang theory, by now a household concept in the annals of cosmology, speculates that the universe began some 13 or 14 billion years ago in a massive explosion of matter from an original, super-dense, super-heated singularity. What does this have to do with twentieth century media? More than you might think. Industrialization and the development of telecommunications resulted in the centralization of communication forms into a kind of super-dense, super-heated singularity of their own: the mass media. Its power to drive a consumer economy through advertising, and blanket entire populations with messages and imagery has been so impressive, so all-consuming, that in a very short time it has come to seem all but inevitable.
But much to mass media’s surprise (and horror), the singularity has exploded. With the web barely a decade old, it looks like the reign of mass media is turning out to have been only a brief interlude between a pre-electrified world, and a vastly uncertain digital horizon. Generations for whom radio and television were wondrous novelties assumed a passive posture, letting the transmission waves wash over them. But subsequent ages, reared in the super-heated forge of the mass media, have grown increasingly impatient with the paleolithic norms of the TV network, the daily newspaper, the cineplex, and the publishing conglomerate. They want more diversity, more choice, more mobility, and more opportunity to contribute in the very forms the media taught them. Totally decentralized, the internet is a different kind of animal, and since it can absorb and copy basically any kind of media, it is perceived by Big Media as fundamentally hostile to its interests. Consequently, they are doing everything in their power to preserve the models that worked so well for them when the universe was still young and galaxies (chains, affiliates, imprints) were still within their grasp: suing file-sharing services, going after DVD pirates, and slapping all sorts of nasty DRM (digital rights management) on the little downloadable content they are tentatively trying to sell. But in the end, it’s a losing battle. Trying to hold still in a swiftly expanding cosmos will prove at first uncomfortable (as it is now) and eventually impossible. The universe is moving outward. Later, we’ll tell our grandchildren what it was like to watch the big bang and the brief, brilliant age of the mass media.
The Wall Street Journal ran a free web feature today – “How Old Media Can Survive In a New World” – examining the crisis facing mass media, asking influential observers in each industry what might be done to adapt to the decentralized laws of the web and how to profit from media that has no physical dimension. It serves as a nice snapshot of the explosion in its current phase.

As the mother of a toddler, I’m keenly aware of how grueling the 24/7 unpaid work of parenthood really is. A friend of mine sent around a mother’s day email that added up all the little things we do and arrived at a salary of about $131,000. Slave wages compared to the figure in Jennifer Steinhauer’s Times article, The Economic Unit Called Supermom which came up with “an estimated $707,126 annual paycheck.”
Problem is, no one will ever pay me $700K to do what I do for free. So is there any point in speculating about the market value of mothering? Perhaps there is. Steinhauer tells us that In 2003, the Bureau of Labor Statistics conducted its first-ever Time Use Survey, which examined the doings of 21,000 Americans over a 24-hour period. “There were a number of economists who were interested in valuing nonmarket production,” said Diane Herz, the survey’s project manager.
Many social scientists have explored the “social capital” gained by participating in these otherwise uncompensated activities. Social scientists argue, for example, that test scores go up in schools where parent volunteerism is highest, and that crime is reduced in communities with high civic participation. “Social capital is usually defined as the networks and relationships we have, as well as the trust and sense of mutuality that arise from them,” said Amy Caiazza, a study director working with Ms. Hartmann.
So this got me thinking about digital networks and I started wondering how much web content is created, nurtured and maintained without compensation. And how apropos the term “nonmarket production” is for most web activity. The networked book, for example, relies on free contributions and other forms of non-commercial support. What does this mean for the future of books? Does the web have the potential to turn the book industry into an unpaid labor of love?

From Sunday’s Observer: “Oh no, it’s the death of the book … again”. Robert McCrum pokes fun at Nigel Newton, CEO and co-founder of Bloomsbury, British publisher of the Harry Potter books, for remarks on what he calls the “Napsterisation” of publishing – i.e. digitization – and the threat it poses to “the cultural and intellectual tradition of the past 600 years.”
McCrum rejoins: “Before we allow Mr Newton and the merchants of doom to seize control of our cultural imaginations, it’s worth recalling that Gutenberg was a vital part of the Renaissance. Gutenberg and our own Caxton were eventually followed by Shakespeare, Marlowe and Milton.
“Delivery systems evolve. Instead of whingeing about Google, we could celebrate the extraordinary technology that will bring a cornucopia of hitherto inaccessible material before a bigger international audience than ever before.”

When you search the web on Google or Yahoo, your results come up in a stack – a long scroll unfurling at your feet. Ranking is what makes the whole thing work – the most relevant, or most linked-to, items are placed near the top, and more often than not, you get what you’re looking for. Few really bother to sort through the rest of the pile, even though valuable stuff could be buried there (and what if you don’t know exactly what you’re looking for?). Clustered search takes a different appproach, breaking up results into useful categories and themes, enabling users to penetrate the stack more quickly (see Clusty, or its parent Vivisimo). It’s an interesting compromise with top-down shelf-based hierarchies. Clustered search doesn’t impose categories on you from the get-go, rather, it applies them as needed – building shelves on the fly. Grokker, a Yahoo-powered “visual” search engine, takes it a step further, arranging clusters into archipelagos of information, “giving you the ability to explore any subject far beyond the obvious.” Each category is represented by a circle, containing site links (appearing as squares) or smaller circles (subcategories). Above is my archipelago for… “archipelago.” It brings up top level clusters for “botanicals” (Archipelago Botanicals produces a popular line of soaps, lotions and scented candles), “Hawaiian,” “Sea,” “Gulag,” and others. Drag over a site and a nice summary pops up (see righthand image above) – much more readable than the hodge podge you get in Google.
Link to NY Times article on Grokker.
Story about Vivisimo clustering search tool built specially for navigating the massive EU constitution.