It's just as well we didn't have the kind of technology we have now when I was in my teens and twenties. I'd never have left the house. Then again, think of the effect it would have had on my creativity.
As I've mentioned many times, I devoted a goodly proportion of my time in my twenties and thirties to what I consider to be the analog ancestor of blogging - Amateur Press Associations aka APAs. I was thinking about it only last week, when a few people were writing about the decline of blogging and the way their numbers have fallen over the years.
I don't know how many regular readers I get at Inventory Full. I just know it has to be more than I got when I was a long-standing member of the British Amateur Press Association aka BAPA.
Membership throughout my time there was pegged at thirty. Occasionally there was a waitlist.
Publication was bi-monthly and required a minimum of two sides of A4 but most people produced far more than that. There was, oddly, no limit on how many zines a member submitted per mailing and several people, including myself, had more than one title running simultaneously, just as some people these days have multiple blogs.
Designing, writing, laying out and pasting up my zines took me days. They were as heavily illustrated as my blog posts are now.
Sometimes I'd use photographs I'd taken. As time went on I became more adventurous, experimenting with collage and cut-ups or distorting and distressing the images I used.
As for the writing, I used a mix of handwritten pieces and stuff I typed up at home on my Amiga or an
old portable typewriter. Later I used to write and print a lot of my copy at work. I had a job then where I could do that. It looked like I was busy and no-one ever asked with what.
Before I had that job, I'd paste it all up at home then take it to a copy shop and pay for thirty copies. It was expensive. I looked into buying a photocopier of my own. It would have paid for itself in a couple of years but i wasn't confident it would last that long. They go wrong a lot in my experience.
It was all as much work as it sounds. More, really. I'm underselling just how much time and effort it took. I was consistent, too. I don't think I ever missed a mailing. I kept it up for years, every other month, with an annual trip to London for the General Meeting. All of that for an audience of twenty-nine people.
Tell that to kids today and they wouldn't believe you. Bloggers? Don't know they're born!
With that perspective,the kind of readership figures people throw around now seem pretty decent to me. I'm comfortably certain I have at least twice as many regular readers now as I had then, plus an unknown number of casual visitors. It's a huge upgrade.
What's more, it's so much easier. No scissors, no SprayMount, no cameras or clip-files. No photocopiers, no staplers! All I have to do is sit at my desk and wiggle my mouse and I get more done every week than I did in those two months.
I have a huge nostalgia for the grainy, black and white aesthetic of the photocopy era but would I ever have chosen it over the full-color, sound and motion, content-rich creative platforms we have now. I doubt it.
Imagine me, writing one of my many lists back in the eighties. My thirty favorite film stars, say. I'd be going through all my Empire magazines, trying to bring myself to to cut them up before deciding I couldn't make myself do it. I'd be dropping into the Watershed Arts Center and the Arnolfini Gallery to pocket handfuls of their monthly guides so I could cut those up instead. I'd have glue on my fingers and bits of paper all over the floor.
These days I wouldn't even have to leave my chair. I wouldn't be limited to stills. I'd embed clips from the movies, trailers, scenes with dialog that I was quoting. Links to the whole goddam movie, even. It would be better. Who'd say it wasn't?
And what about music? I used to write a lot about music but imagine if I'd been able to play my readers the songs instead of just describing how they sounded, show live footage of the bands instead of just talking about the gigs I'd been to.
Only now that future's already in the past. Blogging's dead. The new future is vlogging or livestreaming. Definitely podcasting. We're all on TikTok now, although for how long, who can say?
As Ferris said, life moves pretty fast but not so fast that people won't still quote Ferris Bueller's Day Off to make the point, even though the movie's thirty-six years old. Somehow it's still zeitgeisty enough for a spin-off to get greenlit in 2022. The past is eating the future just like the future eats the past.
Oh but it's fine. The singularity will save us. It's already here, some say.
Now we have it. Artificial intelligence. That's what this post is about. I just don't ever get to the point until at least ten paragraphs in. I imagine you can program an AI textbot to do the same.
works. That and AI Weirdness. They're both in my blog roll. Don't miss out.
I won't. I can't get enough of this stuff. I have four AI image generators bookmarked (All the images in this post were made using Midjourney.), I'm registered with a couple of open AI projects and today I started looking into AI music generators. My dream is to get to the point where all I have to do is input some prompts and out comes a finished, illustrated blog post with video and sound. All I'll need to do is edit. If that.
Oh, relax! We're a good ways off, I think. Not so far you can't see it coming over the horizon but far enough to make the mental adjustment before it arrives.
I'm doing that now. To me it doesn't look like an autofac, spitting out replicants set to destroy human creativity forever. It looks like another opportunity to say what I want to say and have it look how I want it to look. A new, improved version. Again.
The future is coming. Don't get in its way.
Posts
Oh, back when I was a teen I wanted to run a Tolkien style fanzine along the lines of The Minas Tirith Evening Star (the journal of the American Tolkien Society), but I never had access to a mimeograph machine to make my dream come alive. After college, I was a member of an Anne McCaffrey Pern fan fic club for a few years --I may even have a t-shirt from them still around somewhere-- and I helped edit some articles, but I never put an issue out the door.
ReplyDeleteMany years later, I got volunteered by my wife to help her manage the kids' elementary school PTA newsletter, and I got to learn Microsoft Publisher. I could format and set things up to my heart's content, but it also was a pain figuring things out and making things work. I could only imagine how much effort it took to put a zine together back in the era before computerized layouts. So you have my respect in being able to make that leap from a passive reader to an active participant.
Blogging does scratch that itch, which is likely why I stuck with it all these years, despite me eventually going it alone, and also despite my displeasure at being unable to find all sorts of plugins and other third party apps to customize my own blog the way I want to. I do blame Google for this, because they frequently set something up and then refuse to give it the love and nurturing that it takes to keep one of their projects going. (See: Chromecast Audio, Google Music, or any one of their chat programs.)
I saw a few mimeographed zines but the heyday of those was before my time. I have a feeling our school magazine was done that way when I was about 11 or 12.
DeleteI do miss the some of the physical, tactile aspects of zine-making . I partiularly enjoyed laying out the pages using a scalpel and spraymount. I absolutely do not miss anything about the production process, though - the photocopying, collating and stapling. That was always a pain.
I did a couple columns for a SF zine back in the day, but I didn't keep up with it long. I should have.
ReplyDeleteRe: writing blog posts. I found an article the other day that showed how to train a bot to write just like anyone you wanted, given enough writing samples. You'd still have to tell the bot what you wanted to write about and the points you want to make, but after that, it would perhaps be able to write it in your style. I dunno what the point of that would be, really.
There's a whole community of people who train AIs on the works of famous authors. They think of a story idea and have the AI complete it in that style. Some of those works are great. Some are disturbing.
I'm going to have to follow up on those. As for why I'd want to have a bot that wrote blog posts in my style, it's almost a situationist thing, I suppose. I'd like to be able to slot one in now and again just to see if anyone notices. Who knows? Maybe I already have! (I haven't.)
DeleteI can't say I'm as enthralled as you are. I suppose before too long it'll be quaint to actually write a post yourself. Maybe I can sell them on etsy: hand-crafted blog posts. No AI involved!
ReplyDeleteAlso there's the whole dark side about AI's generating fake news to manipulate Facebook denizens. Tho maybe they get what they deserve for being on Facebook.
The other day I had to create a Facebook account because I needed a developer's account for work. I used my work email address. An address I never use except for work. In a browser I never use for anything but work. Facebook immediately suggested I Friend my partner's mom. It is so super creepy...