What I’ve Learned About Garden Blogging This Year #8

No form of publishing ever really dies. There’s a pathway that seems to exist and that all forms of media continue on and never really die.

Think about it.

Stained glass windows were among the first of modern mass reading. Thousands of illiterate pilgrims would “read” the stories told in these windows and understand them with no difficulty because that’s how the stories were told to them. The symbols in these windows (unknown to modern readers) were clear to the people in this culture. You can still obtain stained glass windows today even though most of us can’t read or understand them. They’re now an art form rather than a mass form of communication.

What about basic printing – wood block carving and distribution of small numbers of works. These were the first printing and mass distribution of books. You can still get wood-print works today but they have passed from the realm of the mass distribution to the realm of art.

Moveable type printing moved to the Net as fonts but you can still print that way and indeed there are art-forms that depend on this kind of work.

There are still ham-radio operators and morse-code addicts who operate and communicate in their own world.

Do you see the movement? From mass consumption to limited use and art form. There’s money to be made in the mass consumption and money to be made in the art form but the middle ground – the time of movement – is when there are problems at both ends. The mass consumption is dying, the financial model is broken – and it has yet to be reinvented in a smaller, more artistic, financially-viable format.

Our print magazines, books and newspapers are in this movement phase. They’re just not sure how it’s all going to shake out and the financial models aren’t in place yet.

At the same time, the Net has replaced some of the functions of these publications (the most profitable or time-sensitive ones). But the financial underpinnings of the old system haven’t totally adopted the new system either.

We as writers find ourselves living in interesting times. We too are a bit of an anachronism – a system in flux. As our publishing models change, as magazines disappear, publishers shut down and newspapers withdraw, we’re left with having to figure out how to adapt. There will always be writers. Writers of books, of magazines and other forms but that too will have to adapt and change to meet the markets and move towards an art form. Or towards the new publishing model. Or some hybrid based on the skill-set of the writer/communicator that we can’t see yet.

So nothing ever dies. It just moves from the mass consumption to the artistic consumption of the small market. But it changes along the way as does it’s market. The trick of course is to enjoy the ride and survive along the way.

I’ve chosen to survive (for the most part) in the new world of publishing. To develop a hybrid skill-set that allow me to survive and continue to do the things I want to do in this world. I’ll still write books, magazine articles, my newspaper column and radio show but I’m also drawn to the new technologies that are appearing, to video and Internet interaction – to harnessing the power of this new medium to meet our ever-changing goals of human interaction.

But I’m going to have to get back to you on all this – there’s still a lot to learn here.

And that last sentence pretty much sums up the way I see the publishing world, the Net and garden blogging. And it makes a nice ending to this series. Thankfully, there is indeed still a lot to learn here.

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