The New York author, David Markson, in his later years grew tired of long paragraphs and would mistrust conventional narrative. He wrote his later “novels” as a series of blurbs. These blurbs rarely exceed a couple of short lines and are assembled in seemingly random order. Reading one of these books the other day – Vanishing Point, which among other subjects deals with the miserable existence of writers and other artists over the past millennia – I had a bit of fun imagining the narrative as an an extended Twitter feed. If only! One doesn’t come across such exquisite short-form messaging – wherein even the most mundane anecdotage is elegant, thought provoking, often ironic – not even from marketers. One may think of these Markson novels as professionally crafted and premium-priced tweets, for which we should be thrilled to pay.
This led me to consider – and a glance through my actual Twitter stream pushed me well along in my musings – the misfortune we would suffer if professionally crafted content were to be wholly displaced by amateur product. For a long time, the open and fragmented Internet, the free web, has taken us in that direction. Although we are not all the way there yet, and although there is still plenty of premium-quality content in the marketplace, the proportions are skewing against it, and the economics are increasingly challenging.
So what, you may ask, does this have to do with the iPad? The answer is, a lot. We have all heard the case for the open web, or if any of you have not, visit the Google homepage, type any term to search, and you will get the idea. With the iPad, and for that matter most Apple consumer products, openness is of lesser priority than design and, as it were, quality control. In the open web, even I have a platform. So the iPad, frankly, has its appeal.
If it is indeed the case, as many observers believe, that the iPad will become a home-entertainment unit through which we will access books, magazine articles, videos, games, and music, all delivered through iTunes or a similar system of subscription-based consumption, this could go a long way to check the content value free-fall that has occurred with growing fragmentation on the Internet. This would provide professional creators with a mass-market platform through which to distribute their wares presentably, with less clutter, and for payment received. If premium content, in the long term, has any chance at all against the onslaught of free web-delivered media, then it will take a well-designed and hugely popular consumer alternative, such as the iPad, to save it… so long as this alternative is predicated on paid (rather than free) service… so long as this alternative is hugely popular.
As David Markson’s book reminded me, we should prize quality content more than we have perhaps come to do, and we should be wary of a future dominated by amateur production. Whether this takes the form of thousands of YouTube videos or millions of daily amateur messages, long or short, we should be rooting for professional content creators to continue offering a quality alternative. Advertising revenue, as we have seen, may not suffice to pay. With the iPad not yet available, and as nobody really knows exactly when and how it will be received by popular opinion, let us in the meanwhile keep doing our share to feed the starving content. There is a side-table towards the back of the main aisle at the Strand Bookstore on Broadway and 12th Street, on which stacks of David Markson novels are offered at a discount.
