Ah Netscape, I knew you well.
As news of AOL pulling the plug on the Netscape browser emerges, a torrent of memories of the Web’s early days returned, prompting me to review how far I/we have come. Netscape my have lived only 13 years, but in Net time, that’s at least ten times more than cat years. When Netscape appeared 1993 I was a co-owner of a national zine distributor, Desert Moon Periodicals, in Santa Fe, NM. We had some friends who owned Santa Fe’s first ISP, Studio X. They were very enthusiastic about pioneering the Web. With them we created the first online zine distribution catalog and used the Web to promote the world of zines. Unfortunately, this was still the dark ages and not too many people were online yet, let alone even using email. Our online adventure lasted as long as those dreaded CDROM magazines.
When I left the company in 1995 a small group of friends and I set out to Webify Northern New Mexico businesses. Too bad we weren’t in California because few New Mexicans grasped the potential of cyberspace, and rather than cash in on the first tech bubble, we floundered badly. I recall going door to door in Taos with Spiros Antonopoulos (founder of souljerky.com) and Kyle Silfer (publisher of Reign of Toads) with a laptop trying to explain the Web to doe-eyed gallery owners. At the time we must have seemed like astronauts. Suffice to say, our little venture, The Reality Construction Company, flamed out pretty quickly. The most money we made was from selling our domain, spaceplace.com for a mere $1,000.
Cut to 2007 and many misadventures later. I have now been blogging for about two years, and in terms of gratification and uses of the Internet, this is the most pleasure I’ve had among the myriad of experiments I’ve participated in. The main reason is that it satisfies the communication urges that got me into DIY publishing in the first place. Ever since a group of us started the punk zine Ink Disease in Los Angeles back in 1982, the bug has never left. The debacle of zine distribution proved to me that print is no longer viable, economically at least (this should at least make trees happy). The blogosphere provides a relative cheap, rich and interactive environment that reminds me of the small community we had back in the zine world days. Still, aesthetically I favor print. I like the catharsis of cutting and gluing, and even miss the typewriter (sometimes). I’d also rather sit with a zine, its ink rubbing on my fingers, than stare at a monitor. Nonetheless, being an instantaneous pundit is great fun, and has been a terrific way to purge the evil thoughts that often cruise through my mind as I interact with the world.
In terms of Mediacology, where am I now? Since I began blogging I have had a schizophrenic relationship with the medium, very much a reflection of my own professional life. Blogdisease.com, my first blog, was a great way to unload and write in an obnoxious voice. Going over some of my earlier posts, I find myself missing that channel very much. It also enabled me to connect with some old punkers who I seem to have lost contact with as I have migrated over to Mediacology. Simultaneously I also created a more “business-like” blog, Media Mindfulness, to focus on media literacy. LIke the time when I worked for newspapers, the tone and material often felt a little forced, but increasingly I needed to write about media exclusively. It became too much to maintain two blogs, so I merged them into Mediacology.
Mediacology has become my life’s work. My book of the same title will be out in April. It’s a serious polemic against the troubled state of media literacy and I hope it will shake things up in the realm of media education. But because my interests are varied and broad, I can’t resist reverting to my inner adolescent, finding myself reverting over and over again to more obnoxious postings. Part of me wants to revive blogdisease, part of me just wants to ride out my conflicted tendencies and see what happens. The good news is that I have quadrupled my readers. But like last year when I evaluated my blog’s progress, I wish there was more dialog (i.e. comments) like there was in the early days of blogdisease. I also miss the team-like fun of the zine days. It had been my hope to find a group of bloggers to take over blogdisease, but I admit it’s hard to let the inmates take over the asylum.
Amateur blogging can make one feel a bit like a dilettante. You have to write, copyedit, think up snappy headlines, edit content and images, design and link, and handle the business side of things, all the while be “on” or inspired. It’s hard to always be brilliant, and easier to be snarky. Just to stay afloat I have had to draw on a myriad of work and life experience: newspaper journalism, punk publishing, Web design and media education. That’s a lot of eggs to juggle. The final ingredient is obsessiveness, without which the venture falls apart completely. And time. Oh, if there were only more hours in a day.
Like all bloggers, my dream is to sustain myself financially with the blog, hence my experimentation with ads. Last year I made around $10 from Amazon, and $5 from blog ads. I am now exploring google ads to see if that generates any income. I have a mostly hate relationship with ads, but the donation model so far hasn’t worked. I try to only display ads for companies that I support or like. Ultimately it comes down to numbers, though. I read somewhere that you need to have 500,000 hits a month to make any money. That seems ridiculously high. My memory must be faulty. But… if the content is worth reading, then the illusive audience will come. That’s a lot of pressure, something I’d rather not think about.
I admit that I have some professional jealousy of BoingBoing. One of its founders, Mark Frauenfelder, was a publisher we worked with closely back in the zine days when he and his wife Carla were doing the print version. Like the late-’90s when the tech bubble was so illusive to us New Mexicans, I’m wondering if being a media education pundit will ever amount to much in the blogosphere. No matter. I don’t do any of this for fame or fortune, groupies or drugs (though a free burrito here and there would be nice). I do it because, sob, sob, I care. No really. I’m not trying to be sentimental or ironic, but the truth about media– to me at least– is that people want to be loved (including bloggers) and media interplay with that primal desire to one degree or another. No one ever equates love with media, but if you look deep enough, you will see a faint heartbeat pulsing beneath the pixels we fill our minds with.
If you have read this far, then I can say that I feel proud to be one of your guides and interpreters for this ephemeral information universe. As your humble filter, during the next year I hope to be more frequent, make fewer typos and grammatical errors, and to keep building this blog so that there is a vibrant and interested community participating in the dialog. I would love to know what you like and dislike, so please use the comments area to hurl insults or praise, as you deem necessary, to help me be of better service.
Happy new year!
Technorati Tags: Netscape
Something wicked comes this way
I am now facing my first fatherhood crisis. No it’s not the fact that I haven’t slept more than four hours in a night in the past seven months, nor the daily grind of spit and poop. No, it came in the form of a three foot mouse named Mickey, an uninvited guest who landed in the dark night of Xmas.
Receiving a monstrous Mickey Mouse doll should be a family decision. This is not something you casually buy someone with no warning. It’s an invasion, the D-Day of consumer capitalism. A well-meaning relative believed he was doing the right think by giving our daughter this play thing, yet it’s one of a dimension that can only be deemed, uhm, American. To a seven-month-old this is not a toy, a mouse or a Disney character, but a large plush blob conglomerating abstract shapes that through training takes the form of something more recognizable in the future. I have no doubt that Mickey will now join the family and give her hours of joy. That’s why I feel guilty re-naming him Beelzebub.
Upon rolling my eyes when He arrived, my Italian partner reminded me that I already have a Ronald McDonald doll in the apartment. But he’s wearing a Mexican wrestler’s mask and a button that says “McShit.” I also pointed out that I have two Zapatista dolls as well. She wondered why I object to the innocent looking creature that takes up half our couch. I responded that he is the smiley face of Empire, a gateway drug to consumerism. Once our daughter becomes acclimated to Mickey’s likeness, then the door opens up to a host of other nefarious consumer goods, none of which I can afford, nor do I want to. But can I break her little heart by arguing that Mickey was probalby made by Chinese prison labor, or that the fire retardant material it’s made out of is comprised of neurotoxins? But alas I remember my grandmother telling me that I should finish my food because other kids in the world were starving. I always hated it when she said that. I don’t think I will impose globalization upon my daughter. Yet.
Now, I don’t intend to censor my daughter’s reality. If she wants Disney, she will have Disney, with restraint, of course. We’ll do Santa, too. I don’t intend to be an anti-capitalst scrooge, 1) because I won’t deny her the magical aspects that brought me happiness as a child, and 2) because it will make her a social outcast. I know too many hippie kids who ended up becoming stock brokers and real estate agents because their parents nursed them on wheat grass and made them toys out of roof shingles. Still, something has to be done. Ultimately I have learned that it’s better to ask questions and let the child decide what is right and wrong. This is how my grandfather approached things, even when he denied me coloring books because they controlled my creativity. I honestly don’t know how I will respond when the society will parent my child again. But rest assured, I’m making it my project to design the best mousetrap possible.
BTW, Happy Holidaze!
Technorati Tags: Mickey Mouse, Disney
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