Mediacology

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!

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