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07/28/2005 Archived Entry: "Competition"

Competition
I find this article (via BoingBoing) about competition between used books and new books bought online to be revealing. Often, initial reactions to new media developments includes focusing on "competition." This will destroy that, as the popular Hugo saying goes. We see this in P2P (file sharing hurts music sales), allowing texts to be read for free even though there exists a hard copy for sale (like with Cory Doctorow's work), movie downloading (it’s hurting the movie industry), morality (or you have morality by reading, or the new video games destroy your morality) and even pedagogy (new media is hurting writing), etc. The assumption is that what worked in one medium will work the same in another. What we experienced in one situation is what we will experience in another.
What often occurs, however, is that whatever the process is that we've identified, (buying products or even teaching writing), the move to a new environment (like the Web) alters our expectations. We expect music sales to drop if folks can download songs for free. We expect the new book market to be hurt by the increased sales and access to used books. But that doesn't happen. Instead, new types of relationships emerge - music sales still are alive and well/people still download music. In fact, people often do both.
It is that sense of "both" which I am interested in; interested because a notion of "both" is a network idea (it recognizes the complex moves and responses we make to new situations). The idea of a “both” also acts as a disruption of our expectations that all knowledge can be reduced to binary positions. The best example in popular culture/consumerism, which I think Steven Johnson has pointed out already, is DVD/video sales. That you went to the theater to see X often doesn't mean that you won't rent (or buy) X on DVD. I go to the store to rent a movie or TV show and am amazed that certain shows, shows easily seen on basic cable or network TV, are for sale or for rental. Why rent Arrested Development? It's on Sunday on Fox. But people do rent it. More than once. Why buy The Simpsons when you can tape it off your TV? People do buy it. They engage with the feeling of "both."
There are, of course, pedagogical issues directly related to this sense of both. The most obvious is the fetish of “classic” text over “popular culture” (the idea you can’t have both) or alphabetic vs other kinds of texts. And, of course, the question of what a student writes about in a given first year course (always asked to ignore the "both" in favor of the absolute stance).

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Posted by Disney Vacation @ 08/06/2005 02:07 PM EST

A friend of mine was moving out of her apartment yesterday, and she had six boxes of books to dump. I offered to help by taking them to the local library where the librarian, in a phone conversation, agreed to take them all. When I got there, she assumed a more scrutinizing posture toward the donations and went to rapid-sorting them into resellable books (mostly pulpy stuff like Janet Evanovich and spare copies of Heart of Darkness and Gatsby). In the other pile: anything that fit the slightest comp-textbook part--handbooks, beginning linguistics and ESL texts, MLA guides, and the familiar readers with writing prompts. All of these were without value to the public library. She gave me the address for the recycling center, where I take it that they'll be...recycled. Just an adjacent anecdote, really, but the comp-oriented (student-writer or texbook publisher) lot were a rejected from the "both" and instead seemed like a "neither" (valuable nor readable for library patrons). Still have three boxes of them bc the recycling center was closed.

Posted by Derek @ 07/30/2005 01:17 PM EST