Writing and New Media

Suppose you've got creative ambitions and want to make the best use of new media. What d'you do? Welll, I think sticking your 400 page novel up on an FTP site is a bit of a no-no - but there are alternatives. What you need to do is exploit the features of new media - but concentrate on its novelties, which some nifty folk are doing right now. As Victor Keegan argued in the Guardian this week:

We are at the start of a creative revolution on the Web, enabling millions of people to publish their own videos, music, phtographs, books, blogs, or whatever.

It goes without saying that you can blog stories and poems - which some people already do. But what about the prose soap opera? Why not post a daily snippet which will have us coming back for more each morning.

Or podcasting - it's so easy. You can create what's essentially your own radio station. All you've got to do is make sure there's enough of content interest to get people coming back on a regular basis.

The super-bloggers have gone one giant step .further and established their own TV broadcasts via the Net. Not many months ago professional print journalists were sneering at these guys, claiming they were unethical flash-in-the-pan gimmicks. Now they're blogging desperately (and amateurishly) in a bid to catch up.

Bands have discovered You-Tube and iTunes, photographers Flickr, and even painters and potters have their stuff mounted on web sites these days.

So there's really no excuse. All the technology is virtually free. You don't need to be a genius to get it all working. You won't become a celebrity overnight of course, but your work will be out there with a potential world audience which was previously unthinkable - until Alan Turing and Tim Berners-Lee put on their thinking caps for us.

 

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