Permeable Membrane Blogging

PETERMBALL Big Thoughts

Back in the old days, when dinosaurs roamed the earth and WiFi hadn’t yet migrated to phones, blogging used to feel like the first step of an interactive process. You’d post something, and other folks would respond on their blogs, setting up a slow moving conversation as other folks joined in on their blogs. Interactivity was part of the appeal, and even in the absence of interactive responses, the potential of interactivity remained.

The membrane between you and the readership was thin, and highly permeable.

Over the years permeability feels like it’s fallen away. Conversations sped up as responses moved to tools like Facebook and Twitter, or became siloed to the comments section because folks weren’t maintaining their own feed of information. The nature of blogs transformed as folks figured out how to take this weird conversation platform and monetise it as a content publisher, setting off a boom of increasingly focused blogs devoted to tightly constrained topics, evergreen content generation, and content marketing for further services or products.

There’s less of a temptation to use blogs as a weblog under that model, because the membrane grows more resilient. Then the tools that enable the original permeability–RSS feeds, interlinked communities–fall by the wayside. Facebook eliminates the ability to stream your feed to a personal page, thus ensuring the only way to get a blog on the platform is professional Eventually, you’re no longer speaking to an audience who shows up on the regular, but folks who follow a link from a tweet, or a google search, or a Facebook rec.

The rewards for using a blog for things that aren’t highly concentrated content marketing seem to grow increasingly distant. Increasingly, you stop showing up in your party clothes and start deploying a more together, professional persona.

That notion of the permeable membrane as a default seems to have shifted to other platforms. Facebook had it, but lost it over the course of a decade as they figured out how to monetize the platform and turn everyone into a product. Twitter still has it, but also exposes the potential abuses of permeability, and seems perfectly content to let the fuckheads rule because (hat tip to Mike Monteiro) they make money by getting you to fight with nazis and despair about right wing fuckmonkey incompetents running countries into the ground right now.

At the same time, the platforms that still retain some level of permeability are the ones holding folks attention. People still cite Instagram as their preferred social media, because it still feels like a friendly place instead of a professional one. The resurgence of the email newsletter might be driven by folks engaging in email marketing, but it’s quickly been subverted by various creatives who simply enjoy talking to people about stuff on a regular basis.

The permeable membrane is valuable to us because it allows us to feel like we’re human beings. I’m kinda intrigued to see what happens as the Great Pause generated by the current pandemic sees us searching for more sources of connection online, and highlights the flaws of those places where the market has seeped in.

Personally, I find myself falling back on the blog. Resetting it as the default place where I show up and think, share, and otherwise engage with the folks who find their way here.

You may be fewer than you once were, but that just means we’re in the wee hours of the party when all the beer is drunk and you’re shooting the shit until sunrise.

For everyone else, I recommend checking out Wired’s article about why the RSS reader should be making a comeback. Right now, more than any other time, there’s something to be said for a curated stream of content as a break from the social media firehose.

7 April 2020

PETERMBALL Journal ,

Right, then. Tuesday. It is Tuesday, yes? The weirdness is setting in. I’m sitting in my flat pondering ways to break every rule I know about publishing, and marvelling at the fact I’m coaxing folks to come along for the ride. My inbox is filled with freshly signed contracts, my messenger services filled with chats about future projects.

And for all my bluster about breaking rules, I’m going back to resources from 2005 when the publishing paradigms of RPG gaming splintered thanks to ebooks and thinking about the ways to transplant them into 2020.

This has largely involved picking up an idea that’s been kicking around my computer since 2008. The nice part about everything going mental is that there’s really no reason going full tilt at ideas that seem interesting, rather than second-guessing whether they’ll pay off.

Brain Jar Press is on the verge of getting its own online identity. The webpage is getting some attention. We’ve launched a new Facebook Page, seperate from my own feeds. It’s all a big seat-of-the-pants, making the best use of The Great Pause we can, but it’ll pick up speed as our household figures out the new work dynamic with both of us home.

Ugly Cover, Great Book: go read The Captured Ghosts Interview with Warren Ellis

PETERMBALL Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

The great irony of Warren Ellis: The Captured Ghosts Interviews is this: it’s an interviewer with a comics writer who thinks very carefully about the design and packaging of the written product, and yet it’s released with an incredibly ugly , half-arsed cover that’s seemingly designed to discourage purchasing.

Warren Ellis: The Captured Ghosts Interviews by [Patrick Meaney, Kevin Thurman, Warren Ellis, Julian Darius]

Which is a pity, because the contents of the book offer some fascinating insights into Ellis’ mindset, work processes, and usage of the internet, circa 2010/2011.

We live in an age where access to interviews with creators are at an all-time peak right now, what with the plethora of websites, podcasts, and livestreams devoted to archiving creative insights. What marks The Captured Ghosts Interviews as something special is it’s origins: these are the full transcripts of the interviews Meaney and Thurman did while making a documentary about Ellis and his work, which means you’re getting all the messy asides and digressions rather than the best sound-bytes.

It also means they have time, in a way most interviews don’t. There are whole sections devoted to Ellis’ origins as a writer, and formative experiences that helped shape his mindset. Stuff that would be glossed over or summarised is explored in detail.

Which leads to some choice insights into his feelings about design in comics:

The package is very, very important. It’s a piece of visual art, so it should be attractive. It should be something you want to own and something that gives you pleasure when you look at it. And for all the great skill that was deployed in comics art – commercial comics art , certainly , for the first time in the ’ 70s and ’ 80s – the packages themselves were hideous fucking things.

and the tendency for older writers to engage in nostalgia for their earlier days:

I do not pine for not being able to afford food. I do not pine for being terrified every time a bill came through the door. I do not pine for sleeping rough under the pier. I do not miss those days at all. Yes, there is a sense of purism, but people associate it with that because they were younger, and their minds moved faster, and they had more ideas than they had written down yet. So when you think back to those days, you think, “ God, I came up with a lot of stuff back then! God, I had so much energy!” You were young and you hadn’t written it all down yet. That’s all it is.

And internet privacy:

The nature of privacy – privacy hasn’t disappeared. It isn’t being eroded. It’s just changing What’s happening is, given the plethora of communications media available to us now, we are simply choosing to be less private, because we’re finding that more interesting. We can shut off all these devices at any time we like. We can cancel our Facebook accounts. We can turn off Twitter. We can even get rid of our phones , if we feel like it. We simply choose not to. Because giving up a certain level of privacy does somehow make us all feel more connected to everyone else, in a sort of ambient social space where we can choose to notice what our friends, colleagues, and fellow travelers are doing. We can turn it off, or we can allow great waves of it to pass us by and then start paying attention to it again. But there is now this ambient layer of sociality in society that we all live in that – if we choose to –makes us feel more connected to the people around us or even the people who are furthest away from us.

There are, of course, an incredible amount of insights into comics and comics writing as well, but its the digressions and interrogations into his obsessions that routinely yield the best bits of the book. Especially when he starts projecting into the next ten years of his life, where he foresaw an increasing move into prose (and, these days, seems to have landed in the lands of television with projects like Castlevania on Netflix).

If you’re a fan of Warren Ellis, or just a fan of seeing smart writers interrogate their practice, look past the ugly-as-fuck cover and pick up a copy of this book.