Blogging the Future - An Independent Identity for Online Reviewing

Country Music star and mystery novelist Kinky Friedman is fond of quoting Winston Churchill's observation that a cigar is frequently improved by resurrection.  The same is true of the online comments about the Readercon panel dealing with online publication.  I have already had my say on the issue HERE but over the last couple of days a post by Paul Kincaid and a comment by Kathryn Cramer (an actual panel member!) on the Torque Control site has prompted me to take a second and more detailed look at one particular area of the debate... namely the medium of blogging.

The first thing that struck me when I reread the discussion was the extent to which all online reviewing is lumped together.  This is quite common amongst the mainstream reviewers who routinely pour ill-informed bile on "the state of online reviewing".  Indeed, it's quite common not only for online journals to be lumped in with book bloggers, it's also common for everyone to be lumped in with Amazon reviews (in fact, I rather suspect that most anti-online reviewing types seldom get further than Amazon).  This was the approach taken by both the panel and Paul Kincaid though, in all fairness, they do then go on to point out that there's more variety within the category of "online publishing" than might be suggested by post and panel names.

Paul Kincaid says :

Most of those who have responded to these discussions, especially the proponents of online reviewing, seem to be convinced that the medium makes a massive difference to the message. This is arrant nonsense. At its most basic a review is a judgemental response to a piece of art, it can be written or spoken or communicated in any other way you might imagine (tap-dancing about architecture?). The medium of communication does not – should not – affect the message communicated.

Kincaid suggests that online publication is effectively pretty much the same as a fanzine with sporadic editing, an ability to immediately respond to the reviewer and without the need to worry overly about word counts.  I think that in the case of many online journals, this is mostly true.  Indeed, most online journals are implicitly based upon the dead tree publications that existed before the internet.  If there's a minimal difference between dead tree and online journal publication then it's because, either consciously or not, the people running online journals are aping paper magazines in terms of their production values, their editorial approach and their tone.  But what of other kinds of online reviewing?

Critics of online reviewing are quick to paint it as a kind of wild untamed land where ill-informed opinions sit comfortably next to casual libel in an environment where a lot gets said but very little is worth listening to.  However, rather than a lawless hell-hole, I think that anyone venturing online to find an opinion should see the internet as being a lot like 19th Century America.  Back in the day, if you arrived by boat in New York you were faced with a city much like what you might have found back home.  However, the further out you went, the more it became clear that you were not in Europe anymore as the way people lived started to differ quite markedly until you reached the edge of European settlement, beyond which lay the lands of the American Indian.

If you are interested in SF reviewing and are mostly used to dead tree publications and academic and pseudo-academic texts, places like Strange Horizons (and to a decreasing extent SFSite) will not leave you feeling particularly home sick.  As Kincaid suggests, with a few interactive bits and pieces added, it's largely the same kind of stuff you'd find in any traditional high-end SF journal.  Beyond that you have the more mass market review sites such as SFRevu which offer up reviews comparable to those you'd find in mass market genre magazines like SFX. However, move beyond the centrally run and edited sites and you'll find modes of writing that you simply cannot find in dead tree form but which are, nonetheless, hugely popular.  My question here is, rather than see these as uncivilised lands, why do we not see them as differently cultured lands and consider what is worth importing back to the more sedate, refined, East Coast venues of SFnal critical thought?

Here are some things to consider :

1 - Contextual Linkage

Apparently John Clute sees contextual linking, whereby you add a link from a particular word to a more detailed discussion of said idea, as a violation of the unwritten contract between writer and reader.  Niall responds on Torque Control that it's as though The Clute has never heard of tabbed browsing but I think that Clute is talking about something deeper than the practicalities of going off to look at another web page.

One of the responsibilities of good non-fiction writing is that you show your work and you give the reader as much information as he or she needs to follow your line of thought.  Part of this process is taking complex ideas and putting them in your own words before showing how you're using that idea in the context of what you're writing.  Contextual linking can be used as a shortcut.  So rather than me talking about concepts of transgendered sexual identity and then pointing to a particularly interesting passage in Sean Williams' Saturn Returns, I can just link to THIS and let you do the heavy lifting of working out the point I'm trying to make.  At it's worst this kind of thing is lazy and leads to a lot of hand-wavingand I suspect that that is what Clute is annoyed about.  However, if used correctly then contextual linking can really bring a piece to life.

A defining characteristic of the internet is that it is essentially about linkages between pieces of information.  However, it is comparatively rare for non-Blog based reviews to make much use of it.  Preferring instead to ape the modes of the traditional blank page monograph.  If used correctly, contextual linking can turn an article from a monograph into a launch pad from which readers can go off and explore whole areas of human knowledge and understanding.  It can also help a writer make his point by allowing the reader an immediate opportunity to go off and find out more about a particular concept that a writer is invoking.  A contextually linked review can also immediately plug a reader into the existing body of comment on a particular issue.  From providing a group of links at the bottom of an article to allowing a reviewer to respond directly to other views on a subject, a contextually linked article can really bring home the idea that a review is only ever one part of the puzzle.  It is never authoritative.

2 - Objectivity

"Objectivity" and "Fairness" are two ethical principles that get invoked a lot by readers discussing what they want from a review.  It is even implicit in the way that many people write.  Indeed, many critics (including me) bemoan the fact that a lot of SF reviews amount to little more than a plot synopsis and a short evaluative paragraph at the end.  Aside from being a failure of the imagination, this form of reviewing also stems from the belief that a reviewer should not put too much of himself into a review.  The point is to help someone make a decision about whether or not to buy a book and therefore an objective description of a book and a fair assessment is going to be of far more use than a more subjective piece that is all about what the reviewer thought the book was about.  Embedded in this idea is the idea that a review should aim for authoritative status.

The need for a review to be authoritative comes from the fact that traditionally someone would have to pay money to get a newspaper or magazine in order to get reviews.  In this type of context, it would be monstrous for a reviewer to go "well it's just my opinion... take it or leave it" because the reader paid for the magazine up front hoping for purchasing advice.  Online reviewing does not function this way because it is mostly free at the point of delivery.

People now looking to make a purchasing decision based upon online reviews need only open an extra tab when they google the review.  The only cost to a reader who wants to take in a number of different opinions on a book is time.  This is even true in communities of fans devotes to particular authors where a new book will usually prompt a forum thread collecting different opinions about a book that everyone on that forum is likely to buy anyway.

Freed from the need to chase down the phantasmal hind of objectivity, reviewers can afford not only to let their real feelings about a book flow forth, they can also feel free to explore particular aspects of the book that interests them.  It can be subtext, it can be attitudes to technology, it can be characterisation.  Online reviews are part of a chorus of views and they should be written with such views in mind.  Indeed, one thing that I have also found is that the main barrier between SF criticism and the wider SF audience is not the intelligence or sophistication of the review but the actual subject matter.

3- Audiences

One interesting fact about the SF community is that it splinters itself into the smallest viable chunks it can.  As opposed to other sub-cultures,  SFF has no large "mainstream" forum that deals with all of SF.  Instead, the largest online communities are tribally clumped around particular authors.  As a result the George R.R. Martin, Robert Jordan and Laurell K. Hamilton forums are some of the largest in fandom.  Vastly dwarfing anything more generalist.  The same is true of online critics.

Online critics form their own niche within a niche by frequently reading and linking to each other's blogs.  Indeed, a lot of the consternation caused by  the recent Campbell award win for Ben Bova's Titan was caused by the fact that all of the other books on the short list were books that had been quite widely read and talked about in online critical circles and for a book from an established and successful author that had received little or no online discussion to sneak through and win seemed to be a distortion of the natural order.  This tendency to clump generally results in SF criticism being seen as a closed shop.  An onanistic orgy of self-indulgeance that benefits only the egos of critics, authors and publishers while the bulk of SF fans sail by blissfully unaware.  Indeed, while I knew that the bulk of the SF market occurs at a level that does not usually interest most critics, I was surprised to hear from Orbit UK's George Walkley quite how vastly THIS outsells THIS.  In fact, I've made similar statements myself, accusing dead tree journals of being largely irrelevant to the vast majority of SF readers.  Indeed, "SF Fandom" really does not mean "SF Fans"... it is a quite different cultural entity with only a certain degree of overlap.  However, online publishing offers a way out of this trap.

My output of book reviews has slowed to a trickle in the last couple of months as I haven't been commuting as much but in the past I have reviewed the kind of mass market books that rarely get the critical corners of the blogosphere jumping up and down.  In particular, I reviewed Tad Williams' Shadowplay and Laurell K. Hamilton's Harlequin.  At the time it went up, my review of Harlequin accounted for 10% of my total hits and the bulk of them came in that first weekend.  It was picked up by a number of LKH forums and what I found was not that "normal SF" fans found my style inaccessible or overly long as might be suggested by people arguing the case for 350 word reviews, but rather that they fully engaged with what I wrote, they simply agreed or disagreed based on what they'd read or what they thought of LKH.  The same was true of Shadowplay where the people at the Tad Williams forums considered me in much the same way that they did reviewers from their own circle.

Online publishing, and particularly blogging, offer a real way out of the intellectual cul de sac that SF criticism can become because a well read blog will pop up in Google searches.  The barrier is not style of writing, it is subject matter and timeliness and, thanks to RSS, a reader largely disengaged from the issues that surround "grown up" SF criticism can quickly become engaged as a good review earns your site a spot in their RSS feed reader and soon they're hearing about books that might otherwise have passed them by.  The more informal nature of a blog also shrinks the distances between SF sub-cultures because we all have blogs even if we don't all read the same websites.

A mixed bag of different ideas, and not terribly terribly coherent but I think that many of the things that differentiate not just online publishing but also blogging from dead tree publishing are actually some of those medium's real strengths.

Comments

[Kathryn Cramer]

Online publishing, and particularly blogging, offer a real way out of the intellectual cul de sac that SF criticism can become because a well read blog will pop up in Google searches

While I complain in the Torque Vector comment section about what my audience truly wants to read, I basically agree with this sentiment. If I WANTED to talk only to the concetrated audience for SF criticism, I can do it easily. The same computer I'm writing this on is the one NYRSF is laid out on.

But for some reason, I send most of my wordage out via the web to an audience that mostly finds me via Google.

[Jonathan McCalmont]

I think that's true of any established blog.

Even if I don't post anything for a few days I know that I'll get a couple of hundred hits a day just by virtue of having pumped however many tens or hundreds of thousands words into this blog.

Google provides the baseline of my viewer figures with my core audience providing the melody and a "break out" post occasionally swelling the hits disproportionately.

[Serdar]

There's one thing that's always at a premium when people read reviews, especially involved ones: time! If you find a reviewer that you can come to trust, who has something useful and insightful to say, then you tend to stick with them. I know you're not making any converts out of the Anita Blake faithful, but that's mostly because (from what I can tell) that's not your aim: you want to make a case against books like "Harlequin", and a case for better things, and let people see why.

Most people perceive a disconnect between "what critics like" and "what I like". There's a term for that kind of disconnect: taste. Not in the sense that the critic has it and they don't (although that's debatable), but in the sense that the critic has one and has to make a case for it, while at the same time doing his best to make a case for whether or not people of other tastes will enjoy something. A lot of people confuse that with just gassing off.

[Jonathan McCalmont]

It's not so much taste as attention though. I think the problem isn't that critics write high-brow reviews, it's that they review books that most SF fans have barely heard of. In my experience, LKH fans were perfectly happy to argue the toss over a review they didn't like or found unfair... it's just that I don't spend my time reviewing LKH novels :-)

I'm going to make more of an effort to engage with mass market stuff for a while and see where it gets me.

and talk about FAKE YU-GI-OH CARDS! Get em while they're hot... lovely fake Yu-Gi-Oh cards!

[neth]

This is a great post - but what truly sets it so far above any other is using Kinky Freidman to open it.

[Martin]

Objectivity

1) I'm not sure I see the disconnect between subjective and authoritive, particularly given there is no such thing as an objective review. Does a reviews authority really stem from its perceived objectivity?

2) I don't see many online reviews that go "well it's just my opinion... take it or leave it" either and I don't see why they would. I certainly don't see how payment comes into this. I would suggest that the social contract you seem to believe exists between a consumer and publication is not a universally recognised one.

3) How does television - free at point of use - come into this?

4) I don't believe in in the absolute distinction between the monopoly of print media and the plurity of the internet that you seem to suggest.

5) I don't see how your description in the final paragraph - "reviewers can afford not only to let their real feelings about a book flow forth, they can also feel free to explore particular aspects of the book that interests them" - is unique to online reviewers, plenty of newspaper reviews do the same.

[Martin]

As a general point, you talk about "online critics" but almost all of them where or still are offline critics as well. SF critics are a niche of a niche but online critics aren't really another niche of those and when an SF critic says, online, that they haven't seen much about the Bova they mean anywhere. This does tie into your point that reviewers don't review what readers read but that is the way it has to be.

[Jonathan McCalmont]

1) No, but if you read reactions to reviews that people disagree with one of the first arguments you'll see is that said reviewer was "biased" and not "objective". A review's authority does not stem from its objectivity but a lot of people seem to think that objectivity should be the goal of reviewing, even though that goal is unattainable and, in my opinion, undesirable.

2) My point is that if the audience is paying for access to a review, it seems somehow disingenuous to suggest that said review should only be taken in association with other reviews available elsewhere. I think that the need for a review to be "authoritative" stems from this desire to give people their money's worth. However, in an online review there is nothing very much at all stopping someone from reading three or four reviews of a book before buying. That frees each review from the need to be authoritative. In fact, a case could probably made for there being a need for each of them to say something different.

3) It doesn't. Not everything that's free at the point of use fits this format. I'm not sure how you'd go about watching several programmes about the same thing one after the other. Though having said that... if you look at the discovery channel there are countless programmes about the Second World War and none of them feels the need to tell the entire story. They can happily focus on one tiny little bit of something.

4) Actually I suggest, at length, that a lot of online publications are built to resemble dead tree publications, so empirically, you're right. There isn't an absolute difference. My point though is that there's the possibility to explore a new medium and do something different. Besides which, I didn't argue for an absolute difference. It's still all about reading words on a page.

5) Occasionally yes. In fact, Jetse de Vries' review of Watts' Blindsight in a recent NYRSF looked at a very specific element of the book. I'm merely saying that the way online reviews are consumed makes this type of reviewing all the more desirable.

When I spoke about the relative insularity of online SF critics I wasn't implying that they were online-only beasts and I'm not sure why that would affect what I was trying to say. My point was that SF criticism is an insular world but whereas your average SF fan is never going to accidentally stumble upon an issue of NYRSF, a timely review of a popular book will be read and enjoyed by the wider SF audience even if it appears on a site dealing more with criticism than anything else.

[Martin]

My point is that if the audience is paying for access to a review,

I was thinking along the lines that with the majority of printed reviews that people read they aren't paying for the review itself, rather this is a side benefit of paying for something else (ie news). People do buy newspapers for the reviews - that's why I buy the Guardian on a Friday and not on a Thursday - but this doesn't strike me as the default model. That's why I think the social contract is weaker.

My point though is that there's the possibility to explore a new medium and do something different.

Sorry, I wasn't being clear in what I said. I meant that the people who have an interest in reviews will quite often have a plurality of printed reviews - daily paper, sunday paper, evening paper, free paper, general interest magazine, specialist magazine - rather than a single publication's authoritive voice. You are right that the barriers to access are lower on the internet but I think that is all it is rather than an actual shift in the way people treat reviews.

[Duncan Lawie]

On the subject of "objectivity", here is a genuine reader comment on a review I did last year:

'Your not supposed to bring your own morality or ethics into the reviewing of fiction. In fact, thats the whole point of a critic -- someone who gives an objective opinion based on the quality of the material, not their own personal opinion of whats right and wrong.' (
Mad Dog Summer comments )

Of course, I don't agree with the commentor, or I would not have written the review I did - the final form of which was a product of considerable editing effort.

[Jason M. Robertson]

Greetings Diplomat. As one of those shrill folks whining about the Titan win, I'd be very grateful if you would direct me to _any_ segment of sf fandom online or off where I can find people who think Titan was in the first tier of merit among the sf novels of 2006.

(This post's mention of the Bova kerfuffle linked and briefly mentioned in a recent Kargadan post.)