Blog Post - Week 3 - Tools and Techniques of Publishing

"Different tools, techniques, processes and genres set up different expectations, and different roles, for everyone involved" 
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The essential nature of publishing means that concepts, as were perhaps once held highly in a specific culture, may or may not resonate with those of a different sociality.

Key points to take away from this week's lecture ... 

Things (and increasingly, now) can be made public in both space and time - as was not the case in previous civilisations.

Writing captures the complexity - and more - of previous publishing methods (be in cave paintings, smoke signals, rock structures, etc...) whilst also removing itself from the lived experience … "Writing is good at ‘representing the un-representable" (Levinson: 17)

In week two's lecture, Prof. Murphie spoke of the foundations of publishing - and those methods which transcend through space and time.

And while pictographs, hieroglyphics, cave paintings and the like had told stories to their direct audience, whilst also standing the test of time, the messages were not easily transported and thus new methods would spring forth accordingly. The changes brought about in publishing and its social contexts aligned with the publics of the respect eras.

Writing has since accounted for such, capturing the complexity of the existing means of publishing, and more.  At the same time, writing tries to substitute itself for life (as lived in the present) but can also remove things from the lived experience. Abstract does this even better.

The below video details the history of written language...

"... Written language has allowed us to preserve great stories, plays, poems and even songs... As we have moved into the 21st century, the written language has seen rapid changes and become more important than ever ..." 

We have since moved from an era whereby publishers had often wanted as many people as possible to view their means of work, into an age where upholding the sanctity of texts has become the main priority.

As we - in the current and very much digital public domain - continue to shape and shift publishing methods, content distributors have had to alter their modes of delivery to ensure business longevity.

'Paywalls' - an arrangement whereby access is restricted to users who have paid to subscribe to the site - have been implemented by many news outlets to ensure their readership is still paying for the received content. A method, which as heard in the below video, has proven to have worked for Australian-based NewsCorp.

"... They [News providers] are making more money from their 79,000 digital subscribers, than they did from the 20,000,000 unique browsers they used to have ... The Times is making more money now from their subscription websites, than they did when they were free ... Subscribers feel like they are in a premium environment, and that the content has been tailored for them."