speed is of the essence

What is the thing to do these days?

Being a musician, for money, seems to be getting pretty difficult. Labels don’t know how to make money anymore. Independent artists can get by if they’re willing to spend a ton of time and effort on their own promotion and of course if they are good.

Writing for profit doesn’t look very promising either. Journalism is in a pretty depressing state. Scrambling for an audience and pandering to the lower-middle, they sensationalize much and analyze little. Novelists and poets seem to be fading into the past altogether. E-readers aren’t the problem. The drivel people are willing to dedicate their attention to is the problem.

Photography is much like music. It’s getting really difficult to monetize. People don’t want to pay for it anymore and so many are willing to do it for free to get a bit of exposure. Very few papers and magazines employ staff photographers who are out for months at a time on assignment anymore. There are fewer big shots to pay for giant advertising and fashion shoots.

They’re just making up jobs now. Social media experts and marketing gurus and hundreds of copycat web start-ups. The funny thing is that all the popular career paths for people who would have worked in journalism or publishing or music fifteen years ago are just working as frameworks for content now. They can either point you to the content because they’re the taste-makers or they can point you to the people who supply the content. They might also build web sites and social networking sites to house all the content and invite everybody to join in and hope to make a name for themselves.

The problem is that nobody is willing to pay for or wait for the content anymore. It’s all about hype and recycling and remixing. The span for this trend is necessarily finite. After a decade or so of declining content and a huge influx of confused yet energetic promoters and hangers-on we will have a culture in infinite regress.

The Internet is not to blame. That’s like blaming the living room for the murder that just happened.