Category: Education

In praise of a little quirkiness

An evening jam
UMM’s brought in some outside consultants to assist us in our “branding”. I find the term quite shudder inducing, but what little I’ve seen from these far off lands suggests that the people they’ve brought in are saying some useful things. One bit I liked from their recent report:

UMM’s “quirkiness” [is] appreciated (e.g. Zombie Dance, drag show, etc.) [by the students], but
students felt this was not presented prominently enough

One of the things I’ve always loved about UMM is that it is quirky. Maybe not quite as a “out there” as Reed was, but there are people being individuals and pushing some boundaries in important and valuable ways. We seem shy about sharing that, though, usually in the guise of not wanting to scare off potential students. So instead of emphasizing the cool and strange things that our students are doing, we have tended to focus on a kind of ethnically diverse whitebread image (if that makes any sense).

Our web site, for example, has usually featured these predictably bland photos that wouldn’t typically remind an alum of anything they remember from their time in Morris. A few years ago Jess Larson and others in Studio Art got those replaced by a lot of cool photos that UMM art students took. The student photos were much more visually interesting, and I think actually said something about what UMM was at that time. It didn’t last long, though, and at the next major revision of the web site all those images got replaced by bland professionalism once again. Sigh.

I think there’s a ton of still imagery, video, and audio that we could use on our web site to promote what a neat place UMM is, but we don’t. Below, for example, are four really nice shots from UMM’s Flickr group. Only a handful of people know about or use that group, and it’s probably 75% my stuff, but there are quite a few excellent (and interesting) images there that I think would be really cool on our web site.

Snowy Morning at the University of Minnesota, Morris
Daniel J. Moore 		Sun sets on Morris
Michael Anderson
Alma Mater Ornament
Cory Q from Monkey River Town
bam.bam.

Thanks to all those folks for sharing their photos on Flickr!

Tags: Art, Education, Flickr, marketing, University of Minnesota Morris

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Twilight of the novel?

Minority report

The death of the book has been oft prophesied, and so far the old dear keeps hanging in there. Here Bill Janssen is quoted by Peter Brantley, suggesting that what the casualties may be are forms of content rather than forms of publishing.

Will the novel become a marginal form like opera?

In the hype around the Kindle, I haven’t noticed a mention of Monday’s NEA report, To Read or Not To Read. Seems much more interesting.

I’ve been saying for a few years that we are entering an age where textual fiction is becoming less and less significant, particularly for the canonical long text, the novel. The novel is a relatively recent innovation in entertainment, and the popular novel is a product of cheap production and distribution, thanks to the industrial revolution.

The delivery channels have multiplied, and the economics have changed. Television killed off the pulp magazine (and crippled the market for short stories). What would replace the novel? Something which would produce a ludic experience for hours at a time — a movie. But movies have not succeeded in killing off the novel. They’re too expensive and too complicated, and major players control the distribution channels. The best they could do was to absorb years of talents like Chandler and Faulkner.

But now we have kids who don’t read, the Web, game engines, and the writers’ strike. Game engines and machinima make it possible for writers to produce and direct their own work without actors or sets, for a relatively modest capitalization (a game machine). The Web provides free distribution. Kids provide a hungry audience. But the wild card here is the WGA strike. Suddenly all the folks who normally spend their days creating teleplays are looking for other outlets for their creative energies. Maybe write that novel they’ve been talking about? Maybe not. People like Rob Long (Cheers) are suddenly blogging. Maybe someone will tell them about machinima. We may be entering a twilight for the popular novel, perhaps relegating it to a niche more like opera.

Tags: Books, change, economics, media distribution, publishing, Writing

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