I’ve been involved in a fair few projects, firstly in the wacky world of small press comics and zines and for the last few years online. Some have been great, some have rapidly drifted into obscurity and some have taken on a life of their own. One thing that nearly always happened, though, is that they tend to fade. Usually this is not a problem. A good rule to work by is if no-one’s interested any more then it’s not worth continuing and it was fun while it lasted. (The problem occurs when you lose interested in something you’ve set up and everyone else still wants it to continue, but that’s another story…)
The issue seems to be one of a low barrier to entry. When you have an idea and it’s not hard to implement it, it seems seems silly not to at least try. The music, zine and web revolutions were revolutionary because suddenly pretty much anyone could put out stuff in ways that used to be controlled by market forces, which made everyone a little giddy. If you’d written a song you could record it in your bedroom, make up some cassettes, send them to a trading club and people would listen to it. If you’d written a story you could type it up, photocopy it as a zine, send it to a review zine and people would read it. And the internet is just self explanatory. What this meant for people like me was we saw all this anarchy and got even more giddy, thinking up ways of facilitating all this underground creative activity with reviews, mail order distros, conventions and the like. And again the internet has taken this to a previously unimaginable level.
However, as many if not most of the music, zines, comix and websites that were produced were ill-conceived and a bit crap, so were most of the ideas from people like me. Some of them were brilliant, of course, and without that low barrier to entry a lot of the more creative and interesting ones wouldn’t have come about, and that’s an important thing to remember about this lark. Most weblogs are not much cop, but without them you wouldn’t have that gem you stumbled upon last week.
So today’s question, in relation to the projects that people like me do, and with specific concentration on the web, is what to do with the failures. In the old days if a zine wasn’t working you’d just stop publishing it. The back issues would be there, floating around in people’s collections, but it wouldn’t be part of the current scene. With the web, you have a crazy idea, get others all enthusiastic about it, implement it in a couple of days and within a month it’s just sitting there because it wasn’t actually all that great or useful and people, including you, have moved on to the next crazy idea. But the project is still there, still functional and working but out of date and mildly embarrassing, given the high expectations you had of it. To get rid of it would require actively doing so, and people will get upset about that, especially if they’ve contributed their time and energies to it. Turing it into an archive is a possibility but that would require a fair bit of work, and you’re just not interested in it enough to be bothered. So it just sits there.
I’m not in any way suggesting these things aren’t worth it. Like I said before, in order to get the really interesting stuff to stick you have to throw a lot of shit on the walls. I’m just wondering if there’s a way to effectively build retirement plans into new projects, so when they slow down to a crawl it’s not hard to mothball them without killing everything or leaving a faintly sad relic gathering cyber-dust.
I’m not referring to any projects in particular here, I should point out. It’s just a general thing I’ve been thinking about recently.
Copy the comic book companies who aren’t sure if a project will work – make it “limited”. If it takes off, take a month or two break after issue (?) six and then start Volume II. If interest starts to vanish around issue four or five you only have to publish one more to save face and leave a “complete set”.
Also, there is this *need* to do a monthly release and that puts unfair pressure on everyone involved – you shoot yourself in the foot if you’re going to feature “news” because you already have natural deadlines to make the content of any use.
A semi regular *themed* comics mag via the net (pdf maybe!) would be nice. Without the pressure of a monthly deadline and with a loose theme.
I’m saying nothing else because the wound still hurts ;)
I was thinking more about the projects which start in a blaze of enthusiasm with no real plan or aim other than it’ll be fun, useful and cool, and then either develop into something quite structured and effective or, more likely, gently fade away, except they never really go away so I’m wondering if it’s possible to build some kind of archiving it at the beginning without ruining the spontaneity. It’s probably not possible, but you never know.
The fing wot you’re alluding to, Dan, was very structured from the outset and has left as it’s legacy a bunch of nice self contained issues. If it had been, for example, a site where people just threw in articles of varying quality and length at random then what you’d be left with would be something that looked like it was still live but really wasn’t. In other words, stopping Borderline didn’t require much tidying up because it was already tidy. Most anarchic web projects aren’t like that.
I think you hit the nail on the head with the spontaneity/archiving reference. I used to work with a genuinely funny bunch of people – the kind of people that would have a conversation in a pub that could’ve fuelled a comedy show.
Thing is, they knew it but when someone actually tried to jot down a few ideas from the conversations it lost that spontaneity and things weren’t funny. I know this is the mother of all tangents but I think it demonstrates that conflict between creating the fire and containing/bottling it (if that makes sense!!!!)
How you’d work this on the net, god only knows. It’s starting the relay race and making sure theres a batton to pass once you’ve sprinted the first part and run out of puff I guess.
I’ve been trying to sort out a response to this for a while now, and keep blanking … but it has something to do with how the internet is a special case where limited-time projects are concerned because of how storage and display space is not an issue … and also something with how the internet is an ongoing treasure trove, or perhaps, better, a cabinet of curiosities which is eternally being added to … and how things go through little spates of activity as someone else finds them, and shares them with their friends … and how this might be three years, five years later … or never, or next week. Maybe I ought to delete my old work, but well … on the other hand, I seem to have a far higher tolerance of (cyber)clutter than you.
Easy fixes:
Label it as “older project” or “archive” (without doing anything else to it)
Add a short description, the code, and an invitation for other people to use/develop/finish
Just delete it
No, I love cyber clutter, don’t get me wrong. If I had a problem with it I’d have deleted the first couple of years of this weblog. ;)
I think there’s a personal subtext here about letting go but I can’t quite articulate it, probably because it would intigate me letting go of something I’m reticent to let go of. Ah, it always come down to psychology…