Interactivity is a political, not technological term to me. It means there is a new relationship between creators of content – journalists, musicians, publishers and me – and readers and consumers of content – that would be you. I shocked my book editor a couple of years ago when I put her book notes up on the blog, she said that had never happened before. Last week, I startled the Mannix designers by putting the first proposal for my new header up on the blog and Facebook – nobody much liked it.
Interactivity is a process, a big idea, a huge change. I used to write books, come down off the mountain, do a reading or two and then write another book. Few people ever got to speak to me. Now, they do speak to me, they also have a growing role in what I do. The new header is my idea, I get the final decision, but I want the input of the people reading my work, reading the blog, and I read the responses and consider them. If the readers don’t like it, what good is it? I don’t run the blog by poll, I make the final decisions but interactivity is a sharing of the process. People have come to expect it. The New York Times is flummoxed by the Internet, they just can’t seem to grasp why lots of people won’t pay for the paper online. But the answer is simple, interactive media is thriving, static media – few to many, we have the info, take it or leave it – doesn’t work any more.
My new header is a radical step for the blog. I want a header above the Farm Journal, it will be a series of quotes that fade in and out. The quotes are thematic, partly to introduce newcomers to some of my words, partly to reconnect the idea of words and images. I see the blog as my new and living book, I want it to reflect my words and ideas as part of it’s architecture and infrastructure. I confess to being heavily influenced in design by the ideas of Steve Jobs, who had brilliant instincts about how ideas ought to look.
I was a newspaper editor and TV producer and I never once in those years wondered what people would think about the stories we published or produced. Nor did I hear from many people, there were few ways to reach me or affect my thinking. It is different now. In some ways that is better, in some ways worse, but this new reality is here and I embrace it.
My choice for the header is the one below. There will be about 30 different quotes, they will change, move in and out. They are from me and from my work. I’d like the color to be other than this green and we are putting lines above and below the quotes to separate them from the blog entries and the boxes above. Otherwise, I like it, I really like the Times Roman font the Mannix designers chose. You can tell me what you think on Facebook. You can also e-mail me: [email protected] And thanks for caring.
