The Guardian has an interesting article about the challenges faced by writers in the digital age. With that distinctively British pessimism, the article states…

Roughly speaking, until 2000, if you wrote a story, made a film or recorded a song, and people paid to buy it, in the form of a book, a DVD or a CD, you received a measurable reward for your creativity. Customers paid because they were happy to honour your creative copyright. When the internet began in the 1990s, many utopian dreams of creating an open society, where information would be free for all, sprang into prominence. Wikipedia, for instance, is the child of such dreams. Today, Wikipedia is appealing to its users for subscriptions.

Among many champions of the open (and free) society, Jaron Lanier, author of You Are Not a Gadget and Who Owns the Future?, celebrated the idea of knowledge without frontiers from the comfortable security of a university post. The reckoning has been slow in coming, but now there are some crucial indicators of a change of heart. Lanier, for example, acknowledges that, in his excitement at the birth of the worldwide web, he forgot about the creative classes. He concedes that he has watched a generation of his friends – film-makers, writers, musicians – become professionally annihilated by the loss of creative copyright.

Copyright is the bone-marrow of the western intellectual tradition. Until the book world, like the music world, can reconcile the extraordinary opportunities provided by the web with the need for a well-regulated copyright system, artists of all kinds will struggle.

This is also interesting.

For Kavenna, this freedom is a reason to be optimistic about the future: “The digital age,” she says, “is an extraordinary revolution in consciousness. I grew up with the Modernists – Joyce et al – grappling with the technological developments of the early 20th century. The digital age is just as significant. We are developing a completely different mode of consciousness. So the digital age offers this new challenge for writers.”

A new consciousness… that’s some heavy stuff. I have to admit I was just thinking that despite all my complaints about this era of hyper-technology I do feel lucky to be alive during it. I think we’re seeing fundamental changes in how the human animal lives including changes that could indeed lead to something called “a new consciousness.”