Tuesday, April 21, 2009

The shape of things to come . . . .

The relative sparsity of recent posts herein is due in part to the process of re-imagining and enhancing both the format and the content of this blog, with the intention, as a first step, of adding pictorial and audio components, and subsequently, as time and resources permit, video clips. While a document in the written word alone has many advantages of a unified focus in its very singularity, a purely textual form also has its limitations and challenges, particularly in the multimedia dimensions of the new and evolving digital journalistic (and perhaps scholarly) universe.

In addition, the past two months have offered me the opportunity to experience a splendidly rich--in fact, too rich--sequence of concerts that I have attended with the intention of writing reviews. But I must in all honesty confess that I have not yet developed my chops as purely a reviewer who is always able to craft swiftly a review in the day or two following the event, after the decades I've spent in more timeless scholarly pursuits, with any given piece of writing evolving over a period of a number of days, if not weeks or months. Add to this the imperative of having some sort of "hook" (to use the trade term) to snare the reader's interest, which is particularly necessary given the current vast scope of writing on the Internet.

And finally, there is the issue of reader response--whether reinforcement (praise or appreciation always being welcome); enhancement (through additional contributions or observations from others, using what I have written as a point of departure to expand the scope of the original); or challenge (of a critical or disputative nature, so as to stimulate debate)--without which these writings do not move beyond their original premises.

In short, I have spent recent weeks in exploring ways of renovating and improving the content of my VOAWorldMusic efforts, and ask the blessings (in good South Asian fashion) of all who take the trouble of accessing this site, as well as your input as just outlined in the previous paragraph. At the same time, I'm also exploring avenues to make the format itself more dynamic and flexible, and welcome any thoughts you may have along these lines as well.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Great words Brian! More!

Brian Q. Silver said...

Muchas gracias, Lance--

The key to making this blog as meaningful as possible is dialogue and interaction!