The Digital Writer |
The new system exists to be understood. Our efforts are of the naked man washed up on the shore of some island and trying to understand how he will survive and, eventually, flourish. He doesn't want to let himself get tricked by enormous thirst into believing that the piss of a tiger is a pure mountain stream. Or get so overwhelmed he's left powerless in the constant changes that take place whether he's on the island or off it.
And there's no question that the Net has degraded under the enormous impress of human greed. It has created some sophisticated huckerstism, phony networks, buzz connected to nothing, "community" as a way to rope-in the suckers. It has lost it's appeal and become hopelessly bogged down. The only way to fight through it is to have a strategy and enter into it for some express purpose. For all the hype, I see very little that is new on it. And I don't see new value being created. Same old con jobs. Old politics. Old alienation's. Old will-to-power. Old, old, and old.
At least understand the ways to produce written material in the digital system and a few of the ways of distribution.
A playful devil, a Loki, would say, "the print publishing system is a habit to be unlearned." After all, its been here 500 years doing its thing, refining itself, going up a variety of learning curves. It's always been assumed that a writer writes for an accumulator or publisher who then distributes the printed stuff out to readers. 500 years from now it may look very odd that this was so but it will mark that epoch without question. And all other media followed suit, including TV.
Talent meeting the audience through a variety of channels and platforms, with mediators there for those who need or want them. You would hope such a thing would happen among putatively, free people.
It's going to be a hard road to follow but there are good signs even today.
The problem with the last several years is that the emphasis was in speed and nanosecond transformations. One of the biggest hucksterisms was that "Net years" were measured in months and weeks. People, then, lost perspective, got drunk on promises of wealth, did stupid things, and either lost companies, money, or jobs. Sometimes all three.
The Digital Writer says:
- In good time my friends, in good time.
- You who have lost the ability to sacrifice will not build the future.
Our only solace is that we produce the quality that can't be found anywhere else.
The writer is best served in this time by having an aesthetic point of view rather than a market view.
The author Philip Roth bemoans the loss of the reader. He believes everything is migrating to the screen. In some ways this is a very good thing; it cleanses out the fat that has accumulated in novels, especially, and makes writers search for something in their activity as writers that transcend an audience. After all, we are living in a fin de siecle; what possible loyalty do we have with it? If the culture is going to survive it must improve. It must throw off its own fat. In the anxiety that follows, readers are created. It's one thing I would never worry about. And that is especially true on the digital publishing system where the small band of readers world-wide make up, collectively, a very powerful group of people. And they are all a click away. So, it is really happy times for the writer not one of despair.
I hate to think that we who write are in competition with cameras and other machines. The writer, more than any other individual in the culture, needs to be very experienced and knowledgeable and allow that to play through an integrated sensibility. At that moment some truth or insight can appear, if only for a split second.
Sometime in this century we will see the critical mass of publishing go from print to digital. We will see most people reading from some variant of screen. We will see writers connecting with readers directly and, even, publishing from custom-built printing presses, a book for good customers. We may not see the day but we know it will arrive.
The best view for the writer is not a cynical one but an objective one that is able to view the massive content available in new and exciting ways; with new angles of attack.
Writing is an act of ordering, to make sense out of things. The medium we are on is a chaotic one, leading to no-sense. That is one difficulty writing has on the new medium.
As someone who observes the society it is an interesting thought. As a writer who is engaged in his daily struggles, I am more concerned with what is going on now. Print is still powerful. Much good is in the print publishing system. It is not the print system that is so bad. It is the culture itself which could care less about thinking or imagining anything; doesn't care about language and has reduced all of life down to the bottom-line. It's quite normal, in a culture like this, that a big-time wrestler would have more clout than a big-time writer. That's what the people want.
My concern is not some kind of war between digital and print. Digital will win out because of these factors:
- Lowered cost for production and distribution/more efficiency.
- A massive change in habits as young people get all their information, even knowledge, and entertainment from the screen.
- Free cultures love change, need change to stimulate and make new. Technology is one way. The new publishing system will stimulate the arts and renew a lot of things as it takes into itself the best of the old system and drops away the bad.
So, the Net ironically, is an end-around around the gross people. When the people grow up and learn what it takes to live in a liberal, democratic culture then maybe good connections can be made. Now, they are merely eviscerated by political hacks and their favorite addictions and a world they do not understand whirls above them. Or, so says some cynical character looking for entrance into a novel not yet written. He has read Gasset at an impressionable age and gives up the more humane Unamuno.
The writer has one of two choices. He can bring a great deal of discipline to his work and make it interesting because he understands the fat and superfluous nature of much that he writes. Or, he can let a professional editor do that; an editor who has experience working as a mediator between the writer and reader.
The techies have an astonishing degree of inflated ego. They don't understand that their vaunted technology is considered communal property and that they are the master-builders who migrate from project to project. Unable, by the way, to protect the secrets of their cult because the cult is fractured into many disciplines and associations who compete with each other.
David