The Digital Writer |
As the Muse keeps whispering to me, "this is the most liberated period in human history, why not write it all out? Why not be brazen and sure of ourselves? Why linger in the shadows?" She is a mighty temptress, no doubt, and I've plugged my ears with sealing wax and kept my nose to the grindstone.
The Net says, make music no one has heard before. Build wonderful structures that rival the toppled buildings. We will build wonderfully unless we are terrified of terrorists; those shadows who have only a few years of life left in them. Or, shell-shocked by the hate politics that parades around as sophisticated thinking, we are driven into the monastery.
I love the industry I call my own; that is, the publishing industry. I am on the margins, the digital sector, but that is fine with me. And nothing convinces me that writers and writing shouldn't be at the center of the industry but I am a dreamer.
As long as media is concentrated the way it is, it will produce two types of people. The "knowers" who produce the content or buy the content and disperse it like the priests of old; the dispensations of heaven. And the "receivers" who are too dumb or lazy to find out greater sources of content and on whom the political and marketplaces are dependent. So, the writer sees the modern media in terms of extreme failure of potential and ignores it after seeing how impossible it is to do anything about.
Ah, but you say a new medium has come into play? One that can't be easily controlled, try as the elite's may to do just that? Hmm. Must check that out!
After all, isn't news and opinion old hat by now? Isn't it rather predictable and dependent on a lousy war or some terror attack for its vitality? And yet, through it all what does the modern media teach? Compared to other sources very little. It doesn't teach but hypnotizes like the evil magician until the people are numb to anything else. A man or woman, that is a free citizen, could easily find out the better sources if they had the incentive to do so. The fact that they don't explains why you have a parasitical media industry, a tobacco industry, a porn industry and all other industries dependent on addiction, flourishing at a time when the liberation of the self from all dependence is very crucial.
The modern media is put alongside the great tobacco companies, the porn industry, the fast-food industries in the amount of shame they inspire in people. It has successfully produced an addled population that's starting to put wrestlers and actors in positions of authority, as you would expect in the decadent phase of a culture.
But, the media is as good or as bad as the educational system at any given moment in time.
You can't produce a good culture dominated by schlock masters imposing a system from the top, down as in the major cultural industries. The worst are those who are educated and know better but who kowtow to the lowest common denominator. They may laugh all-the-way-to-the-bank but they are also passed over by time and history. Oh? They don't care? Ah, one of the secret's of their nihilism!
The American people, especially, view themselves as rich in culture but the truth of the matter is that their sensibilities are barren and they know a fifth of what they need to know and one one-hundredth of what would make them better, happier, and more productive. No institution teaches this. Most institutions hold fast to the status quo because they are implicated in it. A citizenry processed through the cultural institutions is as dull and weird as the one processed through the rituals of the church or through the old, ancient Empire.
We say our piece and move on I suppose and no one is the wiser. We would reflect on one more item: The American has succumbed, as much as the terrorists in the Middle-east, to the inhuman. And the inhuman is contemptuous of everything that has a heart and imagination. The inhuman sets up its machinery in order to squeeze every vestige of freedom and spirit from the individual. The systems in place demonstrate this with a never-ending kind of pleasantness. "We are powerful, precisely because we are inhuman, and are inhuman to attain power; and we will determine what your values are in just a moment."
Let us have our say, we are weary of the world's troubles. We view the Net as an exemplary attempt to renew human culture and knowledge; although even we admit that it is filled with the very worst of non-Net culture. That is why the idea of a channel, relatively clean, is so important and, in fact, the only thing to focus on.
There are dangers, as this article points out. The Net is not promoting a social/political pluralism but fostering a very inclusive, almost cult-like protection of ones views and opinions. In other words, the Net is aping the larger institutions that provide a safe haven for very inclusive views.
The screen, the box, is the publishing system. It's an outlandish thought because it cuts through all the hyped up assumptions we have come to expect in a wooly, over-grown culture like our own.
And it is remarkable the amount of anger that exists when one contradicts the ongoing orthodoxy, in whatever field they may be in. People don't want to break their habits. They have banked on a particular medium or way of doing things and now the acceleration of change is real to them and they don't know what to do. We've been there. Antidote: Study and understand systems, history, and oneself.
Writers need to be as babes again and re-enter the world with fresh eyes and cut through it with their words.
And the words that count are not connected to emotion only but to the richness of imagination that knows the treasures are laid up in the mind, awaiting the key to open them.
There are many good people in the media establishment. But then, there were good people who resisted the American revolution and who supported slavery; had wonderful rationalizations for it and used them without batting an eye.
The great spirit in freedom is always in the next horizon peeking out into the vistas of the future.
David
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