The Digital Writer |
Even after eight long years on the beast I am convinced that we are in a new epoch. I am convinced that print technologies will diminish in the coming decades and a new literary system come into being, evolving and transmuting from our humble place, here, in the early years of the 21st century.
Why is this important?
It implicates so much: education, production and distribution of written material, scholarship, information, knowledge, and wisdom, among other things. It certainly doesn't guarantee anything and only the fool believes that it's "easy."
The print publishing system lost a lot of credibility with the literary writer long ago; yet, existed as the only game in town. That had the unfortunate effect of sealing in the writer, rather than liberating him. Whereas the digital publishing system is just this open sky that says, "write, write, write and expand and build according the dictates of your inner laws." It appears that way at any rate and appearances count.
I'm still impressed with a good deal of the print publishing system. But, as a writer I am more interested in my own work. I am adamant about its destiny. I am willing to fight for it. This makes all the difference.
Do new forms of writing emerge as a result of this? I've thought about that for quite awhile. I know that after the emergence of the printing press several things converged. For one thing, the middle-class got more power for a variety of reasons. And as they got more power as a class they began to demand a literature to speak to their life. Therefore, the novel came into the picture as the literary form to depict the life of the people. Perhaps the camera has come in to replace the novel, I don't know.
The novel has for a long-time retrenched itself as a pure sort of creation filled with the basic ingredients of a creative life: play, imagination, dream and fantasy. Dickens and Tolstoy are still the best ways to view Victorian England and Czarist Russia but now people have video tapes, news coverage of communities, personalities all over TV, that will bring people curious about this time closer to the fact of the matter. If that's all they want, that is. And it's good to look at an age that has passed and think through it a bit. Reading Balzac, for instance, brings us directly in contact with all people who will live for all time.
What is lost in our time is a unifying force, a unifying theme. And this is where the artist has to step into the breech and use the stuff of his or her experience to fabricate such a thing. And to do so with a great deal of responsibility, considering how fragile human consciousness is in relation to these things. One good unifying theme can sometimes wreak havoc for a century.
More freedom, more enlightenment, more relinquishing of the shadow. More dreams, more forms to grapple with an onrushing world that doesn't understand itself, not even a particle of itself.
I wrote this in June of 1998,
" "what is a revolution without revolutionaries? The focus of attention has been on the magnificent infrastructure of the beast. What? Is the beast for the people? Or the people for the beast? When you have a 'revolutionary communications medium' it implies a whole litany of changes from the make up of the self to the arrangement of power. Those who take up that challenge will be placing an 'x' mark where the future will say, 'ah, that is where we come from...'"
The only revolution available on the Net, is one that absolutely increases the capability of the people in ways we can't imagine at this point. Blogging at conventions won't do it. The bloggers are in love with themselves but are also excellent in many ways. The emphasis on "nowism" is a con game for the most part. However, what's happening is that journalists, especially, are training themselves to use all these tools at a higher and higher level and that is going to improve the art and skill of journalism I believe.
Journalist are right there with librarians for resourcefulness and its resourcefulness that is the prize on the net.
For many, the net is simply the nerd's equivalent of a mosh-pit and as concerned parents we watch and after awhile quote the wonderful Poetry Editor, "whoopdeedoo."
Journalists, among others, are anti-authority types who believe that if only authority were gone or they were the authority, the world would be a better place. This is not a revolutionary idea or feeling and, actually, very commonplace. Now, those few who actually re-imagine the world.....
I do have solidarity with them in one sense: The creation of a brand new career on this beast.
Oh, you've killed off the database and have contempt for the people. Ok. I understand.
Good luck.
It grieves me that my generation is such a bust. It's a poor lesson for the future; crimped now by a terrible feeling it has failed and all the sex and dope and wild music has done it in. Well, it did create the wonderful, new communications infrastructure. And that is significant and worth celebrating.
However, it was primarily an ego-trip of sizeable proportions and even Viagra can't keep it inflated. The divergent road appears at the confluence of youthful vision and middle-agism when the spirit is ready for a long rest. "Oh no more of this!" And it hides behind the TV screen and only comes up for something to eat or drink.
However, creating a "revolution" is not the end-all and be-all of things. The blogs are interesting and do open a way up for something; a new form of "letter to the editor," perhaps. A new feedback system for the infamous ombudsman that so many media outlets have employed.
Advances are usually made outside the noise and hoopla that accompanies something worth so much money to so many people. The "buzz" draws people into something they scarcely understand but are told, "you are participating in a great revolution!" Colonization is conducted in like fashion; the buggers have to be egged on and promised everything to get them on the damn boats, over the stinking, dangerous ocean and into the territory that belongs to someone else who will fiercely protect it with knives.
The Significance of Good Books
I was reading a good book, one that I've had around for a long time and has gained a bit of fame and credibility over the years. As I read through it I thought, "will this piece of writing survive the clattering teeth of time?" It could be that sometime in the future men and women will no longer pay this piece of writing any mind at all. It will be codified in a huge database very few people tap into. And yet, the life of this piece of writing has been with us for over one hundred years. Without it, the level of culture and civilization would be difficult to imagine. Therefore, one can say that whatever occurs in the future, if they are a civilized lot, they will need to produce work at this level or above. If they don't then they will be, merely, barbarians who will survive through time by force and terror.
Writing shows the way out of the problem of living in a world with too much confusion, too much change, too much of everything. Writing discriminates and slows down and makes the mind deliberate and so shows the way to a civilized, cultured existence. And it is only those cultures high in civilized value that values writing and other arts. The barbaric periods in history despise them. And they destroy everything for a dubious dance in the eternal now. And it could just as well happen tomorrow as yesterday.
A new medium, like the internet, is a liberator or acts as a catalyst to new forms, new stimulation's. And that means that the element of fascination re-enters culture. We are ignorant in front of what can be known, therefore we need to be inspired to know beyond what we ever thought possible. New forms of communication then and new ways to keep the mind folding back against the impossible that seems to press inward all the time.
The greatest modern literary theme is the stupendous birth of awesome machines and emaciated, backward, barbaric human beings playing out in their shadows. We will be the people and the culture the future must overcome. I hope not but it is a theme.
David
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