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The Future Writer
In the 1990s, most
news publishers responded to the rise of the Web with the assumption
that Web sites could serve as advertisements for newspapers, but weren’t
likely to replace papers themselves. Others began tweaking their
business models to fit what they saw as the new market
conditions—creating more content and giving more of it away,
incrementally. A few, like Daniels, who was working at the
The News and
Observer
in Raleigh, North Carolina, in 1993, saw the Internet as a gamechanging
technology for journalism.
“When Mosaic came
out, we began doing Web sites and publishing on the Internet,” Daniels
said. “What we learned was that it’s all around story. It’s about
creating the opportunity for consumers to get information in the most
effective way possible— what they want, when they want it, at the time
they most need it. We began telling [news] stories in multimedia with
audio and interactive graphics and video back in 1994.… We sold all our
newspapers but one in 1995.”
Across the United
States, newspapers and magazines are focusing their resources more and
more on their Web sites. In the process, they’re giving voice to an
entirely new breed of digital journalist even as they show the door to
news department veterans. Many writers are justifiably alarmed by the
shift, but, according to Daniels, writers who are willing to view
themselves as storytellers first and foremost, who are eager to
incorporate new technology into the writing process, have a bright
future.
“What’s the biggest
thing that held up Hollywood in recent years?” he asked. “The writers
went on strike. They’re the ones who put the story together.”
Read differently, in
relation to books, this means that the cloistered author—holed up in
some wooded cabin to perfect his or her tome—has become an artifact of
history. Today, cultivating and communicating with a reader base has
become an essential component of building a platform and positioning
oneself as viable to publishers, particularly for nonficiton. O’Reilly
reported that more than 70% of literary agents advise their clients to
blog at least five hours a week.
Beyond blogging,
this means that the writers of the future (both fiction and nonfiction)
will work with Web designers, software writers, and other professionals
to create product.
The more ambitious
among them will likely start the process before ever approaching an
editor with a manuscript. For many young writers, and writers outside of
the United States, that’s already standard practice.
Japanese novelist
Yoshi became a cross-continent media sensation when a novel he had first
texted into his cell phone became so popular that it went on to sell
more than 2 million copies as a printed book. He’s not alone; half of
Japan’s top 10 best-selling books last year started out as cell
phone–based.
The good news is,
you don’t have to be a Tokyo text-novelist to take advantage of
technology as a writer. In a conversation last fall, Lewis Lapham,
historian and long-time editor of
Harper’s
magazine,
acknowledged that his first response to electronic media was
“denunciation.” Lapham’s newest publishing venture, a journal called
Lapham’s
Quarterly,
represents his first foray into multimedia content generation.
“The Web site is not
just a translation of the journal onto the Web. They’re different.
They’re different media. I’m trying to do an analogous thing, give a
sense of the past. But I’m also doing a radio program with the same
premise. These are separate media. There are things you can do on radio,
on the Web, that you can’t do in print and vice versa.”
To Lapham, the
crudeness, silliness, and uncultured quality of today’s Web culture is a
symptom of the immaturity of the new medium and the youthfulness of its
users. The change will be gradual. “We’re still playing with it like
it’s a toy,” he said of the Web. “We don’t yet know how to make art with
it. McLuhan points out that the printing press was 1468, it’s a hundred
years before you get to Cervantes, to Shakespeare.”
The Same Language
Shakespeare seems a
far cry from where we are today. An unremarked consequence of our new
information age—one that will influence readers, writers, and publishers
in the future—is that bad writing, chat speak, text, millions of message
board posts that come from and lead nowhere, are having a cheapening
effect on all written content. As veteran journalist Mitchell Stephens
has pointed out: “Editors and news directors today fret about the
Internet as their predecessors worried about radio and TV, and all now
see the huge threat the Web represents to the way they distribute their
product. They have been slower to see the threat it represents to the
product itself. In a day when information pours out of digital spigots,
stories that package painstakingly gathered facts on current events—what
happened, who said what, when—have lost much of their value.”
Consider French
management professor Philip M. Parker’s recent invention of a system
that can aggregate all the available information on a subject into book
form in just minutes. According to the
New York Times,
Parker
has “written” more than 200,000 such books.
The idea that the
practice and craft of writing can simply retool itself for the digital
age overlooks the fact that the Web is giving rise to totally unique
forms of expression, a writing that is different from the kind
traditionally found in books. YouTube clips, animations, and other video
applications account for more than 60% of Internet traffic today. The
proportion is growing rapidly. While very little of this visual content
has any monetary value (the most ad revenue a YouTube clip has made has
been $25,000), there is a seemingly ceaseless supply of it, as well as
numerous vehicles for distribution.
What does Web 2.0
portend for the written word itself? O’Reilly has an opinion on that,
too. In addition to being a Web enthusiast, he is himself a bibliophile.
He graduated from Harvard, won a grant from the National Endowment for
the Arts to translate Greek fables in 1976, and later wrote a biography
of Dune
author
Frank Herbert. He disagrees with the notion that the Internet is
spurring us toward something like a postliterate age, but he
acknowledges that technology inevitably changes that which it comes in
contact with, including forms of communication.
“Look at
Notre-Dame de Paris,”
he said. “The novel is not about the hunchback so much as it is about
the church, and the idea of sculpture as a way of communicating stories.
In the preliterate era they told the stories through these churches.…
Victor Hugo was lamenting the loss of that stone literacy, where people
would look up at the church and know what it was about. Yes, something
was lost. But we gained a lot. I remember a conversation I had at our
open source convention with Freeman Dyson, the physicist. He said
something wonderful; someone asked him what do you think about the fact
that we were losing something or other, and he said, ‘We have to forget,
otherwise there would be no room for new things.’ That’s an important
thing to take.… Be accepting of the losses and the gains.”
“Reading isn’t going to go away,” agreed Abram, “but it’s
only one aspect. Probably, it will be some combination of reading,
visual conversations, and lessons. What you’re authoring is contributing
to a corpus that is significantly larger than it is now, electronically.
Most of the important stuff will have been converted 20 years from now.
We can convert the entire Library of Congress for $9 billion right now,
which, in terms of national priorities, is only five weeks of Iraqi
conflict. It’s doable. It used to be
undoable. The corpus, the ability to create cultural context, is going
to change the nature of how culture is expressed.”
Lapham was likewise
dismissive of the notion that IT is bringing us to the brink of postliteracy, but he acknowledged that written material will likely
never regain the cultural primacy it enjoyed in earlier centuries. “The written word
will survive because there are things you can do with the written word
that you simply cannot do with film or with radio. I don’t know if it
will be a mass medium,” said Lapham. “The large majority of mankind is
passive. The change comes from the active minority. Those people will
continue to read. Books will continue to be read. Maybe the more popular
forms of writing will be taken over by video games. But it’s up to
members of your generation to teach young people how to read and what
the difference is between reading literature and sifting data.”
Rushkoff sees new
kinds of information systems springing to life next to writing, and sees
this as part of a grand evolution in human communication. “Just because
things became written down, we didn’t lose oral culture,” said Rushkoff.
“Read Walter Ong [author of
Orality and
Literacy:
The
Technologizing of the Word].
We changed, but we still talk to each other, dance for each other. We do
them in different situations. The written word is cool. It’s for a
certain kind of thing. The more media we have to exchange, the better we
understand what the biases are. The written word is abstract,
contractual. It launched monotheism, ethics; it launched evolution. It
was really important for a lot of things, and that will remain. But
visual media will lead to other kinds of insights.”
For lovers of
literary writing, who are now watching the marketplace and Internet
erode the remains of nineteenth-century print culture, these assurances
may not be particularly consoling. We have no choice but to accept them.
Arguing against the forces of digitalization is as much a losing battle
as cursing the coming of the evening tide. But before we invest
ourselves too deeply in this future, consider this: If new technologies
expose the biases inherent in print and text, so the converse is true as
well; that the written word is uniquely suitable for revealing the
myopias of our digital age. If poor old Oliver Goldsmith were alive
today, he might argue that critical reading abilities, cultural
literacy, and traditional literacy were never more vital than the
present, when Linux writers are regarded as the modern incarnation of
holy monks and the newest Facebook application is treated with the
deference of an illuminated manuscript. Coding skills are highly
marketable in the twenty-first century. We, as a civilization, are
duty-bound to encourage technological know-how. However, before we make
the mistake of convincing ourselves that a knack for writing software is
more valuable than the ability to simply write well, we might consider
looking anew at the souvenir that is the book. One day, computer
programs—these objects of our fascination and frustration—will learn to
write themselves. And we’ll be left with our ideas, however grand or
shallow. #
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