Old/New World Discourse: To be a writer, part I

These days, "easy" work is available for writers either in creating documentation for software or in supplying content for websites. In contrast, when I began in this business, life was different; print media dominated. Tacit, mass produced, mass distributed ideas, sieved through gatekeepers like department editors, constituted the leading, cheap, popular, commercial platforms for writing.

In the 1970s, novice writers were considered to have established themselves if they had newspapers to which they contributed. A select few, among our wordsmith population, wrote for magazines (academic journals being a different matter altogether; great for tenure, impractical for most other portfolio needs). Rare was the author whose name was printed on the cover of a book (and rare was the book that was not produced by means of a mechanical press).

Simultaneously, audio-based media were hot. Whereas radio was the province of my parents' generation, television and film were among my youth's "sexy" channels of communication. During my formative years, "hacking" referred not to fixing source code, but to creating scripts for broadcasters or for other camera-related endeavors.

Just a bit later, in the 1980s, when folks like me taught courses such as Introduction to Mass Media or Media and Society, we focused our students on print and on broadcast media and those media's influence on collectives and on individuals. At that time, digital media and hypermedia, if referred to at all within the college classroom, were the stuff of research labs.

I remember a semester, in the late 1980's, when I was granted special permission to borrow, for pedagogical purposes, a DVD and a DVD player (those were the decades when citizens thrilled just to change from records to cassettes) from MIT's Media Lab, a state of the art facility, which was focused largely on questions of the human-machine interface, and which anticipated future media's convergence. Whereas a few of my students understood how to operate a VCR, none of us (nor the rest of the general public) had ever seen a DVD player. We had to call MIT for further instructions on how to operate the thing.

While my students and I were talking in whispers to that new technology, urging it to show us high resolution pictures concurrent with allowing us to listen to its well reproduced sounds, other universities, as well as some government agencies, were installing new forms of computational devices. Print sources were beginning to play "technology catch-up," too.

I clearly recall, also in the 1980s, interviewing for a columnist position at a major newspaper. The editor in charge of the features department proudly showed me his stable of new computers. Laptops, cell phones and other "simple" sophistications were yet years away. That his office would be eliminating light boards and blue pencils was significant enough to him and to me.

Certain factions of the population (as is usually the case in most societies when the locus of power shifts) became anxious about the burgeoning technology. Courses like Media Ethics were requested from the upper echelons of many academic institutions. Since I was interested in epistemic questions, I found my groove in that subject matter. I enjoyed relatively quiet success for my research on questions about the nexus of rhetoric and of ethics (e.g. I was even awarded federal money, a nice feather in my academic cap, for work in that area).

While the power brokers of civilization were getting increasingly bothered about the impact of all of those new toys, on their authority, some of the rest of us remained concerned with getting into print. Computers did not dissuade editors from hiring and firing. Thus, though busy with teaching and research, I continued to contribute, here and there, mostly to newspapers. Such offerings would soon become outdated.

In "To Be a Writer: Part Two," this blog will examine the impact of digital technology, in general, and of convergent technology, specifically, on the vocation of writing.
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Little Smile:

Amidst the hustle, bustle and rudeness of the prepesach shopping crowd, I was privileged to hear about a spiritual haven. More specifically, as Missy Oldest and I were evaluating the relative merits of various manufacturers' potato starch, while in a grocery store of considerable size, an important announcement came on over the shop's loudspeakers; anyone wishing to participate in a mincha minyon was invited to come immediately to a designated area near the shop's checkouts.