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

In "To Be a Writer: Part One," this blog examined the impact of mechanical technologies on the vocation of writing.

During the early 1990s, the second generation of cell phones, those which could be used outside of a restricted range, were created, improved upon, and distributed. Although digital cameras and Internet access were not yet widely available on those devices, the ability for individuals to form coalitions, even of the purely social variety, had become greater than ever. Certain technologically outdated moguls opted for early retirement.

Wealthy western nations were embracing not "two chickens in every pot," or "two cars in every garage," but "two televisions in every home." Rap was becoming a progressively more popular form of music. Society cruised on audio-based literacy, with undergraduates balking at the requisite hours of writing classes (it was not until the present decade that college students and others began to holler for opportunities to improve their expository writing skills), posted in just about every postsecondary institution's curricula. The new hot stuff, the issue of the scion of the silicon chip, was not yet profoundly felt.

When that influence began to filter down from the research labs to other social echelons, members of my generation jazzed ourselves up to embrace the particulars of that technology's bells and whistles. Most of us resented the change. 

I don't own a television and I certainly have no desire for one to be incorporated into my refrigerator. I refuse to use a video camera and I have no desire to be able to film, clandestinely, from a handheld computational device. As for mechanized automobile key pads, microwaves that send signals which interrupt international phone calls, or (the impositions created by) electronic gate keys, count me among the dissonant (See: "Cell Phones, Electronic Gate Keys, and Automatic Automobile Key Pads," March, 2008, and "Domestic Technology Woes," January, 2007).

While it is easy to understand, especially by dint of hindsight, how Gutenberg's printing press sprung communication (in its previously hand-scripted form) from the claws of the extreme elite (think royalty and heads of religious organizations) to the masses and how that social change, in turn, gave voice to many more diffuse elements of society, few academics, scientists, or government officials (all of whom were rushing to process early retirement or to receive some other sort of golden parachute), let alone humble writers, entirely anticipated the turn of the millennium's technological shifts and those shifts' bearings on society. Visionaries, however, did understand.

I remember attending a communications conference at the University of Dublin to talk about my research on communication ethics (I worked that topic for a while) and meeting the brilliant media theorist, Neil Postman. Professor Postman spoke to conference attendees about a novel idea, i.e. about technopoly, about the forthcoming prioritization, of our society, of efficiency over other communication needs.

Postman anticipated the approaching communication revolution. He foresaw our culture's call for embellished data and for embellished data devices at the cost of the quality of data content and at the cost of the deep quality of data vehicles (globally, apparati are created with built-in limits to their life spans; although technologies appear shiny, many perform as though merely rebuilt). More fascinating, though, was Postman's prediction of the social pressures concomitant to those new technologies. He realized that the new playthings would generate unnatural needs for jettisoning the social leveling that had been constructed (albeit also artificially) by our affairs with print and with the more simple electronic media. He estimated that social strata would be enforced, rather than broken down, by the advent of convergence media.

Postman was right. As a society, we have returned to a space where we glean our ideas from predominantly text-based sources (e.g. a blog is no less an essay that is a feature article; the two communication forms are just checked over and disseminated differently). 

Superficially, a reemphasis on visual data would seem great for writers. If one were to look a bit deeper, though, such as change can be appreciated as unfathomable rot. Ditto most of the changes that are currently impacting on critical and creative thinking around the world (if there ever was a time to be concerned about the lack of light shining in the minds of the masses and of our leaders, now would be that time).

As a collective, we have sacrificed attentive discourse for troughs of words. Electronic channels urge us denizens to please the deity of keywords, of widely used lexical units, which help us measure the number of hits that a bit of text receives during Internet searches (the wisdom being that if your rhetoric triggers informational retrieval, your ads get read, and that if your ads get read, your rhetoric has worth) on the alter once reserved for intellectual integrity.

Said simply, during this decade, writers are asked not so much to create content but to create the means to generate moolah (sure, commerce was always a consideration in the past with examples of such thinking ranging from the announcements placed on paperback novels to the fast food tie-ins made for television characters, but with today's computer-aided ability to precisely target demographics and psychographics, this ominous behavior, of writing for profit rather than writing for social grace, has worsened. The extent of this harm is such that ours is a social landscape with no need for Big Brother since ours is a social landscape with, for example, software generated cookies [not sweet, in the least]).

In my own, humble experience of recent weeks, for instance, during which I have had no more than an average number of encounters with this highly frightening high tech phenomenon, my moderators have asked me to change my prose, or the framework for my prose, to accommodate their sales plans in a variety of ways. Consider the book publisher who told me that my pages contained too much descriptive discourse (i.e. not enough commonly used language). Consider the publisher who insisted that I procure an Ad Sense account and some other unsundary electronic rites of passage in order to work for her. Consider the distance learning dean who insisted I devote thirty hours of time to learning her software just to advance to the next stage of candidacy for a very part-time appointment.

Consider, as well, recently listed links to this blog. In a span of two days, I found Old/New World Discourse referred to in places as disparate as: frenchbulldog.org, psychicguide.info, congo.com (a technology site), and infopig.com (under the rubric of "New Jersey News"). Little was said, anywhere in my nonstatistically representative search, about this blog in the contexts of: Judaism, Israeliness, motherhood, or even academia. It's probably of little help that my tags include words like "piercing" and "strike." Next week, I'll (has v'Shalom) be linked to body art and to socialism.

Software cannot discern between adjectives and topics. Software is only as reliable as the parameters within which it must operate. People are often disinclined to question the validity of software parameters or of the references to which those parameters point. Sigh.

Whereas technologically-infused media enable me: to teach college classes on line, to instantaneously send samples of my writing to important monitors (i.e. potential employers), and to quickly hunt down odd or otherwise specialized facts, those media confound me as a writer. To be lucrative in today's market is to be a fashioner of discourse easily copied and transmitted vis-a-vis convergent technology venues.

Sure social networking sites such as: Facebook and MySpace, Yahoo! Mash and Bebo have a place and a purpose. Sure, it's fun for me to accept the rhetorical gauntlet thrown down by periodonist sites and by breeders of Maine Coon Cats.

It would just be nice, once in a while, to write for merit.