writing

Digital guru Clay Shirky claimed in 2002 that "Writing as a special talent became obsolete in the 19th century. The bottleneck was publishing". That assertion has been echoed in claims that we are all writers now.

Raymond Kurzweill went further, writing in the November 2007 Atlantic that

The means of creativity have now been democratized. For example, anyone with an inexpensive high-definition video camera and a personal computer can create a high-quality, full-length motion picture. A musician in her dorm room commands the resources once available only in a multimillion-dollar recording studio.

As noted in discussion elsewhere on this site regarding blogging and podcasting) many readers would consider that mere use of a keyboard and a server does not gift the 'writer' with talent. Having a keyboard doesn't make you Ingmar Bergman or even Ed Wood. The musician in the dorm room has tools but, with apologies to Kurzweil, tools do not equal the greatness possessed by Mahler or Mozart.

Mark Dery questioned the digital pieties -

Another fit of spleen: This ghastly notion, popularized by Masters of Their Own Domain like Jeff Jarvis, that every piece of writing is a "conversation." It's a no-brainer that writing is a communicative act, and always has been. And I'll eagerly grant the point that composing in a dialogic medium like the net is like typing onstage, in Madison Square Garden, with Metallica laying down a speed metal beat behind you. You're writing on the fly, which is halfway between prose and speech. But the Jarvises of the world forget that not all writing published online is written online. I dearly loathe Jarvis's implication that all writing, online or off, should sound like water-cooler conversation; that content is all that matters; that foppish literati should stop sylphing around and submit to the tyranny of the pyramid lead; and that any mind that can't squeeze its thoughts into bullet points should just die. This is the beige, soul-crushing logic of the PowerPoint mind. What will happen, I wonder, when we have to write for the postage-stamp screen of the iPod? The age of IM prose is waiting in the wings...



























     next page  (publishing landmarks)