Saturday, April 4, 2015

On The Emerging New Class Of Writer



(Please see my article, "A few More Inconvenient Truths," about Alan Turing and the Universal Machine, as a companion piece to this article.)



I'd like to write about an aspect of the complex world of literature in this era, that is in part, contradictory to what I wrote in an essay about poetry. In that earlier piece I wrote about the descending spiral affecting modern poetry, in that because people do not buy poetry,the quality of poetry declines, resulting in even fewer people buying poetry, and so on...

I would just like to say, as an aside, that I'm not particularly uncomfortable with contradiction, if it concerns aspects of a problem as convoluted, and contradictory, as that of modern publishing. Life presents us with contradictions, and when that is the case acknowledging it is necessary to the pursuit of truth.

At any rate, having made the case for the necessity of writing as a profession, I would like to look at the issue of the emerging new class of writer in our society, the blogger, the internet writer, the citizen journalist.

In at least one important way this new class of writer is a boon to the integrity of modern publishing, in that unpaid, unaffiliated, citizen writers, can simply say anything they want to. Whether it is acknowledged or not, established writers who work for newspapers, or publishing houses, or almost any profit driven entity are inevitably influenced in what they say by such affiliation. The academic writer is freed from this pressure to a great degree, but the academic writer must always think of how his or her writing will be received by peers, a thing which is a double edged sword. It enforces a high standard of production, professionalism and rigorous thinking, but also reduces creativity and discourages original thought, and perpetuates conformity and redundancy in expression. So the freedom of expression attained by this new class of unpaid writer, in the era of the internet, is probably unprecedented since the invention of the printing press! A completely unaffiliated writer, unpaid for their work, can now say whatever they want to say, while also reaching an audience! There is no one to prevent them from publishing whatever they want to, as I do here on this blog, and there is a tremendous amount to be said for that!

Yet we are left with this quandary: although this unprecedented freedom of expression is a boon to writing, it is also anathema to writing, in that it allows for an enormous amount of expression, while at the same time allowing for no effective means of separating the wheat from the chaff. The sheer amount that gets published makes any serious attempt at critical evaluation of that content impossible, and so there is no way for anyone to know what part of that output is of real value. Many people might say to this: "Fine, then we have a 'free market' of ideas in which people can pick and choose what interests them."

The problem with such thinking is that we run into the above cited problem with poetry. Not all ideas, not all art, not all critical thinking, not all journalism - or whatever writing is in questio - is created equal. And if nobody is able to make a living in writing, as well as having the freedom of expression to write what they will, then the quality of writing (and thus of culture, and of thought itself) will rapidly devolve to the lowest common denominator.

This problem is quite humorously laid out in the movie Idiocracy, and has been understood since at least the time of Plato. To avert such cultural and intellectual decline, somehow the quality of creativity must be protected and advanced. So here perhaps, more than anywhere else the question must be confronted. . . "If the computer replaces human labor, even in intellectual endeavors, as it is already doing, then as technology advances, will we lose the ability to preserve meaningful culture altogether?

Those most enamored of the "free information" generated by the computer are consumers of that information, not its creators, and that inherent imbalance between these interests could spell the end of higher culture over time, resulting in "Idiocracy."

I don't have the answers to all the questions generated here, but I think, as a society, we need to seriously grapple with those questions, in order to preserve a society worth living in.

Brent Hightower
Copyright 2015 Brent Hightower
21stcenturyperceptions.blogspot.com

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