Takeaways (2)
It’s important to remember that, in the modernist mode of being a writer, publishing is publishing and writing is writing. The “making public” of writing can happen at a later, compositional (and typographical) phase–type needs to be set in place. In this instance, writing is a direct conduit from thought, and publishing is one step removed from that, at least:
thinking –> writing –> publishing
You could even put “dreaming” before thinking here in this lame flowchart (or the unconscious; thinking that we’re not aware of).
However, in the “cloud” of social media, the flow changes a little bit:
thinking –> writing/publishing
The compositional/typographical tools become the writing tools; a “press to publish” compositional field narrows the range and timespan of an embryonic “writing” stage to one that is more “in the public.” This can be demonstrated any number of ways, such as the collaborative/tribal give-and-take between an author and audience that was talked about in the last post.
The potential problem isn’t with the writing in this role per se (although this can lead to bad writing of a different sort than the bad writing of the traditional model). The problem is that it binds thought more closely with publishing. It has the potential to have the writer willingly cede her or his thoughts to the whims of the marketplace. Now, sure, it could be argued that that happens all the time; writers thinking of projects that will sell, or whatever. Nothing inherently wrong with that. But writing is the nether-dreamworld acting as an intermediary and buffer between our private thoughts and the interactions we have. That is where, to a large extent, it gains its restorative power: to remind the reader of an inner life, separate from the bounds of a commercial world we are all, to one extent or another, trapped in. (This can be intimated as “mere” escape or the multilayered pleasures of immersive worldbuilding.) Worse still is the potential creeping of the “commercial network” into the true wilds of the unconscious, so that we don’t realize that we really don’t want what we want.
The point is not to say that great art can’t be made within a hypertexted, collaborative space. The point is, rather (or one of them, at least) is that attitude of short term, tactical gains in a marketplace–with these new tools that can shrink the bandwidth of a writer’s private lexicon–can potentially yield mere empty interconnectedness, without durability or the idiosyncratic vision of a writer that might be, in the end, his or her only true hallmark.
The early pulp writers were not great writers, for the most part, yet they put their hearts into their work, and their stories had high-impact and were encoded (encrypted, if you will) with a high level of cultural impact for future generations. They were networked, after a fashion, with the fan community, but were also for the most part isolated voices (the poignancy of written letters also is an instance of the marriage of thought and writing).
From The Exploit by Galloway and Thacker (truly a great book):
The expectation is that one is either online or not. There is little room for kind of online or sort of online. Network status doesn’t allow for technical ambiguity, only a selection box of discrete states. It is frustrating, ambiguity is, especially from a technical point of view. It works or it doesn’t, and when it doesn’t, it should be debugged or replaced. … One way to fix the ambiguity is to be “always on,” even when asleep, in the bathroom, or the unconscious. All the official discourses of the Web demand that one is either online and accounted for, or offline and still accounted for.
If we give away the store (our reserves of who we are), if we give our selves, what are we really receiving in return?
