Writing 2.0
This interesting video by Michael Wesh, an anthropology professor at KSU, has been making the rounds recently (found it on JP’s blog). It illustrates the range of areas which are affected by our transition into a fully connected and digital world, a world where people work, play, learn, create art and foster relationships online and where the perceived line between online and offline identity in increasingly blurred. While I find the whole Web 2.0 complex fascinating - overhyped and idealized as it may be - what really caught my attention in Wesh’s clip was how one particular cultural practice is influenced by the evolution of social computing: writing.
Wesh begins his presentation by remarking that text is linear, then qualifies this statement by adding “when written on paper”. He goes on to point out that digital text is different, or, to be perfectly precise, that it can be read differently. Text as such is always linear in the sense that one word in a sentence is parsed after the preceding one and that there is a starting point and an end point (not necessarily in the sense of meaning but it the way that strings of words are presented to us, whether on a website or in a sticky note left on your desk). What is actually different about digital text is that a) it can be both read and used (hypertext with clickable links), b) that it can be a mesh of text and other media, c) that it can be easily modified and d) that it exists not in any single place but is potentially omnipresent when published on a network.
One item in Wesh’s list of things we need to rethink is rhetoric. Rhetoric in its broadest sense is about understanding the effectiveness of communication, whether we communicate to persuade, praise, inform or criticize. Classical rhetoric is applied, in other words it is about how we can communicate more effectively, whereas modern rhetoric is mostly descriptive and concerned with how we achieve our communicative goals.
So what kind of rhetoric is adapted to a networked culture? How are the rules different in a digital world?
Digital text can no longer be assumed to be read in just one way. I don’t mean this metaphorically as in “there are different ways of interpreting this”, but literally. People may read your text or just parts of it; they might skim through it, copy and paste it, quote it, link it, email it, blog it, digg it, bookmark it. They might put it on their blogs or talk about it in their podcast. Or perhaps your text is not even read by a human being but by a machine. Knowing and reacting to these many different applications changes how we write. And then there’s the question of whom you’re addressing that also has an effect. Traditionally, when you’re writing a novel, a poem, a newspaper article - anything on paper - you are holding a monologue. You may have an implicit reader in mind but there is nobody who will actually give a live response to what you are saying. The way our culture of writing has evolved in the course of centuries to the present day is shaped by this situation. Writing meant talking to yourself in the paper age - and not just that. It also meant that whatever was put down was meant for posterity. Publishing was not merely the idea of making a text available to a group of readers - it meant committing it to the public record, making it a part of some assumed eternal archive. Funny to think that this was actually the early concept we had of the Web: a repository of mankind’s knowledge. Before something was published, it was edited, vetted and checked for mistakes with the greatest utmost care because it was assumed to be immutable and permanent. But since it is now possible to modify a text later if you discover an error, the pursuit of perfection has become relatively senseless. You instead create texts that works in the situations that you need them in, for those people you are talking to. You create texts on an as-is basis to serve a concrete function. Consequently, the weight and relevance of a text is not longer fixed and no longer comes exclusively from the author but is instead an amalgam of quotes, comments and links.
It follows that digital text is different for a reason: it is created and received in a different environment than paper text. It also serves a broader range of functions. We use instant messengers to “chat”, basically writing in many ways like we normally talk. This is especially true for synchronous communication such as chats, but blogs are also like conversations regarding their interactive context. What is interesting is that blogging may seem very conversational on the surface but that a lot of planning goes into composition, much more than is possible in a conversation. You won’t find a lot of glaring grammar mistakes in blogs because obviously a blogger can (and will, in most cases) check what he has written before publishing it. Thus blogs actually mimic conversations rhetorically but the circumstances of their production and reception are quite different.
Writing as it is practiced in blogs is characterized by shorter pieces, the emulation of spoken discourse, the centrality of the author as an actor and intertextuality, i.e. frequently referring to other texts. Just as such a style hardly works in traditional paper-based texts the old style of writing won’t work in the new environment. In other words, traditional genres such as the op-ed are like fossils in the new ecology of blogs, wikis and other forms that are adapted to the environment. They may still be well-written and informative but the surrounding discourse situation - a permanent, time-shifted and physically unrestrained conversation - works against them. Journalists, marketers and others who have worked hard to make communication a profession need to unlearn parts of what they know and return to the basics of how people interact. Composition is still a valuable skill - more valuable than ever, perhaps - but how you write is now more dependent on situation and addressee than in the slow-moving paper age.
I wonder how this will change our reading habits in the long run. Most expository texts are still largely written without any visible actors - the author remains in the background to make the text seem more objective. Yet in a world of interactive texts this approach may eventually fall out of style, at least to a certain extent. It seems we are closing the gap between spoken and written communication - or finding a third way of getting our point across.