...as a round-a-bout the area of "writer", I’m very concerned with how technology will affect writing. I’ve already been told countless times that digital platforms have replaced the print newspaper, and it is really no question that people turn to Wikipedia way before cracking opening the Britannica. Informative writing is something that is becoming less and less “specialized,” and more and more democratic or “collaborative.” The world doesn’t necessarily need people who merely taut an ability to grammatically construct sentences- it needs professionals who can apply their knowledge and skills to a digital world.
Writing has been democratized, or in some way collectivized, as Bruns more or less points out in Produsage. Though Bruns isn’t talking about the writing process, per se, methods like Wikipedia and the news blogging show how it applies. The medium of the internet- the new internet literacies- lend themselves extremely well to notions of democratic-like, non-authoritarian collaboration. Even as I, in my professional career, might side-step the digital question by swerving towards graduate school and a career as a professor, the digital world is changing literature, too. As Hayles points out, there are entire new worlds of “literature” and electronic texts which only lack an effective method of classroom integration. People everywhere have even begun participating in a vibrant cell-phone novel culture, for example, which is especially popular in Japan.
As Baker writes in the Wikipedia article- and as cell phone novels sometimes make painfully obvious- it is no longer necessary for professors or accredited writers to be the ones making up the literary environment of the net. The internet is something that almost anyone can contribute too, regardless of whether they’ve got degrees or not. The people who were initially contributing to Wikipedia weren’t the people who had already poured their intellectual energies into completing dissertations, and the people who are texting away at their cell-phone masterpieces certainly aren’t those who’ve had any commercial success or those who’ve been through university creative writing programs. Guys like me, who are very attached to things like physical books and quiet, gloomy reflective writing, and who tend to do adequately well in meeting- but not exceeding- the expectations of my more-or-less literary “conservative” professors, have got quite a bit of adjusting to do.
The digital medium has even changed the type of writing that people want to read. Hayles Hyper and Deep Attention suggests that learning patterns have changed, and often today’s generation spends its reading or “learning” time online doing a plethora of other things. The types of big paragraphs which I seem to have an affection for isn’t reflective of the type of writing that most people on the internet want to read. Deep, word for word, fully attentive reading is partly a thing of the past.
And yet, I don’t think fully attentive reading will ever completely be a thing of the past. As a writer and a language learner, I can say with 100% certainty that I cannot study vocabulary or practice writing Chinese characters while instant messaging my friends. Furthermore, though the article we read on remediation article has a point, and history moves toward being more media-integrated, I don’t think that old mediums will disappear completely. I am still strong in the believer that the classic “novel”- and I’m talking solely about the physical novel here- will never disappear. Statistics have shown that people are just as interested in reading books as ever, and there’s always an audience for people who want something “vintage.” Since most people who read adamantly (and I’m going out on a limb here) probably have discovered that they, at least, like physical books better than most other media at least some of the time, I’m confident that there will always been room for writers who want to right typical novels.
But that leaves me with two choices here- I could be the type of writer (or graduate student) that resigns to studying the status quo and finds a nice niche position there, or I could be the type that takes chances on experiments- some of which will most definitely lead nowhere.
This reflection has been plenty convoluted, and maybe a little bit confused. But it represents where I’m at right now. Writing for Cyberspace has not helped me decide where I’d like to vent my creative energies, but it has exposed me to a world of possibilities that I knew very little about. In a way, this complicates my dilemma. Before, I couldn’t figure out what kind of writer I wanted to be. Now, I can’t figure what medium I want to write on. Maybe this new exposure has been just what I needed- but I’m falling into cliché.
(Reflective Essay- Prompt 2)
