Thinkcorps

I got an email this morning from a friend, announcing a 4-part series he wrote that’s appearing on sfgate.com. He’s also started a blog, which unlike the advice you’ll get from thousands of bloggers, isn’t about the ‘conversation’ so much as it is about exercising/exorcising his own skills, ideas, emotions, etc. It’s a writer’s blog, treated writerly.

Now part of what makes blogging such a phenom is that you can do whatever you feel like, post whatever you want. There are no rules, save one, really—make it personal, make it reflect your passion. And yet—writing?! He’s posting actual stories, pieces he’s sat down and thought about, crafted and revised. I even have the evidence in a recent post where he destroyed his laptop after it crashed while in the middle of composing what i can only imagine was a lengthy post.

I suppose that it’s only natural to expect that the expansive population of blogs would reflect our own society, and our own individual contributions. The vast majority are going to jot, and only a select few will take the time to craft. But the Net is awash in information, and a jot adds only one tiny dimension to that original data point such that we need to compile several jots (or opinions) in order to sufficiently contextualize the data. So presently, we jot and jot, flushed with our new power to influence, and others code and code building tools to filter and organize the data and the jots. Once the tools mature, however, the jots will become just another data point—ones we won’t even see until enough of them coalesce into something large enough to be visible.

The Power Law and Folksonomies
There were once conversations about “power laws,” the natural tendencies (from top and bottom) of the powerful to retain power. And then people moved on to “folksonomies,” which convert that same power law into programmatic user interfaces. I personally like the added dimension a folksonomy provides, but I have no idea what effect it will have long term. It destroys the editor, the programmer, the writer. What can only matter is a popular vote. If you visit Flickr’s main tag page, you’ll see that not only do they need an entire page to display enough useful tags, the tags don’t change much over time. What bubbles up is what bubbles up. It takes an editor, a human personality, to email the link of a cool Flickr group to friends or post it on a blog where I might click on it. Otherwise, I’d never see anything new or unique.

Most of you are saying that I’m full of crap, and that clearly this is all working because it’s working right now. But I’d have to say that it’s only working well where you can cut a swath across the entire Internet. Eliminate even one group of users, and your effectiveness drops dramatically. Which means that while we’re all very satisfied with our little world (and it is so very little), we are building on the lowest common denominator. That’s what the network effect is, after all. So when we all become great successes and the world beats that path to our door, we may be very surprised at what we’ve wrought. Who wants a path to their door beaten into the dirt, anyway?

My Original Point
So I suppose that what I’m lamenting is not so much the death of writing, but the lack of currency that good writing has. I believe that the forms of writing will change. Clearly, what one chose to write down on a wet clay tablet is going to be different than what we bang out on our cell phones today. And maybe we’ll suffer under the shadowy reign of Microsoft’s grammar checker, maybe we’ll turn it off.

In an age where information dominates all, are we fashioning ourselves after it? Am I crafting an informationally rich post here? I did include points on ‘folksonomies’ and ‘network effects’ which I know to be hot topics. Am I holding my post up to the Google mirror, to judge its ability to attract?

Even in magazines, the print ones, NY editors will hack your little piece to death to make sure it contains enough information. Print is worse of course, since your word count is generally fixed and your editor is forced to pump up your piece’s information density to absurd highs. As a writer, I find it’s easier to simply turn away. If there’s an interesting trend in this, it’s that print magazines, currently under siege by digital media, aren’t trying to differentiate themselves from the data-rich Web at all. It smacks of a last desperate stand —who cares what happens in the future as long as the teat we’re sucking on now is wet?

I would have thought that great writing would have enjoyed more of a Renaissance than it has. I’m making a distinction, of course, between posts that are long and intelligent and data-rich and those that are just good writing, good stories. Because, to be honest, I don’t learn much from most of these ‘informative’ discussions. There’s very little new to be had in any given post or article, when thousands are simply mimicking one side or the other. Truly original stories are few and far between when everyone’s chasing their Google PageRank.

I take heart however, that there are pockets of people who already have their audience and are happy to write for them and no one else (maybe a couple passers-by, if they happen along). It’s their stories—whispered in the ears’ of friends or screamed out into the digital abyss—that truly resonate.

If Bittorrent (torrent Web sites, in particular) can teach us anything, it’s that some technologies do serve to create stronger communities. And that the individual benefits most by introducing something truly original into the world. So, screw Google. Go write something no one’s read before.