I'm going to go ahead and quote the blogger instead of Zadie Smith since I can barely make out what she's saying in the (sensationally titled) video we were to watch:
Smith (and countless other writers who have expounded on the subject) spends too much time distracted online so it's a disaster for writers? Do I really need to point out the fallacy in that statement? That's not to be harsh, but to elaborate on something that she herself wrote about regarding Facebook and The Social Network--generations, or more accurately, the way we divide ourselves into groups with like experiences, are splintering at a much faster rate than before. I've never been able to figure out what generation I qualify in and that's partly the point. Shared experiences beyond the momentary are hard to come by nowadays: what besides maybe 9/11 can everybody remember and relate to right now? Music isn't the explosive cultural marker it used to be (I doubt there will ever be another Beatlemania), neither is literature or name-your-preferred-art-or-flashpoint. We will become aggregates of moments, as dozens of sparks might resemble a fire.
I grew up in a strange time with regard to computers. In kindergarten, we did reading lessons on computer programs with clunky vinyl headsets. I was taught how to use a mouse. Really. I got my first PC around age ten and I was maybe one of a handful of kids who had a computer at home. It seems absurd now, but my friends and I dialed up the web--sometimes interrupted by an incoming phone call--and spent days in chat rooms (oh the things I learned in there!).
By middle school, we were doing typing tutorials, rectangle blocks covering our hands so we learned touch typing. (Most kids cheated.) My librarian taught us what "http" meant and what a search engine was. Stuff that, now, is taken for granted.
Photoshop wasn't a thing yet, everyone talked on AIM, MySpace was still awesome, Facebook didn't exist for everybody until I was almost finished with college.
My point is that the internet wasn't quite as culturally solidified or influential as it is now, nor did it look like today's web. (And: that you can identify your place in the digital world most broadly by what you didn't have yet better than by shared experience.)
I'm told, though I have no idea if this is true, that kids learn HTML and basic coding in high school now. I suspect those are elective classes, much like my Excel classes were. But then there are also stories about college students not understanding how to google effectively, and my own anecdotal evidence tutoring high school students suggests that they're no longer taught computer literary either. Rather, like using a mouse, they're expected to already know how to find credible information online. Just like you have to model close reading--supposedly a skill we should have if we can read, right?--you can't take for granted that everyone knows how to do basic search functions; we had to teach kids card catalogs, now we have to teach them Google.
That's a generational problem, possibly the last vestige of generational divides as we know them. Adults with less than impressive web skills see kids zooming around the internet, on The Facebook (misplaced articles are the funniest) and YouTube and the like and assume that the kids know what they're doing when they really don't. Photoshopping zits out of a picture is a far cry from doing artistic digital work, from engaging with the capabilities of software and digital platforms effectively. And limiting the sites they can visit at school isn't an answer to increasing literacy either.
(To be sure, there's a similar pressure on older adults to become fluent in the digital world lest they be entirely disconnected from the culture at large, but they have the old dog, new tricks shadows to retreat to.)
I have no doubt that being able to find and make surprising, novel connections is the currency of the future. When nearly any information is available to nearly anyone who can find it, sheer fact, rote knowledge, loses its value. The people who can draw disparate ideas together--through wit, comedic impulse, with intellectual aims; it doesn't matter much the intent--will become more valuable than ever. Connections and applicability aren't new, of course, but they're going to be more important for any kind of success in a digital world.
To circle back: just because older writers like Smith--Teh Oldz becoming increasingly younger in definition; she's only in her thirties--can't handle the infinite distraction that is the internet doesn't mean that kids will have the same problem. They might, certainly, but who's to say it won't swing the other way, that children today won't have superior coping skills by dint of growing up in an encompassing digital environment? Books were going to drag us all into daydreams and TV was going to rot out minds--you know the story. Maybe today's youth will create more sophisticated procrastination-discouraging add-ons for browsers or maybe they'll find a way to make their browsing and what we currently call "time wasting" a part of the artistic process and product. It will be a different world and we need to get with it.
Why aren't writers excited about how the internet forces people to read everyday, how a "wasted" afternoon link-chasing around websites inevitably teaches you something you never would have learned otherwise?
Money. That's the answer as far as I can tell. We're spending precious writing time online. We're not making cash from the blogs we feel obligated to have. (Or are we?) How are writers going to make a living in this dawning future?
I am idealist, I am young and in the safety of grad school, but to money fretting I say yuck. I have no doubt the money question will be solved--how or when I'm not sure, but I'm am certain it will be. And if the solution ends up being that writers don't get paid unless they're the top of the top and in our last shiny print publication The New Yorker, then that's an answer too. Not one we all like, not the fair and democratic conclusion writers want.
Capitalism: when doing something you love and not getting paid for it is the ultimate devaluation of the self.
My book is worth more than ninety-nine cents.
Literature is worth more than a couple dollars.
Sorry, that ship has sailed. Brush up on your German and publish there. Or get excited about the fact that you can control your book price (regardless of market pressure, if you wish) and that you can make money indefinitely instead of relying on an advance.
I've been told numerous times that if you don't love writing enough to be compelled to do it, if you would stop if you weren't paid for it or published, then you aren't truly a writer. I've also been told that writers shouldn't work for free. Like any blanket advice, both oversimplify the problem facing artists in America, but I think they also reveal the schizoid way we view writing on the cusp of the digital era.
We now self-promote, we build an audience, we publish our own books, we edit ourselves, we create communities, are literary citizens. Keyword here being "self." It's up to ourselves. (But no longer our typewriting in the basement alone selves.) There are certainly attendant problems with that model, namely the lack of external authorities. Who will be the guardians of standards, journalistic ones particularly? It just might become the people we've been writing for all along--our readers. Our novice fact-checker readers on their iPads.
If there's anything the internet has done, it's splinter us into ever-smaller factions that, I'd argue, interrelate based on difference rather than sameness. Sure, you join writers groups (on Google+) and find friends through common movie preferences just like always. But the cultural focus has shifted more to sharing something new: "Have you seen the newest thing/learned this latest tidbit and have you embraced it?" A question we can share until we know the other person's answer. If you won't even try reading an ebook, then that puts you in a whole different sphere than me.
I won't say that's a bad thing either because I think these gaps invite us to find connection in less than obvious ways. Whereas before it was "I also like Lord of the Rings" and the two of you could then nerd out on useless Middle Earth trivia together, now it's "omg you did a kitten version of the LOTR epic and I found it by googling snow shoes three hours ago." If creativity was a highly valued artistic trait pre-internet, how can anyone deny the new heights, however lowbrow, creativity has soared with crowd-sharing and social networks? If kids can't be creative in school anymore, then they'll do it online however they know how.
The internet has also, on the whole, created a literary culture that's fairly colloquial. As word lovers, we can decry that shift all we want and fight it personally, but such a shift marks a difference in what we value as creative or artistic. What gets to the widest audience wins the internet, and guess what, that usually means images, shorter words, humor, and catchy ad-like content. Twentieth century writers didn't write like Jane Austen; twenty-first century authors won't write like John Updike.
These arguments are always happening, cycling around as technology changes and, to some extent, that makes them feel moot. However, there are always the last hangers-on, the charge forward revolutionaries, and the people who have the distinct feeling of having had these arguments before. We need 'em all. To remember where we've been while we snatch visions of the future. Though the internet might someday swallow up physical culture, it will still leave a record of that which it swallows.
So what will we get when everyone grows up with the web? A culture that, despite all the worry and fortune telling we're doing now, will look largely the same as it does today, just remixed into something slightly different. But don't worry, we'll all still be thinking and we'll still be writing.
She calls the Internet “an absolute disaster for writers” because she spends too much time on Facebook and Google, and she imagines a generation of children who won’t know how to concentrate because they grew up with this Internet. And what will you get when everyone grows up with the web?It might be fast-paced web culture speaking here, but this already feels like such an old argument, similar to another article we read a while ago. Really, I think we're moving beyond the chaos phase of hand-wringing over the internet and entering the time where people actually do something about their concerns. (Let it be noted that the "outdated" discussion was only two short years ago. Welcome to the digital age.)
Smith (and countless other writers who have expounded on the subject) spends too much time distracted online so it's a disaster for writers? Do I really need to point out the fallacy in that statement? That's not to be harsh, but to elaborate on something that she herself wrote about regarding Facebook and The Social Network--generations, or more accurately, the way we divide ourselves into groups with like experiences, are splintering at a much faster rate than before. I've never been able to figure out what generation I qualify in and that's partly the point. Shared experiences beyond the momentary are hard to come by nowadays: what besides maybe 9/11 can everybody remember and relate to right now? Music isn't the explosive cultural marker it used to be (I doubt there will ever be another Beatlemania), neither is literature or name-your-preferred-art-or-flashpoint. We will become aggregates of moments, as dozens of sparks might resemble a fire.
I grew up in a strange time with regard to computers. In kindergarten, we did reading lessons on computer programs with clunky vinyl headsets. I was taught how to use a mouse. Really. I got my first PC around age ten and I was maybe one of a handful of kids who had a computer at home. It seems absurd now, but my friends and I dialed up the web--sometimes interrupted by an incoming phone call--and spent days in chat rooms (oh the things I learned in there!).
By middle school, we were doing typing tutorials, rectangle blocks covering our hands so we learned touch typing. (Most kids cheated.) My librarian taught us what "http" meant and what a search engine was. Stuff that, now, is taken for granted.
Photoshop wasn't a thing yet, everyone talked on AIM, MySpace was still awesome, Facebook didn't exist for everybody until I was almost finished with college.
My point is that the internet wasn't quite as culturally solidified or influential as it is now, nor did it look like today's web. (And: that you can identify your place in the digital world most broadly by what you didn't have yet better than by shared experience.)
I'm told, though I have no idea if this is true, that kids learn HTML and basic coding in high school now. I suspect those are elective classes, much like my Excel classes were. But then there are also stories about college students not understanding how to google effectively, and my own anecdotal evidence tutoring high school students suggests that they're no longer taught computer literary either. Rather, like using a mouse, they're expected to already know how to find credible information online. Just like you have to model close reading--supposedly a skill we should have if we can read, right?--you can't take for granted that everyone knows how to do basic search functions; we had to teach kids card catalogs, now we have to teach them Google.
That's a generational problem, possibly the last vestige of generational divides as we know them. Adults with less than impressive web skills see kids zooming around the internet, on The Facebook (misplaced articles are the funniest) and YouTube and the like and assume that the kids know what they're doing when they really don't. Photoshopping zits out of a picture is a far cry from doing artistic digital work, from engaging with the capabilities of software and digital platforms effectively. And limiting the sites they can visit at school isn't an answer to increasing literacy either.
(To be sure, there's a similar pressure on older adults to become fluent in the digital world lest they be entirely disconnected from the culture at large, but they have the old dog, new tricks shadows to retreat to.)
I have no doubt that being able to find and make surprising, novel connections is the currency of the future. When nearly any information is available to nearly anyone who can find it, sheer fact, rote knowledge, loses its value. The people who can draw disparate ideas together--through wit, comedic impulse, with intellectual aims; it doesn't matter much the intent--will become more valuable than ever. Connections and applicability aren't new, of course, but they're going to be more important for any kind of success in a digital world.
To circle back: just because older writers like Smith--Teh Oldz becoming increasingly younger in definition; she's only in her thirties--can't handle the infinite distraction that is the internet doesn't mean that kids will have the same problem. They might, certainly, but who's to say it won't swing the other way, that children today won't have superior coping skills by dint of growing up in an encompassing digital environment? Books were going to drag us all into daydreams and TV was going to rot out minds--you know the story. Maybe today's youth will create more sophisticated procrastination-discouraging add-ons for browsers or maybe they'll find a way to make their browsing and what we currently call "time wasting" a part of the artistic process and product. It will be a different world and we need to get with it.
Why aren't writers excited about how the internet forces people to read everyday, how a "wasted" afternoon link-chasing around websites inevitably teaches you something you never would have learned otherwise?
Money. That's the answer as far as I can tell. We're spending precious writing time online. We're not making cash from the blogs we feel obligated to have. (Or are we?) How are writers going to make a living in this dawning future?
I am idealist, I am young and in the safety of grad school, but to money fretting I say yuck. I have no doubt the money question will be solved--how or when I'm not sure, but I'm am certain it will be. And if the solution ends up being that writers don't get paid unless they're the top of the top and in our last shiny print publication The New Yorker, then that's an answer too. Not one we all like, not the fair and democratic conclusion writers want.
Capitalism: when doing something you love and not getting paid for it is the ultimate devaluation of the self.
My book is worth more than ninety-nine cents.
Literature is worth more than a couple dollars.
Sorry, that ship has sailed. Brush up on your German and publish there. Or get excited about the fact that you can control your book price (regardless of market pressure, if you wish) and that you can make money indefinitely instead of relying on an advance.
I've been told numerous times that if you don't love writing enough to be compelled to do it, if you would stop if you weren't paid for it or published, then you aren't truly a writer. I've also been told that writers shouldn't work for free. Like any blanket advice, both oversimplify the problem facing artists in America, but I think they also reveal the schizoid way we view writing on the cusp of the digital era.
We now self-promote, we build an audience, we publish our own books, we edit ourselves, we create communities, are literary citizens. Keyword here being "self." It's up to ourselves. (But no longer our typewriting in the basement alone selves.) There are certainly attendant problems with that model, namely the lack of external authorities. Who will be the guardians of standards, journalistic ones particularly? It just might become the people we've been writing for all along--our readers. Our novice fact-checker readers on their iPads.
If there's anything the internet has done, it's splinter us into ever-smaller factions that, I'd argue, interrelate based on difference rather than sameness. Sure, you join writers groups (on Google+) and find friends through common movie preferences just like always. But the cultural focus has shifted more to sharing something new: "Have you seen the newest thing/learned this latest tidbit and have you embraced it?" A question we can share until we know the other person's answer. If you won't even try reading an ebook, then that puts you in a whole different sphere than me.
I won't say that's a bad thing either because I think these gaps invite us to find connection in less than obvious ways. Whereas before it was "I also like Lord of the Rings" and the two of you could then nerd out on useless Middle Earth trivia together, now it's "omg you did a kitten version of the LOTR epic and I found it by googling snow shoes three hours ago." If creativity was a highly valued artistic trait pre-internet, how can anyone deny the new heights, however lowbrow, creativity has soared with crowd-sharing and social networks? If kids can't be creative in school anymore, then they'll do it online however they know how.
The internet has also, on the whole, created a literary culture that's fairly colloquial. As word lovers, we can decry that shift all we want and fight it personally, but such a shift marks a difference in what we value as creative or artistic. What gets to the widest audience wins the internet, and guess what, that usually means images, shorter words, humor, and catchy ad-like content. Twentieth century writers didn't write like Jane Austen; twenty-first century authors won't write like John Updike.
These arguments are always happening, cycling around as technology changes and, to some extent, that makes them feel moot. However, there are always the last hangers-on, the charge forward revolutionaries, and the people who have the distinct feeling of having had these arguments before. We need 'em all. To remember where we've been while we snatch visions of the future. Though the internet might someday swallow up physical culture, it will still leave a record of that which it swallows.
So what will we get when everyone grows up with the web? A culture that, despite all the worry and fortune telling we're doing now, will look largely the same as it does today, just remixed into something slightly different. But don't worry, we'll all still be thinking and we'll still be writing.
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