{"id":234,"date":"2004-02-05T07:02:14","date_gmt":"2004-02-05T12:02:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/misc.wordherders.net\/?p=234"},"modified":"2004-02-05T07:02:14","modified_gmt":"2004-02-05T12:02:14","slug":"online-anyone-who-types-can-be-a-writer-in-theory-that-is","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/misc.wordherders.net\/?p=234","title":{"rendered":"&#8220;Online, Anyone Who Types Can Be a &#8216;Writer.&#8217; In Theory, That Is.&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A friend clipped the following article for me from last Sunday&#8217;s Washington Post (ah, clipped &#8230; how lovingly old school): <a title=\"iT was a dark stormy Nite . . . (TechNews.com)\" href=\"http:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/wp-dyn\/articles\/A1993-2004Jan31.html\">iT was a dark stormy Nite . . . (TechNews.com @ Washpost)<\/a> by Linton Weeks, a WashPost Staff Writer.  The article is presumably about &#8220;Neterature: writing on and for the Internet,&#8221; where (as the subtitle states) &#8220;Online, Anyone Who Types Can Be a &#8216;Writer.&#8217; In Theory, That Is.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>And I hate to be nasty (no I don&#8217;t), but I kept checking the date, because I would <i>swear<\/i> that this article, except for its references to blogging, was written in <i>1998<\/i>.  The article&#8217;s list of &#8220;Neterature&#8217;s&#8221; attributes?<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<ul>\n<li>Not always in complete sentences. <\/li>\n<li>Often with bullets. <\/li>\n<li>Not a lot of punctuation but a great deal of self-exploration you know <\/li>\n<li>case often lower when should be upper and Vice Versa. <\/li>\n<li>Rife with misteaks &#8212; easily corrected but mor often not. <\/li>\n<li>Full of attitude and not always kind. Sometimes sinister and fraught with swear words. Othertimes saccharine and spangled with winking, smiley-face emoticons. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>i maen isnt That jst Nsane you know?!?!??  \ud83d\ude09 \ud83d\ude09 \ud83d\ude42 \ud83d\ude2e<\/p>\n<p>Seriously.  Even though the article references some popular blogs (such as William Gibson&#8217;s), the example quoted is by a 20-year-old GW student, described as:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>a recent excerpt &#8212; errors and all &#8212; labeled &#8220;The State of Our Union Is Lousy&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>I don&#8217;t object to focusing on the student&#8217;s blog, but it seems to be used precisely to support the article&#8217;s bullet points of what constitutes &#8220;Neterature.&#8221;  Bad spelling, full of errors, someone mouthing off, and terribly unsophisticated.  Sophomoric.<\/p>\n<p>Which is, in terms of representation of the whole, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/wm\/paint\/auth\/pollock\/pollock.number-8.jpg\">one ink splatter on a large Pollock canvas<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Other representations of Neterature in the article, from e-poetics to fan fiction, all get the same type of crappy example.  Here&#8217;s the fan fiction piece Weeks uses:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Here is a short story &#8212; bad punctuation and spelling included &#8212; based on the mindless computer game Minesweeper:<\/p>\n<p>-The Tale of Joe &#8211; By Nazi Janitor One day, Joe Schmo, decided to quit his job of being a taco salesman. But, he had no idea what to be. Then he saw an ad in the paper: &#8220;DUDE BECOME A MINESWEEPER AND SWEEP MINES. NOTE: YOU MIGHT DIE BUT WHO CARES?!?!?!?!&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Hyuck hyuck hyuck, this is thuh kinda job I&#8217;m looking for, hyuck.&#8221; Joe said to himself.<\/p>\n<p>Joe was hired. But sadly, he was killed buy a mine because he selected the wrong box. And because he was a smiley, his eyes turned into X&#8217;s and his face exploded because he sucks at life. The End.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Linton Weeks shows an amazingly sophisticated <i>lack<\/i> of knowledge about writing online.  He could have talked about the technologies that allow bloggers to create social networks, report on wars (did he <i>miss<\/i> the whole warblogging thing?), and hold discussions on special topics.  Or, perhaps, he could have spoken to the increased complexity of interactive fiction and organizations that feature IF, like the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.eliterature.org\/\">ELO<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rhizome.org\/\">Rhizome<\/a>, or <a href=\"http:\/\/trace.ntu.ac.uk\/\">trAce<\/a>.  Instead of looking at <a href=\"http:\/\/www.astonia.com\/index.html\">Astonia<\/a>, perhaps he might have thought to discuss Everquest and its subscribers that number in the hundreds-of-thousands?<\/p>\n<p>The article concludes with the type of fear-driven hype that was, again, typical in 1998.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\nSo even if we want to read &#8212; or write &#8212; more textured, complex prose, we may not be able to. The result is slapdash, small-vocab, shallow, callow writing that seems to be devolving with the technology rather than evolving.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Beware folks &#8211; technologies of writing will cause you to write shorter, shallow prose.  We&#8217;re doomed. Oh no.<\/p>\n<p>Finally,<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>On one side of the equation, today&#8217;s engineers have made it eerily easy for writers to write &#8212; certainly more rapidly and, some would say, more creatively and innovatively.<\/p>\n<p>On the other, maybe the easier we make it to write, the worse some of the writing gets. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>I didn&#8217;t realize that engineers had also made it easier to get unsophisticated, ignorant articles published on the front page of Sunday&#8217;s Style section.  I guess at the Washington Post &#8220;Anyone Who Types Can Be a &#8216;Writer.&#8217; In Theory, That Is.&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-234","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blogging","category-print"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/misc.wordherders.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/234","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/misc.wordherders.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/misc.wordherders.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/misc.wordherders.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/misc.wordherders.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=234"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/misc.wordherders.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/234\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/misc.wordherders.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=234"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/misc.wordherders.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=234"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/misc.wordherders.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=234"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}