Pylimitics

People create and use technology to do something they think they want to do. Typewriters, then word processing machines, then word processing programs on personal computers have all been technology for writing a lot of words quickly and easily, and being able to go back and revise and change. This used to be a lot harder than it is today. Public writing was the product of a group of people. One person might write an original draft, then others got involved — colleagues, friends, maybe an agent, an editor, and editor-in-chief, possibly even a typesetter— they all read the draft and at least some of them would give feedback.Most of the public writing audiences read was the product of human interaction and collaboration.

There were, of course, people who did the whole writing and publishing process completely alone. But they weren’t generally accorded much respect. They might pen letters to the editor published in newspapers and magazines. But the audiences knew the difference; when those letters were even read, they were often just disregarded. They certainly weren’t considered as serious or reliable as the articles in the publication.

But the marketing of public writing and publishing seem to have always tended to deemphasize its collaborative nature. Articles often had “bylines” that mentioned the person who wrote the original draft. Hardly ever mentioned were the colleagues, editors, agents, and acquaintances who commented, contributed, argued, edited — all contributions. The published writing was the product of human interaction, but it was marketed as the output of a single individual.

This feature of publishing practice was exploited by some publishers who released novels in series, all under the name of a single author. In some cases the “author” didn’t even exist. “Victor Appleton” was the author of Tom Swift novels starting in 1910, and the name “Carolyn Keene” appeared on 175 Nancy Drew novels over many decades. Neither Appleton nor Keene actually existed. The books were collaborative projects, but the collaborators were never mentioned, much less celebrated. Even though the collaborators were real, and the “authors” were not. It was like the “great man” stories told about historic events. Not true, but simpler and easier than reality.

Real human authors often do acknowledge their collaborators, but usually in a preface or forward. It’s very rare to see a book cover listing an editor, an agent, or the like. It’s so rare I don’t think I’ve ever seen one.

All this is to say that to the audience, a piece of public writing was presented as a product of an individual, even though the reality was different. The technology of writing and publishing — mostly created by people who were in the audience, not the writers or editors — has been focused on the presentation, not the reality. Technical tools now make it quite easy to generate public writing without any collaboration. This very piece, for one example, has gone straight from my keyboard to the public, although it’s taken me a week or two to think through and revise.

One other thing about writing: it’s difficult. That is, as you write a longer and more nuanced article, story, or analysis, there’s more to think about, more aspects to weave together, more details to remember. It’s some of those difficult aspects that collaborators can help with. If you’re writing a novel, and you have a colleague who agrees to read and critique a draft, they might remind you that in Chapter 2 your hero mentioned that they hate coffee, but in Chapter 9 you have them ordering it in a cafe. Or that you made a logical error in an argument you’re building up. Or that you overlooked some historical evidence.

Even when you’re working entirely alone, the difficulty of writing is there, but crucially, the difficulty of writing increases with its length. Dashing off a brief message is easy, particularly when it’s a reaction to some other dashed-off message (which itself was sparked by yet another dashed-off remark). Brief messages take very little thought or reflection, and might be nothing more than a reflex. Impulses don’t take thought. And there is a reward for your dashed-off reflex: you’ve joined the ranks of public writers. Your byline is right there. You’re the author. And now you don’t even need to acknowledge your collaborators, because there aren’t any. Even better, your message might be repeated by other people, and you might accumulate likes and follows, which we’ve all been told to desire. Because…um…well anyway we’re supposed to want them.

That’s where we’ve arrived; constant rewards for public writing, virtually no costs (to the writers), and a system that discourages human interaction, even as it generates the illusion of interaction — after all, aren’t you “conversing” with everyone else dashing off their own messages? 

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Thanks to Jon Katz and Adam for sparking these ideas.