Use All the Words You Need

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It is, I suppose sufficiently ironic to warrant a millennial's eyeroll, that coloring, an activity I pursue specifically to avoid technology-driven undertakings, has thrown me into the maelstrom of Web 2.0, social media and maybe even Web 2.0534, the "Thingy Internet.” As I explore with my publisher the various ways of marketing Color Me Chilled Out online, I am rediscovering parts of the digital world that I had forgotten. It is certainly a world creating its own norms, and that is as it has always been with the media.  

When any communication system reaches a position of cultural dominance, it both shapes and reflects the culture of which it is a part. Newspapers boomed in conjunction with public education.  A literate audience advantaged all print based communication.  The emergence of radio, television and film brought audio and video to center stage. And now we have the Internet - or the Web - all those enchanting, distracting sights and sounds on our computers, tablets and smartphones - and yes, when appropriate, you may remind me that I refused to use the word “phablet."

My current concern is that a loosely-defined cadre of “experts" is defining a set of digital compositional assumptions with which I take exception.  I actually taught a course on writing for the Internet a few years ago - 2010? 2011? - using Christopher Johnson’s Microstyle  and a couple other then-cutting-edge textbooks. Anyhow, also having taught the first HTML course at my university back in 1994, it struck me that it was time to see how the process of putting words and images on screens had shifted in the last decade or so. Sadly, the emerging norms appear to lean in the direction of “quick and dirty,” although that “meme” has been massaged into “immediate and impactful.” 

I am not so much an old fogey that I would suggest that we will find excellence only by looking over our shoulder.  And one positive insight we can take away from new media assertions is the notion of the 360 degree perspective. When we do that we come to realize that there are models for excellence lurking at every point of the compass. Sure, texting invents “words" that may or may not be around next year, or even next week. But Shakespeare is credited with creating new words when they suited his fancy - when they aided the message. The fascists of the 1930s and 40s also moulded the then currently available media to craft a xenophobic milieu that seemed to convince the local populace to tolerate their later atrocities more passively. Current politicians are using the same strategies with modern media to Trumpet an equally hateful agenda. So yes, everything old is new again. Hence, we need to take a 360 degree perspective when looking at both the old and the new in order to design our own “best practices” for digital communication.  And that certainly applies to blogging.

Katy Munger, an old friend of mine - and the current NC Piedmont Laureate - recently wrote an insightful series of posts regarding the place of novelists and other writers in an Internet world. [see http://bit.ly/1Q5drvM]. Among her excellent suggestions is that we keep in mind our intended audience. It should not surprise us that the intended audience demographic at which much of the content currently available on the Internet is aimed is the18-to-30-year-olds for whom “Sit there quietly and read your book,” is a punishment.  My oldest friend, for whom the phrase “brother from another mother” is most appropriate, once told me that his idea of heaven was a room filled with an inexhaustible supply of novels. He is out there with you on “SchragWall,” and serves as an excellent definition of my intended audience; thoughtful, educated, humorous - an audience that loves to read.

It is an audience that gets stopped in its tracks by an artfully constructed phrase, sentence, paragraph, poem or novel.  Try making a list of the "Oh, my! That is just excellent!" moments you have encountered in the world of literature.  Among others on my list I find:

Shakespeare's Sonnet 116, the "love is not love" one.

Billy Collins' wonderful poem on Forgetfulness.

Elizabeth Bennet's delightful rebuke of Lady Catherine de Bourgh in Jane Austin's Pride and Prejudice.

The Bene Gesserit Litany Against Fear - in Frank Herbert's Dune.

Well, I could go on, as no doubt you can as well.  The point is that none of these owe much to the ideas of "short sentences," "simple words," 146 characters, and emojis.  My assertion is not that the Internet prohibits meaningful literary moments. Most haikus fit comfortably within the restraints of a tweet. Rather, my concern leans increasingly to software constraints that mandate a particular advocacy of "short form composition."  If you are reading this post in the original blog, there is a text block somewhere on the page titled "About Me" where I was encouraged to "tell your readers all about yourself." I had written what I felt was a nice bio for another of my websites “Agent of Calm," and thought I would use it in the About Me block on SchragWall. Not so fast, buckeroo! What they really meant was tell your readers everything about yourself that fits in 1200 characters - letters, punctuation and spaces!  

This is where the Internet turns the old adage "form follows function" on its head. The function is to tell your readers all about you, so the form should enable whatever amount of text, images and music are necessary to complete the function. That was one of the original wonders of the Internet. Back in 2002, when I was the editor of the Journal of The American Communication Association, we were giddy - “No page limits, bring on the images, trot out the music!”  Not, apparently, on your Blogger “About Me” block. I had originally fulfilled the function of “About Me” on the Agent of Calm website in around 3300 “characters.” But here on Blogger the form dictates that the function fit into a form that holds only 1200 letters, spaces and punctuation.  This new "formalism" is evident everywhere throughout the Internet, nudging us all to "short form” constructions. Hvn 4bid! :-(

Mind you, I am not arguing that we should make the academic notion of “Why use 2 words when 15 work just as well?” the norm on the Internet. I am simply asking that we retain places on the Internet where “long form” composition is seen as the future of serious literature and not simply as an interesting relic from days gone by.  Ebooks certainly have a role to play here, but so does blogging. And while in today’s parlance I claim the title of “long-form Blogger,” it would have been great fun, in the 1700s and 1800s, to be an essayist. To be sitting on a overstuffed chair before a fire on a winter's day, chewing on the end of a quill pen, gazing over a frosted pond or garden, and looking down my nose at those infernal mechanical writing machines.

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