The word on the net

"I never cease to be amazed by the arcane expertise lurking in the crowd; ... it's getting harder and harder to hear the insightful voices through all the media cacophony."

This sentence -- the whole passage really -- is broken. It's implying that there's a limited supply of "insightful voices", who happen to be the ones who used to have the plum jobs, and that while the blog-publishing explosion has increased the amount of "arcane expertise", that mainly it has served to drown out the Few with Insight.

The key duplicity is "harder to hear." It is much *easier* to read anything published before 2000 than it used to be. The topic sentence for his piece is:

"As someone who once survived (albeit barely) as a freelancer, I can say with some authority that the freelance writer is going the way of the Quagga. Well, at least one species of freelance writer: the public intellectual who writes for a well-educated, culturally literate reader"

What he means by "harder to hear" is "harder for people like me to be HEARD."

The problem is that writers are judged by the smoothness of their transitions. These transitions don't work online, because of the randomness of what is to follow when someone takes a link.

The writing has to be non-linear. Non-linear writing is not new, but it had been something that most writers didn't want to learn. It can be learned. And, it can be done in ways that are as smooth as that generated by linear writing.

Writing as means of earning a living is dying all over the place, not just in the freelance paying gigs.

And, it can be done in ways that are as smooth as that generated by linear writing.

Please point me to an example of what you're talking about.

To me, the powerful thing about the internet is that it can be many things to many people. While it is three-dimensional (multi-linear, as opposed to non-linear), this does not mean that writing must necessarily be compromised. One could just as easily argue that the pyramid lead approach is hurt by the three-dimensional aspect of the web, because once you've read the first line or two and linked away, you have no reason to return.

There are useful rules of writing for commercial web content. But to argue that across the board, all writing online must conform to the lowest common denominator, as if all readers had severe cases of ADHD, is a bit much. I turn to the web for news, science, blogs, and much more, and just as writers address different audiences in different styles and tones, as a reader I have the wit to expect different styles and tones from personal blogs and peer-reviewed science articles.

More online writers should pay their readers the compliment of not patronizing them.

What struck me most about that excerpt is how hard it is to not sound like you're whining when talking about a change you don't like, but don't have the power to stop. I think Nick does a good job with this blog in writing literate criticism of techno-enthusiasm from a pulpit whose power derives from techno-enthusiasm. But this sort of postmortem of the way the world was, delivered as a bitter farewell (despite Mr. Dery's assurance to the contrary), does little to convince.

Writing is certainly changing, and I find one aspect of that change in particular fairly interesting given this context: those who brought thoughtfulness, and even art, to journalism are seen as some of the most severely displaced by more mechanical information dissemination. Yet birds of a feather to these professional short-form writers, perhaps characterized as those having literary aspirations of varying degree, are quite a big part of the foundation of blogging. I think a lot of people have a desire to write, yet not so much desire that they would write anything more than a few pages on a given topic at any one point in time. This jibes with my own experience as a blog reader: I read more short, topical (to me) essays today than I could have in the past.

For the magazine Stone Soup, writing is an end in itself. While edited by two adults for many years, it publishes the work of adolescent writers and artists. The result is high-quality. They have a wise policy: "We do not accept e-mail submissions from the U.S. or Canada." Why? Because it it is too easy.

The net is a near-real-time communications network. It is part of mass media. It find it is getting harder to distinguish between "writing on the fly" and good monologue performance art. I suppose we want such to be both informative and, so some degree, entertaining.

I really love that quote.

What does he mean when he says:
> We're drowning in yak,

I know the hairy animal, but I can't get his point.

> and it's getting harder and harder to hear the
> insightful voices through all the media cacophony.

I'm afraid this sentence is not true: it is not easier; Mark Dery has reached an institutional position that made him able to parse through the best -- a seat challenged by the recent changes -- but now every one can find what is the best to his own taste. It will take time to have publishes turn back, find their new purpose, but many of us already can't have enough to read -- and in my case, I mean peer-reviewed, quality, insightful scholarly contents.

And Oscar Wilde would not be another blogger; he is a very respected gossip known as Perez Hilton, with a secret diary far more interesting then what his time knows him for.

Yak = chatter

as in "yak yak yak"

There is at least one other way to view writing: as a practice, not a product. When people write - when they engage with words and thoughts and with other people (even only a few, even only themselves) - when they do that, or only try to do that (and often fail), they enrich themselves. It is an education. It is a way of being who we are, and of learning who that might be. Writing, as an action, regardless of the outcome, regardless of the product, regardless even of whether anyone reads it - is a kind of freedom.

Elsewhere you suggest that the invention of the pencil does not make it possible for anyone to write a high quality novel. Of course not. Writing is a hard thing to do well. It's hard because it means something. If it were easy, if all it took were a bit of technology, would it mean much at all? So what if the Internet creates not one more good novel, not one more beautiful poem. There are more of those in the world than I could read in a sad life spent doing nothing else. Better that I should write a little - and be surrounded by others who do likewise. The Internet has made that a little easier and we are better for it.

I think the whole "oh my god, there are other text producers coming, and they don't value what I do"-angle is overblown - apart from it being unfounded, elitist "mostly bullshit" as Bray says.
Blogs and the web, text based as it is, create readers as much as it creates writers, or possibly even more so. Readers are good for writers.

And, it can be done in ways that are as smooth as that generated by linear writing.

The canonical exemplar here is probably Michael Joyce's hypertext classic, _afternoon, a story_. You could reach for Stuart Moulthrop's _Victory Garden_, or Shelley Jackson's _Patchwork Girl_, or perhaps for the nonfiction hypertext of David Kolb or George P. Landow.

Astrid Ensslin has a new book, _Canonizing Hypertext_, on the development of a hypertext canon.

Also of interest is nonlinear but sequential prose on paper. Robert Coover's "The Babysitter" comes to mind. Italo Calvino, of course, Turchi's _Maps Of The Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer_, surveys this nicely.

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