Digifesto

Years ago on a now defunct Internet forum, somebody recommended that I read a book about the history of writing and its influence on culture.

I just spent ten minutes searching through my email archives trying to find the reference. I didn’t find it.

I’ve been thinking about writing a lot lately. And I’ve been thinking about writing especially tonight, because I was reading this essay that is in a narrow sense about Emily Gould but in a broad sense is about writing.*

I used to find writing about writing insufferable because I thought it was lazy. Only writers with nothing to say about anything else write about writing.

I don’t disagree with that sentiment tonight. Instead I’ve succumbed to the idea that actually writing is a rather specialized activity that is perhaps special because it affords so much of an opportunity to scrutinize and rescrutinize in ways that everyday social interaction does not. By everyday social interaction, I mean specifically the conversations I have with people that are physically present. I am not referring to the social interactions that I conduct through writing with sometimes literally hundreds of people at a time, theoretically, but actually more on the order of I don’t know twenty, every day.

The whole idea that you are supposed to edit what you write before you send it presupposes a reflective editorial process where text, as a condensed signal, is the result of an optimization process over possible interpretations that happens before it is ever emitted. The conscious decision to not edit text as one writes it is difficult if not impossible for some people but for others more…natural. Why?

The fluidity with which writing can morph genres today–it’s gossip, it’s journalism, it’s literature, it’s self expression reflective of genuine character, it’s performance of an assumed character, it’s…–is I think something new.

* Since writing this blog post, I have concluded that this article is quite evil.