technology

Geoff Kloske, the head of Riverhead Books, publisher of George Saunders and Aleksandar Hemon, thinks current stylistic variety makes it impossible to claim we are in either a minimalist or maximalist period. “More, I fear, there is a flaccidity and casualness of style that has come from writing habits born out of e-mail and social media.” A kind of death of the sentence by collective neglect. Kloske is right that the incessant dribble of mini-messaging has made most people’s daily use of written language brutally factual in character, more private ad copy than prose. I’m old enough to have written letters to friends when I was younger, which took time and a bit of thought. Like most people, I don’t do that any more, and e-mail hasn’t replaced the habit. The writing of complete sentences for aural pleasure as well as news is going the way of the playing of musical instruments – it’s becoming a speciality rather than a means most people have to a little amateur, unselfconscious enjoyment. This isn’t the end of the world for literature. In a sense, it only intensifies its role as the repository of our linguistic imagination. But it’s a pity none the less; there’s a difference between pure spectatorship and semi-participatory appreciation. The latter is much warmer. It creates more room for fellow feeling and a bit less for the glare of celebrity and the correlative abjection of envy and fandom.

But things change. Will we still have Henry Jamesian prose in an age where popular writing has condensed from concision to near-hieroglyphics? And, is it really social media/technology that’s wrecked how we communicate or has it perhaps rather broadened the audience for text-based communication in a time when no one makes time for long thoughts? Culture: Facebook; Chicken; Egg.

Data will come. For now, we can know that schoolchildren will still read Strunk and White while texting under the table. They will still read Proust while going home to play Call of Duty: Black Ops. The snows of yesteryear are, axiomatically, historic, but we will see the creation of new works of literature. The next generation of great writers will learn how to write in the same way they always have: by reading books that move them.

The headline – whether page title or link text – should tell people exactly what’s in the article, they say, so that people will know what’s in your article before they even read it. There’s certainly justification for this approach. In tech writing, for instance, it just makes sense. If your article explains how to repair your mobile phone in the field, it’s clearly better to entitle it something like “Fixing Your Mobile Phone On The Road” rather than “When ET Can’t Phone Home” or “The SIM Sins” or “Lost Verizon.”

But my big question is whether Zuckerberg is right when he supposes that young people are likely to permanently adapt to alternatives to traditional email. While it’s true that kids are developing some new habits that will last a lifetime, it has always been the case that some teen habits change as they get older, especially as they enter the work force.

Fact is, many businesses run on email today and though things will change over time, I don’t see instant messaging, text messaging, Facebook messaging or any other technology threatening email anytime soon.

This doesn’t mean Estleman and I are Luddites or cheesy romantics. It’s both simpler and more complicated than that. It means we don’t believe that faster is necessarily better, and we’re distrustful of a bill of goods that our gadget-drunk culture has swallowed whole, the illusion that technology has some magical power to improve our lives. Estleman and I are essentially conservative animals who distrust the notion, so prevalent today, that all things can be improved with the right technology, the right information, the right management, the right laws. While mankind strives to improve itself to death, some of us want no part of it.

…One could argue that writing is writing – it’s all communication – whether it’s scratches on a cave wall, glyphs in stone, ink on papyrus, pencil on paper, typed characters on bond stationery, or digits in the ether. I disagree. In writing and reading, no less than in art, the medium of creation and consumption is critical to a work’s effect. That’s not to say that writing longhand is better than writing on a typewriter, or that writing on a typewriter is better than writing on a laptop; rather, it’s to say that each of these acts is different from the others and will yield different types of prose.

…Similarly, tapping out an e-mail and hitting the Send key (or texting with your opposable thumbs) produces a different effect from composing a letter, revising it, putting it in an envelope and mailing it to someone. And opening that envelope and reading that letter is a different experience from reading an e-mail or a text message. It simply is. It’s more tactile, more suspenseful, more personal – and more likely leave a lasting impression. When writing an e-mail, I find I write much faster and with less thought and feeling than when I write a letter.