Immersive Writing — A Manifesto
Paradigms of the written word
In my last post on teaching the fundamentals of complexity to a teenager, I talked about a reading/spirit journey embarked to study the soft science of complexity. Along the way I may have name-dropped a few researchers and authors (although I’m not sure if you can call it name-dropping if you’ve never had an actual conversation with someone), but I assure you it was merely to site origination of important ideas and concepts and perhaps to guide interested readers to a wealth of further readings — however as a sort of penance for the admittedly somewhat excessive names listed I will purposely refrain from such practices in this post (perhaps with an exception for historical figures) — after all the author Nassim Taleb has rightfully coined the aphorism “The opposite of success isn’t failure; it is name-dropping.” (starting now.) This same complex journey took me from the flashy front page of online newspapers to the ADD inducing social media feeds and even the dusty corners of the local library. Along the way I found some material deviations in writing conventions as a function of platform as well as some important distinctions in the platform capabilities themselves. The purpose of this post will be to explore the expanded possibilities of the written word as enabled by new mediums gaining prominence — both why we are here and where we should go next. It will be a theme of this post that the authors of today, even in new media, are often writing posts in form as would be dictated by prior paradigms — the legacy of the printing press.
The journey starts with this proven platform of antiquity, the printed page. The media that started it all. With the movable press and mass printings Martin Luther was able to spark the protestant reformation and later newspapermen such as Benjamin Franklin were able to seed revolution for American independence — such is the potential of a new media’s reach. These resulting societal transformations proved that words did in fact matter, and that a ruling class could not only lean on the weight of tradition, the might of the sword, or the adherence to class and caste lines to ensure compliance of the masses, but must also appeal to reason and justice. Access to a printing press and retailer distribution was a tall barrier forcing those with resources a degree of selectivity in granting access to the public through the medium. Just like Jerry and George’s pitch to an NBC executive, when asked why people would watch a show about nothing — I’m sure the answer was often “because it is on TV” — or in the case of the books because it was on the bookshelf. In a circumstance of limited choices those begging for content could not be choosey after all.
I am oversimplifying, but for a large part this arrangement remained unchanged for hundreds of years. Over this time the printed page has established some rules of norm. In mass communications short form nonfiction was largely the domaine of short-lived disposable newspapers, medium form writings found a home in only slightly more durable magazines, and the true weight of endurance and selectivity was saved for book length works. The conventions of these media are well known, from the dust jacket to the font and layout design even the most inspired book designer mostly paints with a limited pallet. Even today, in the time of laser printing and digital design, the style of printing has largely remained consistent with those conventions from the movable type printing press. It is only the rare work that dares to materially deviate from traditional approaches to page layout and design.
The advent of the internet and the hyperlink brought the first challenge to this status quo. Although a hyperlink could be considered merely the digital manifestation of a foot or end note, it brought speed of access (not having to visit a library to check a reference for instance), ease of operation (anyone who has flipped back and forth and back and forth with two bookmarks throughout Infinite Jest knows what I mean), and most importantly the potential for a crowdsourced value metric incorporated into a language, laying the foundation for an association approach to indexing via search engine (as called for in 1945 by the then Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development (a precursor to DARPA)).
The human mind … operates by association. With one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the association of thoughts, in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain. … Selection by association, rather than indexing, may yet be mechanized. One cannot hope thus to equal the speed and flexibility with which the mind follows an associative trail, but it should be possible to beat the mind decisively in regard to the permanence and clarity of the items resurrected from storage. — Dr. Vannevar Bush
Interestingly the machine enhanced search tools enabled by the hyperlink even to this day largely remain focused on selecting options between web pages, while searching inside of a web page is unchanged from the paradigm of the 90’s — a Control F search simply matches characters. I see real potential for those geniuses of the search industry to take their tools and add some relational intelligence to the Control F function — although perhaps this is a task for an operating system or browser. Helpfully the crowdsourced assignment of a passage’s value via hyperlink has since been expanded on a more granular scale with tools such as the Facebook like button or the Kindle popular highlights feature.
The earliest days of the internet found few changes to writing outside of a simple porting of offline content. The newspapers had barely an inkling of the chaos that was coming through the disintermediation of their classifieds profit center and so offered largely free access to online content under the assumption that a business model would eventually present itself (cementing an entire generation’s consumer pricing expectations along the way). It wasn’t until the advent of first blogging and then the modern social media feeds of Facebook and Twitter that new paradigms of mass communication really began to emerge (I’m not an expert on this transition as was kind of late to the game, so will just gloss over and focus on the implications). The blogging platforms mattered less for form than because they opened mass communication to the crowd — distribution was no longer a constraint. Where previously a letter to the editor was primary path to a resident sharing a view with their neighbors (and subject to the whim of the editor as to if they would actually consider publishing), suddenly anyone could speak and have potential to be heard, albeit finding an audience was less assured. Some bloggers settled on a central theme for their writings, other on reactions to current events or perhaps just more general musings on subjects of interest. Those posts that found the widest audience often aligned in certain criteria such as length of post or address of popular topics such as investing, nerdery, wisdom, or perhaps just mining the depths of the internet for undiscovered gems of diversion.
With the bloggers came more professional approaches to online media. New journalistic outlets forewent print publications altogether. Some online journals adopted a blogger’s approach to adding a layer of comment to media sourced from other outlets — yet another parasite to traditional newspapers online porting of offline content. Other outlets merely aggregated links to content of others, usurping a newspaper’s editorial slant with a collaged slant of their own. The themes of online journals reached ever further into the long tail of interests. And yet through it all some traditions of the newspaper remained. Even though these online writings may have had unique topics, tones, or theories, the format of the blog post could easily have been ported right back into a printed form. Only recently have the basic element of a video snippet found their way into the mix of selected articles, in 20 years of the online platform and 10 years of youtube, the divergence of online and print remains largely perfunctory. It is only the rare work that dares to materially deviate from traditional approaches to multimedia, page layout, and design.
These type of experimental multimedia infused and elaborately designed writings that we have seen from sources like the New York Times or Bloomberg deserve their own kind of prominence and permanence as might usually be reserved for a book length work. It is unfortunate that just because they were presented online their window of attention followed a typical posts lifespan of a mere few days. In printed media important works are often captured in annual anthologies of best of writings — a comparable online approach is deserved for works such as these. It is part of the legacy of the printing press that primarily book length works maintain any kind of longevity.
The more recent developments of the social media feed have taken writing in new directions, with content following incentives. The status updates of Facebook world have their own kind of Pavlovian system in place, with the algorithmically filtered and sorted visibility of a thought tailored to users based largely on a metric of “likes.” The desire to be seen and heard pushes users into the game of playing for appeal, and the content of our speech (and thus our thought) is subtly shifted, training us to care ever more what other people think lest we fall into a vacuumed silo of indifference. There was a moment in a presidential debate (I believe the second) where Trump made some offhand barb about Clinton which elicited a cheer from the audience. Hearing the reaction of the crowd, he quickly doubled down on the point, visibly treating the audience as focus group and crafting a real time update of message based on visceral appeal to that same crowd, and the phenomenon of the Trump rally is made clear — these were more than just events to mobilize voters, they were also experimental mass focus groups meant to gauge crowd reactions and thus hone in on messages of virality and appeal — after all not every voter is active online, and if a candidate wants to understand appeal of the entire electorate they have to find ways of confirming resonance with those in other bands of the digital divide.
Through the Facebook feed each of us now has a focus group of our own. Over time we are trained by the likes of our connections to communicate in a certain way. This same system can be gamed with formulaic click-bate headlines, fake news that we want to be true, or other viral content catering to baser instincts, and for those that suggest that the training of our speech via likes of our friends is a positive thing, consider that this viral trash is one natural end game of that contest.
Twitter is a different beast. While the like and retweet buttons bear some resemblance to Facebook, the algorithmic sorting of a twitter feed has long been dormant, and so the weight of a peer’s approval less influential. The defining feature of the twitter speech is of course the 140 character limit, which perhaps has a more positive impact on a writing style than the likes of Facebook. As anyone who has spent time on the platform can attest, the challenge of crafting a thought for a tweet’s limited space changes your writing. As you battle against the constraint, superficial conventions such as use of the words the/a/is are discarded for a more compressed prose (and thus a higher Shannon Entropy value), and other cracks in the cage are explored to find avenues, any avenue, of effective communication. The inclusion of analogous pictures, videos, or music to illustrate a point. The poetic layering of meanings based on context and proximity to adjacent thoughts. The inclusion of search terms such as an important concept’s key word or the name of an author. Turning to similes and metaphors to express a difficulty.
The expansion of vocabulary to overcome constraints could also includes those recent developments of emoticons, our generation’s distinctive contribution to language. Through smiles, winks, and shrugs our alphabet is 26 characters no longer, just as physicists who have run out of numeric, english, and greek characters sometimes invent their own conventions and symbology, our language is finally emerging from the chains of the 26 character world of the printing press to include visual notations of emoticons and memes, and reaching it’s true potential of information density — after all a picture is worth a thousand words (especially in the case of a twitter post where it is literally a picture of 1,000 words).
I think the use of twitter medium bodes well for future authors. We’ll find writers with a denser prose, harder to summarize, perhaps disjointed or even fractal at times, but with a lot of hidden nuggets, easter eggs, and layered meanings. If you look at imposed constraints in the world of music, Ray Charles without vision or Beethoven losing his hearing, you’ll find that these artists gained something in their music alongside the loss, a certain soulfulness. An author looking for a similar effect may consider spending a decade under the chemical lobotomy of an overmedicated haze just to see what that does to your writing style. Or perhaps less drastically, exclusively writing public content on twitter for a few years, just to see how creative you can get at overcoming this self-imposed constraint — once you pull back part of that constraint and jump back to the expanded playing field like Medium you might just find that the exercise of fighting through the 140 characters limit over time has had a positive impact on your voice.
As writers have pushed the limits of the legacy of the printing press, we have had to fight the constraints of tools which were largely derived from that same paradigm — Microsoft Word and the Amazon Kindle and other online porting of offline tech. And we are just now catching up where the palate of prose reaches beyond what was available to our 15th century brethren. The fun fact is that the overproduced and expensive polish of the New York Times or Bloomberg multimedia efforts aren’t required to achieve the kind of immersive writing now available to us through an easy and intuitive platform like Medium — just take a look at some of the lighthearted prose of say Cracked.com. Even for amateur writers simple youtube videos can easily be inserted such as a song to set a mood or video of a sitcom to provide a laugh and demonstrate a concept. Through emoticons, popular memes, or images we can liberally illustrate our works through the miracle of google image search or even a simple screen capture. With simple yet incredibly powerful tools such as the Wolfram Language we can easily work with images to assemble collages and word clouds. We can even follow the genius of the great Michel de Montaigne (his complete essays are only $0.99 on Kindle!) and sprinkle our writings with illustrative or inspirational quotes that sometimes are only vaguely related to the meat of our argument but regardless add color and depth to a passage. All of these techniques are available to us with the tools of today. Writers have been writing for old paradigms for far too long, it is time for us to celebrate the lifting of the constraints of the printing press, and put all of that hard earned soul to use as we explore this strange but wonderful new world.
Grant it to me, Apollo, that I may enjoy what I have in good health; let me be sound in body and mind; let me live in honor when old, nor let music be wanting. — Horace, Od., i. 31, 17. via the essays of Michel de Montaigne
*For further readings please check out my Table of Contents, Book Recommendations, and Music Recommendations.
Books that were referenced here or otherwise inspired this post:
House of Leaves — Mark Danielewski
Ship of Theseus — J. J. Abrams and Doug Dorst
Essays— Michel de Montaigne
(As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.)
Albums that were referenced here or otherwise inspired this post:
Preservation — Preservation Hall Jazz Band (CD)
As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.
I’m just an amateur blogger doing this for fun and hopefully to make a few new connections along the way. If I have violated any copyrights here I would be happy to edit just let me know. I can also be reached on twitter at @_NicT_.
For further readings please check out my Table of Contents, Book Recommendations, and Music Recommendations.
