Also in this weekend's Washington Post is an article by Linton Weeks on "neterature," loosely defined as: "all the quirky, jerky kinds of writing that is/are on the World Wide Web -- blogs, fan fiction, role-playing game sagas, news filterese, spam poetry, prose parodies, etc."
This could have been a good article examining how new communications vehicles - primarly Internet-based (they really don't get into SMS text messaging for mobile phones) is changing the nature/practice of writing.
But, in reality, it is a hack job which sets out to prove the author's already-made-up-mind that "neterature is destroying writing."
"Experts" are quoted:
"The Web doesn't have Nobel Prize-winning content. It doesn't reward you with incredibly deep insight," Nielsen says. So you surf to the next site. "The cost of moving on is minuscule."
and
As a result, you respond differently to the screen than you do to paper. It brings out different aspects of the brain. People writing on the Internet, Restak says, tend to be "laconic, and overly rude."
Examples (all chosen to exaggerate the ridiculous) are given too.
Epic poems and sonnets and haiku. Here's a haiku from the Genuine Haiku Generator (www.everypoet.com), an online program that tosses words together according to syllable:formlessly laughing abyss emerges mildly patiently, nude dead Okay, so it's not Basho. But it does adhere to traditional form
Weeks gives a rather bad definition of blogs, points to some of the blogerati, then, using language (that denigrates as it is used) -- "And the Web is awobble with personal blogs from around the world..." -- reproduces a post that is guaranteed to create sniggers among the "well-read."
Then, Weeks looks at Fanfiction.net and gives another example (again, guaranteed to produce sniggers): "Here is a short story -- bad punctuation and spelling included -- based on the mindless computer game Minesweeper:" and snarks at the end of the example: "Not Tolstoy, but you get the idea."
Weeks concludes:
So even if we want to read -- or write -- more textured, complex prose, we may not be able to. The result is slapdash, small-vocab, shallow, callow writing that seems to be devolving with the technology rather than evolving.And, because we are no longer crafting our stories and poems on paper with pens or typewriters, gone are the days when we were forced to think through everything before we wrote it down.
On one side of the equation, today's engineers have made it eerily easy for writers to write -- certainly more rapidly and, some would say, more creatively and innovatively.
On the other, maybe the easier we make it to write, the worse some of the writing gets.
So much for objective journalism.
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