On the Internets, Briefly

It’s been a topic whirling around the various lit-and-writer’s blogs lately, what with the economy, the Kindle, and, well, technology as a whole: what role does the writer play in this climate? Comma, what role does the writer play beyond his or her own writing?  Comma, what is all this technology doing to us in a broader sense?

So, for those of you unaware, publishers have started selling the writer as much as the book.  The writer has become a product.  It’s a good thing I’m as dashing as I am.  The problem is that I’m a firm believer in the author playing as small a role as possible outside of the creation of the work.  I’ve long known that’s impossible–here I am, blogging– so let’s say I believe in the Coma of the Author, or the Severe Beating of the Author.  Not quite the Death.  As publishers push writers to sell their books in more active ways, as we are driven to blog, tweet, and have a beer with our readers, our work not only becomes minimized but colored.  This is of particular concern, I think, for writers of literary fiction.  You’re here, and you know me already, probably.  But consider a reader who sees my name on the shelf (let’s hope) and picks up the book.  Likes it a lot.  Looks me up and finds that it’s a kid, essentially, who wrote this book about all kinds of things that he’s never experienced–knowledge that can lead the reader in one direction only: away from my book and to me.  To quit theoretically tooting my own horn, pick a literary giant.  Someone really big, you can’t imagine them putting on their pants.  Now sit down and have a meal with them.  Holy shit, Hemingway chews his food like everyone else!  Now he’s got hamburger in his beard.  Now he’s going to the bathroom.  These are human realities that I don’t think the reader needs to face when considering a work of fiction.  I just don’t.  You have to come to terms eventually with the fact that your wife or husband or whoever does, at times, have all manner of rude bodily functions.  You don’t ever need to think of that when reading.  The Sun Also Rises never poops.  Hamlet never farts.  Hell, Hamlet never farted.  Crude humor, I know, but you get my point?

Until I’m established, I am going to fight for exposure.  I’m going to blog.  I’ll make jokes, I’ll talk about what I eat or drink or how I met a smelly Jehovah’s Witness.  I’ll be real world.  It’s necessary.  And it may even be necessary after I’ve got some exposure.  And if that’s true, so be it.  Because what is most important to me above all is that you read my writing.  That’s first.  If I can get that done, then I’ll start worrying about how you read it.  You’re one mouseclick away from an excerpt of my real writing and it is quite different from what you find here.  The space between these two things enriches your knowledge of me.  Not of my writing.

As for things at large, you can make a lot of arguments about all manner of inventions over time, for good or ill.  What if the gun was never invented?  A: We’d still be killing each other with swords.  People make do with what they’ve got and these advances don’t go away.  You can ignore them if you like but the world is going to intrude on you or someone you know.  That being said, I don’t know that it’s true for these advancements.  And, honestly, if I can draw a crude parallel before establishing anything else: What if the gun was never invented?  A: We’d still be killing each other with swords, and we’d be forced to look our opponents in the eye.  I say this to make you wonder about the psychological and moral implications of technology.  The barest, raw result is that someone is dead.  But what has changed in the mind of the victor?  Bear with me.  The first link above goes to Sonya Chung’s latest post.  In it she talks about these coming advances.  I argued in the comments section (go there for the full, I’m not copy-pasting) that the iPhone, Googlemaps, GPS, Twitter, Fmylife.com, textsfromlastnight.com, all these things are reducing our need for interaction in the real world but more importantly, in the case of the latter three, are commodifying what experiences we do have for use on the internet.  Our misadventures (I bring myself up on purpose) become a sort of online currency or hold a point value in a game that goes unscored and unrewarded except through some manner of internet back-pattery.  The ultimate result of all this is that interactions will become a luxury of their own–we’ll simply need the time we save with an iPhone so we can do…whatever.  Tweet.  What we lost by the gun we’re losing by the phone: eye contact.  I could count on my hands the number of people who have addressed me or acknowledged my existence in any way while walking down the street here in Riverside.  What’s worse is that I’m already coming to accept that.

Just like we’re always gonna kill each other, whether by rock or sword or gun, we’re always going to interact in some way.  There are basic interactions that won’t change.  You’ll need to go to the grocery, or get your maid robot repaired, I don’t know.  There’ll always be bars.  But these interactions are being devalued.

To be sure, I’m not innocent.  I’m four days from meeting Lindsay for the first time.  We’ve only spoken online or on the phone.  I’ve gotten postcards from her, my only contact outside of electrical currents.  Obviously I’m blogging this.  It’s all pretty inevitable, I think.  There will be less value put on interaction.  Period.  I will have to sell myself as a writer– which, oddly enough, is going the other way of the technological trend, come to think of it.  But I’m all for fights and hard work.  So let’s make a little ruckus for the passing of “how about this heat?”