Should everybody write The destabilizing technologies of comm.docx

Should everybody write? The destabilizing technologies of
communication
Dennis Baron
Should everybody write? That’s the question to ask when
looking at the cyberjunk permeating
the World Wide Web. The earlier technologies of the pen, the
printing press, and the typewriter, all
expanded the authors club, whose members create text rather
than just copying it. The computer has
expanded opportunities for writers too, only faster, and in
greater numbers. More writers means more
ideas, more to read. What could be more democratic? More
energizing and liberating?
But some critics find the glut of internet prose obnoxious,
scary, even dangerous. They see too
many people, with too little talent, writing about too many
things.
Throughout the 5,000 year history of writing, the privilege of
authorship was limited to the few:
the best, the brightest, the luckiest, those with the right
connections. But now, thanks to the computer

and the internet, anyone can be a writer: all you need is a
laptop, a Wi-Fi card, and a place to sit at
Starbucks.
The internet allows writers to bypass the usual quality-controls
set by reviewers, editors and
publishers. Today’s authors don’t even need a diploma from the
Famous Writers School. And they don’t
need to wait for motivation. Instead of staring helplessly at a
blank piece of paper the way writers used
to, all they need is a keyboard and right away, they’ve got
something to say.
You may not like all that writing, but somebody does. Because
the other thing the internet gives
writers is readers, whether it’s a nanoaudience of friends and
family or a virally large set of FBFs,
Tweeters, and subscribers to the blog feed. Apparently there are
people online willing to read anything.
In the past, writing was restricted to a few die hards and adepts,
and the question “Should
everybody write,” if it ever came up, was answered with a
resounding, “No!”
Writing itself was a communication technology that came in for
plenty of criticism in its early
days. Socrates warned that writing was just a shadow of speech.

Writing isn’t interactive, he tells
Phaedrus: you can’t ask a text a question, because all it can do
is repeat the same words back to you,
over and over again. At best, writing is nothing but a
mnemonic, a device not to teach us new things but
to remind us of what we already know. But paradoxically, its
danger as a mnemonic is that we will come
to rely on it, so that according to Socrates, the ultimate effect of
writing will be to weaken memory, not
strengthen in. We remember this because Plato wrote it down.
Henry David Thoreau made pencils for a living and sought
endorsements for his writing
instruments from the likes of Emerson. But in Walden Thoreau
suggests that not everyone should write,
because not everyone has something to say: “We are in great
haste to construct a magnetic telegraph
from Maine to Texas, but Maine and Texas, it may be, have
nothing important to communicate.”
Every new communication technology has the capacity to
expand the set of who gets to write
and talk, who gets to publish and be heard. But expanding the
authors club tends to be a byproduct of

the technologies, not their intent.
When writing came on the scene, very few could read, and
fewer still could write. If our
interpretation of the Susa stones is correct, writing comes on
the scene 7-8,000 years ago as a device for
Mediterranean traders to track their inventory. The first writers
used the technology of shaping and
marking stones as a memory device to represent jars of olive
oil, goats, and sheep. It was the ancient
world’s equivalent of a bar tab.
Even after someone repurposed writing as a way to transcribe
speech, and writers as we might
think of them today came on the scene, only a few brave souls
were tempted to try the technology,
which came with a steep learning curve, required expensive or
labor-intensive materials, and for most
people, it didn’t seem to do anything that speech couldn’t do
better. In order for writing to spread, costs
had to come down; materials had to be more easily accessible;
writing technologies had to become
more user-friendly; and writing itself had to offer something
better than communicating the old-
fashioned way, by word of mouth.

More and more people began to write, and the new technologies
of writing enabled writers to
create new genres. But even so, the rise of literacy was
painfully slow. Harris reports the literacy rate in
Greece during the 4th and 5th-century BCE as below 10% (and
that was the figure for urban males;
literacy among women and in rural areas wasn’t much better
than 1%. And yet letters were everywhere
in ancient Greece: inscriptions on public buildings, legal
documents, commercial texts, and literary and
scientific ones. Even with arma virumque cano, Gallia est
omnes divisa in partes tres, and et tu Brute,
literacy rates were no better at the height of Roman civilization.
In the Hellenistic period, the great
library at Alexandria may have housed half a million scrolls at
its peak, but still the average Egyptian
didn’t have a library card.
By the 12th century, written documents were becoming the way
to transact business in England,
and scriptoria churned out copies of sacred texts. Still, not
everybody wrote. The number of text
creators remained small, as did the number of text copiers, and
the number of people who could sign

their names. This late 11th-century Anglo-Norman charter
transferring some English land to a French
abbey is “signed” by Sir Ilbert de Lacy, his wife Hawise, and
King William Rufus, the second son of
William the Conqueror. It bears the earliest example of an
English knight’s seal as an authenticator. But
none of the principals could write their names, and it’s very
likely that none of the signatories, who
witnessed the document with three crosses, even made those
crosses. The charter was probably
created some time after the physical land transfer took place,
with the scribe, not the author or the
witnesses, filling in all the necessary details to commemorate
the act.
Even though the age of print opened up publication
opportunities for writers, the printing press
is a copying technology, not a technology for text creation.
Gutenberg copied bibles, after all, and while
the press eventually created a demand for reading materials –
William Caxton was just one early English
printer who commissioned original works –many early printed
books were reprints of sacred or classical
works, or translations, rather than original works.

Readers as well as writers encountered obstacles. Received
wisdom praises Protestantism for
spreading literacy as a way to encourage the faithful to read
vernacular translations of sacred texts for
themselves, but even Martin Luther warned in 1520 of the
danger of too many books – in his view, you
just need one good book, which you can read over and over –the
gift that keeps on giving –not a lot of
bad books that will fill your head with error or just confuse you.
And later, in 17th century England, a period known for the
flowering of English letters, where
even kings and queens composed poetry and the brand-new
Royal Society promoted science writing,
literacy in London remained a mere 10% for men, a shocking
1% for women. But who should write was
not the same population as who could write. The route to
publication wasn’t simple or direct, and even
William Shakespeare couldn’t put on a play without first getting
a license from the Stationers’ Company.
Not until the 19th century did literacy in England reach about
70%. And in this period of
“exploding” literacy we find explicit concerns being voiced
over who gets to read and write, together

with a sorting of the literate population into two groups: the
functional literates, those who used their
literacy to work in offices, shops, factories. The writers in this
group were the copiers, not the creators
of text, like the Ruler of the Queen’s Navy in Gilbert and
Sullivan’s Pirates of Penzance, a clerk who
began his climb from office class to officer class by copying all
the letters in a big round hand. And the
vastly smaller group of literati whose station in life allowed
them to appreciate and exploit a higher
education, to create texts, and to consume texts with some sort
of higher-order understanding that
ordinary people lacked. Concerns arose that too much literacy
would elevate people above their station
in life, causing depression, discontent, or even civil unrest.
Thomas Carlyle complained that the
explosion of reading matter made possible by the invention of
the steam press in 1810 led to a decline
in the quality of what there was to read. At the very least,
literacy-controllers argued, reading too much
exposed good citizens and the faithful to error and heresy.
Yes, writing expanded the authors club, and later, so did the

printing press, and eventually, by
the end of the 19th century, literacy levels rose over the 80%
mark –in Western Europe and the U.S. But
the question of who gets to write has always been a vexed one,
and every writing technology came with
limits on who gets to be in the authors club – who gets to create
texts and not just copy them, and who
gets to read, limits that were imposed and that continue to be
imposed by governments, by religious
authorities, and by social norms. The pencil, the printing press,
the typewriter, all expanded
opportunities for writers, so long as they could clear the hurdles
imposed by publishers, government
censors, or the church. In terms of raw numbers, however, all of
these technologies benefited copyists
more than they benefited the creators of texts.
With the typewriter, as with the press and the big round hand
before it, everyone’s a copyist.
This 1875 ad in The Nation for the Remington “Type-Writer”
reads, in part,
a machine now superseding the pen. . . . anyone who can spell
can begin to write with it.
. . . It is worked without effort, and is notliable to get out of
order. . . .Young persons

acquire its use withwonderful ease and interest. . . .The
benevolent can, by the gift of a
“Type-Writer” to a poor, deservingyoung woman, put her at
once in theway of earning a
good living as a copyist.
Mark Twain wrote about this newest writing technology,
I will now claim – until dispossessed – that I was the first
person in the world to apply
the typewriter to literature. . . . The early machine was full of
caprices, full of defects –
devilish ones. It had as many immoralities as the machine of
today has virtues. After a
year or two I found that it was degrading my character, so I
thought I would give it to
[William Dean] Howells. . . . He took it home to Boston, and
my morals began to
improve, but his have never recovered.
[from Twain’s essay, “The First Writing-Machines.”]
But to make this early celebrity-endorsement of typing, Twain
dictated to a typist rather than composing
directly at the keyboard.

This 1930s experiment put portable typewriters on the desks of
schoolchildren around the
country and “proved” that typing students outperformed
nontypists on standardized tests in all their
subjects. According to teacher reports, typing students even had
better handwriting than nontypists. But
despite such positive results, two factors combined to keep
typewriters off desks: it was the Depression,
and schools couldn’t afford to replace pencils with typewriters;
plus it proved too difficult to train the
teachers to use typewriters. So instead of a widescale adoption
of typewriters to create knowledge, the
machines were relegated to dedicated typing classrooms, where
students were trained “to copy all the
letters” in Courier 12 pt. so that they could eventually win jobs
as office clerks.
Unlike other communication technologies, which effectively
limited who could read and write,
the telephone immediately offered the opportunity for anyone to
talk to anyone. Preservers of the
social status didn’t like this. They sniffed that all you had to
have was a nickel for the payphone, and you
could cross social lines at will, entering homes over the wires
where you had no hope of being admitted

should you knock at the door. But telephones were for talking,
not for writing. They might have
destabilized social class (and despite complaints about this, it’s
not clear that they really did), but in the
long run people didn’t worry so much about the democratizing
thrust of the phone, since access to
speech was nowhere near as guarded as access to writing. Of
course, as we see in this still from Alfred
Hitchcock’s Dial M for Murder, there are times when not
everyone should make a call.
Enter the computer. People worked with text on mainframes, to
be sure, but the machines’
strength lay in number crunching; they weren’t writing
machines. The personal computer too was
initially billed as a “work processor” –word processing, a
phrase deployed widely by IBM in its
advertising and training literature, was still the province of the
typewriter. Like earlier communication
technologies, the computer had to overcome some obstacles
before it was widely adopted as a writing
tool: costs had to come down; the machine had to become user
friendly; and it had to allow writers to

do what they used to do with older technologies (pen,
typewriter) only better (faster, more efficiently,
with a superior product).As word processing software was
perfected and hardware improved, the PC
replaced the typewriter as the text copying machine of choice in
American offices. But along the way
something unusual happened: once the PC was hooked up to the
internet, copyists of text began to
create text as well. And as the personal computer claimed its
space in the writer’s toolbox, it enabled
the creation of new internet-enabled genres: email, web page,
IM, blog, social network pages, tweets,
and videos.
The computer combined with the internet affords writers
something they never really had
before, the ability to bypass traditional publication controls. To
repeat, all you need is a computer, a Wi-
Fi card, and a place to sit at Starbucks. Given that kind of
access, more and more of us are finding
something to write about, whether momentous or trivial,
positive or negative. And while throughout
history authors have wondered whether anyone would ever read
what they had to say, on the internet
there seem to be readers for every text. As a result the authors

club is expanding in ways it never has
before, and with that expansion comes new concerns about how
to control this particular literacy
explosion. Because in addition to all the good texts out there in
cyberspace, there’s pornography, fraud,
and hate. And Wikipedia.
In a 1999 New York Times op-ed, educational reformer
Theodore Roszak complained that
computers prevented us from writing. To him, “a child with a
pencil in hand is ready to write. A child
with a crayon in hand is ready to draw.” But the pencil didn’t
turn us all into writers, and despite the
promise of the Famous Artists School, turning us loose with
crayons didn’t make us all artists either. In
contrast, the computer facilitated exactly what Roszak warned
that it would prevent, making children,
and adults, ready to write, and even Roszak admitted in his
critique of the computer-processed word
that he much preferred WordPerfect for DOS to the steel-tipped
dip pen which hadbeen a torture for
him when he learned to write in school.
In any case, today the question, “Should everybody write?” is

rendered moot by the fact that
everybody appears to be using their computers, and their cell
phones, for writing. And so the new
question seems to have become, “How can we control these
writers and their explosion of text?”
Although Geoffrey Nunberg has rightly pointed out that from
the earliest days of writing there has
always been too much to read, critics bemoan the internet’s
information glut, and they seek to control
access to, or censor outright, the more dangerous parts of
cyberspace. There are firewalls and filters to
block prohibited topics or content; plus the tethering of devices
– like smart phones or the soon-to-be-
released iPad – to limit or control what writers can do. But
there are other ways that we’re controlling
authorship that may be less traditional, and a bit more subtle.
As we write on our computers, we’re giving up our privacy in
ways that writers never did before,
not just exposing ourselves – or our personas – on Facebook,
Twitter, or a blog, but also by leaving
digital fingerprints that allow both businesses and the
government to log our keystrokes and track our
clicks. Back in 1890, Samuel D. Warren and Louis D. Brandeis,
concerned about the intrusiveness of

photographers and journalists, warned in their essay, “The Right
to Privacy,”
Recent inventions and business methods call attention to the
next step which must be
taken for the protection of the person, and for securing to the
individual . . . the right
“to be let alone.” Instantaneous photographs and newspaper
enterprise have invaded
the sacred precincts of private and domestic life; and numerous
mechanical devices
threaten to make good the prediction that ‘what is whispered in
the closet shall be
proclaimed from the house-tops.’
[Harvard Law Review 4 (Dec. 15, 1890)]
We used to think that the internet offered a kind of anonymity
that would allow us to express
ourselves more freely than ever, taking any pose or persona we
want. But if everyone from Sun
MicroSystems CEO Scott McNealy, who is supposed to have
said back in 1999, “You have zero privacy
anyway. Get over it,” to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg,
who insisted in an interview this year that

his company is only trying to adapt to the needs of Facebook
users, then privacy is indeed dead, even if
only college students, Google, and the NSA are willing to admit
it. But now that everyone is writing,
we’re going beyond the simple invasions of privacy outlined by
Warren and Brandeis to a more complex
inversion of public and private. Putting ourselves online allows
other users not just to watch our online
behavior and send us context-motivated ads or pack us off to
Guantanamo for a nice waterboarding
session, but also to remix the posts they find or create mashups
of our posts with theirs.
Accompanying the “everyone is writing” phenomenon is a
growing amateurization of online
text, which is democratic in spirit but which also calls into
question the nature of intellectual property,
the writing, graphics, and music that we post on line. Internet-
published text means writers are easily
ripped off, and plagiarism has become that much easier – as we
see in everything from schoolsucks.com
and the online term paper mills to the “creative” plagiarism of
the award-winning teen-age German
novelist, Helene Handelmann. But every communication
technology brings with it opportunities for

fraud and cheating, and eventually we manage to get enough
safeguards in place so that any
counterfeits that get past the controls can simply be chalked up
to the cost of doing business
Jonathan Zittrain warns that even with plagiarism and mashups,
too strict an adherence to
traditional notions of copyright may limit the generativity and
inventiveness of the Web. Kevin Kelly
goes even further, simply announcing that writers will have to
hang onto their day jobs, because
royalties will simply dry up because law or no law, online text
will inevitably be treated as communal
property.
The late John Updike pushed back against Kelly, and Anthony
Grafton suggests that the age of
the seamless cybertext is far from a reality. But since most
writers don’t live off their royalties anyway,
there’s a bigger danger to the status of authorship than a revised
economic model for writing. It’s the
growing centralization of online services, with Apple,
Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Wikipedia
controlling larger and larger blocks of our information and what

we can do with that information (and
maybe Zappo’s controlling the shoes we buy). This represents a
particular kind of monopolization of our
data by for-profit corporations, who unlike most libraries or
public utilities are responsible not to the
people as a whole, but to shareholders and boards of directors.
The mission of libraries is typically
openness and accessibility, but Google & Co. are bastions of
secrecy and digital rights management,
renting you the privilege of reading online, but retaining
ownership of text and limiting access by
distributing it according to a carefully calculated business
model.
Add to this corporatization of the data stream the trend toward
cloud computing. With the
spread of the next generation of computers –netbooks,
smartphones, and tablets, all of them devices
with limited storage space – we will be encouraged more and
more to turn to software located not on
our hard drives but on a remote server. For some users, that
server will be at home or at their university
or office. But for most, it will be a Google or Microsoft or other
proprietary server, accessible by
subscription. And we will be encouraged/forced to cede control

of our data to these remote servers as
well. The advantage of cloud computing is that all our digital
files will be available to us, no matter
where we are or what computer or computer-like device we’re
using to access it. The disadvantage is
that our texts will slip from our control to the control of the for-
profit corporation that manages the
cloud.
Is that so bad? Just as we trade convenience for accuracy when
we rely on Wikipedia as our first
resort for information, we’ll trade convenience for control,
which may be worth the trade until Amazon
decides it doesn’t like what’s on our Kindle and takes it back;
until Facebook decides we’ve committed
an illegal act and blocks us; until Google loses our data or turns
it over to the government, or to our
employer, or some other third party, with our without a
subpoena or warrant. Or until I log on and
instead of the draft of my next book I get the dreaded Error 404,
file not found.
Of course there’s always someone who objects to a new
technology roll out. Critics of the first

wheel probably argued that round technologies sped up the pace
of life too much compared to the old
way of doing things,preferring animals for locomotion or simply
keepingtheir feet planted firmly on the
ground. And of course, as we see from this 1956 ad for a
Chrysler with in-dash record changer, not all
new technologies catch on. But the computer is now the writer’s
tool of choice, and even though pencils
still sell in the billions annually, more and more people are
joining the authors club and uploading text to
the internet.
So, finally, again, I ask, should everybody write? More people
are writing now than ever before,
if by writing we mean creating text for readers – whether those
readers consist of a nanoaudience of
friends and family or a virally large set of FB friends, Twitter
followers, or other denizens of cyberspace.
More people are writing in North America, in Europe, and even
in parts of the world where individuals
have not typically had a public voice. Yet one critic of the One
Laptop Per Child Program echoes
Victorian concerns of educating people beyond they station
when he argues that giving computers to
masses of children will create discontent: “Access to eBay and

YouTube isn’t going to give them clean
water and freedom from disease. But it may help breed
resentment and discontent where it hasn’t been
before.” Functional literacy remains a goal, but creative
literacy, putting the tools of meaning
production into everyone’s hands, that’s still seen as too
destabilizing, and not just in China or
Myanmar, but also in Silicon Valley.
For those who are already writing, the question is becoming, are
they producing anything worth
reading? We may not think so –to repeat, there’s a lot of junk
being cranked out. But then again,
somebody seems to think so – there seems to be no lack of
readers for even the most inane of
cyberposts. Previous technologies of writing did not guarantee
quality either. There are plenty of clay
tablets, manuscripts, printed books, mimeographed screeds and
xeroxed memos, that should never
have seen the light of day. To Nunberg’s observation that there
has always been too much to read, I
might add that there has always been a lot of stuff that no one
wants to read.

So, should everybody write? Sure, because it increases the
chances that there will be something
you will want to read, and you can just ignore the rest. Perhaps
the more interesting question is, Will
everyone continue to write? Cell phone users are texting more
than they’re talking, and computer users
everywhere are creating and publishing text at growing rates.
Most digital texts are short, and most
aren’t “keepers,” even though it turns out to be difficult to wipe
out a text once it’s been uploaded. But
there are explosions of fan fiction, online essays, blogs,
extended chats and commentaries, and
explorations of text, audio and video, and that sort of text
production doesn’t seem to be slowing down
much.
Perhaps the predicted shift from PCs and laptops to tethered
devices like the iPad, which really
promise to be entertainment devices rather than text-production
machines, could signal an eventual
decline in internet-enabled authorship. These are machines that
permit text entry, though they’re billed
as entertainment machines, not writing tools. I don’t really
think the iPad will prompt a decline in card-
carrying authors. After all, the original PCs were not text-

production machines either. What’s more likely
to happen is that writers will see the usefulness of tablets, as we
once saw, a mere 30 years ago, the
usefulness of PCs, for what we do. And developers will
reengineer tablets so that, while they satisfy the
needs of gamers and video watchers and the readers of ebooks
and newspapers, they also allow us to
key in and upload our textual, musical, and visual creations.
Maybe one day we’ll all use Star-Trek-like communicators
pinned to our chests to create our
texts – just tap and talk–but I think that speech-to-text software
is still a long way off, and for the near
term we’ll be keyboarding, and doing so in growing numbers.
No matter what you or I think of their
products, writers gaining access to the internet seem to have no
trouble finding a subject to write about,
and no trouble finding readers to read their output. However
new communication technologies
destabilize the conditions of writers and readers, writers will
continue to find ways to get the word out,
and new genres to clothe the word in.

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