My Need for Paper
For Posterity, Precision, and the Removal of Personality
As history flows like a raging river, there are people who ride the rapids, hoping to record all the minute happenings, with nothing ever getting left out. It might be slow sailing in your part of the river, but for someone else, that smalltown murder will dominate the local news for many weeks and months to come. As one might see, I’m trying to find the perfect metaphor for the process in which history intertwines with those attempting to record it. The best I can do is a river that is anything but calm. Like planet earth itself, the river of events is turbulent, unpredictable, and subject to the violent laws of nature. Yet I’m struggling to analogize those who wish to get wet, and what they intend to do with all the information that, in the end, we’re all suffocated by.
The ancient scribe, I’m certain, had a comparatively easier job. I assume so only because he could not have known much about events happening outside of his part of the world (even if he could have been killed easily for upsetting the king who did not like what he had chiseled). If those chiseled walls and tablets are history’s first forms of Media, then we’ve clearly come a long way. Nowadays, in the 21st century, everyone has some idea of what the concept entails. The capital “M” does not mean I’m referring to the powerful corporate monopoly that controls most of what we see on TV or read in the newspapers. Indeed, the proper definition of media is: the “means of mass communication.” It’s the publishing of all gray sheets, glossy pages, and hardcovered volumes. Print, the written word, prior to the 21st century, was the primary mode for information transfer for over half a millennium. In the last hundred years, radio and television were introduced, which quickly dominated.
But even those were back then. Now there’s the laptop and the “iPhone,” the very entrance to the nonphysical domain known as the Internet. On there, one can pull up their favorite content creator – one of several hundred thousand. You read the comments, or make a tweet about it – one of several hundred million, every day. A decade ago, techies spoke about exabytes; today, we’re talking zettabytes (whatever that is, I’ll assume it’s a lot). It’s been estimated that if all this information were to be uploaded onto those old-fashioned CD-ROMs, the stack would reach up to the moon five times. Since none of us will ever have the time to go through all that material, it might be easier to throw ourselves onto the stack...err, into the river. Hopefully, my analogies are starting to make some sense.
We’re talking about a lot of data, an unbelievable amount of information that’s being recorded with an instancy that intimidates. As stressed, many try to get deep inside the information wave. They wish to dig, hunt, and sail. For whoever aspires to reach eternity, the impossible goal is to change the very course of the river, or at least put a momentary stop to the rapids. Because these aren’t just commentators, reporters, or scholars. Nor are they activists. They are influencers. As the news comes in, the commentary is delivered in “real time.” Sit down, turn the camera on, and “let’s go through this together.” They make sure to give strong opinions about things they just heard about. No matter. The riverbed, they shout, will be rerouted!
As creators work to perfect this format, they come near synchronicity: the constant flow of notable events that are at once agonizing and monumental, which are then overheard and interpreted at nearly the exact same moment in which they occur, give or take a couple days. This gives the appearance that the two things discussed here – celestial progression and the low-frequency earth-dwellers who record their version of it – can be seen as one. Wherever it is that I’m sitting, I view them as the same.
If this all sounds good, productive, and revolutionary, then I have erred. It’s not my intention to make the river look so inviting. Furthermore, I have doubts whether the wall chiselers had used the king as their only source. Surely some must’ve witnessed events firsthand. But the same can’t be said for everyone riding the Information Superhighway (now using the classic metaphor). With the help of Google and the many online podiums, they can stay always abreast. As such, many like to think of themselves as experts, both educated and encouraged by other information riders.
Compare them to other information-seekers. A graduate student would spend weeks or months studying a subject. An investigative reporter would follow every paper trail and talk to every source. Now, learning more about an issue means doing a few extra searches, while getting closer to the action means getting closer to the screen. From my survey of video and audio content, books are hardly mentioned at all. What’s the point of reading a book when you could just have the author come onto your podcast and tell you all about it? It seems like, for many creators, their sources are comprised mainly of articles, all of which easily pulled up online. (Hell, I’m linking to articles here). Of course, information that’s found in ink retains the same value when it’s turned into digital bits. Still, the overall effect has been to cheapen the general intellect. And cheaper is the fact that not all the content is commentary about the news, for a good deal of creators are simply responding or “reacting” to one another. Lord knows many floppy disks that requires.
Nonetheless, if there is a “national conversation,” those making use of those more personalized formats are the ones heard the loudest. The more enraged, the more waves. Cheers to the conservative radio broadcaster, whether conspiratorial or establishmentarian, who reads the papers, cuts out some clippings, and then offers his rant to an eager audience. This has been a profitable and influential undertaking. Now, a quarter way into the 21st century, and we have award ceremonies for people who sit with a camera in front of their face for half the day. But this is convenient for people who like to listen and watch.
Those sitting on the shore, toe-dipping but not wading, have already taken notice. They don’t only want to be informed: they like to pretend that they’re part of the conversation, making small waves themselves. That’s the reason they “comment below,” call into the show, or give a retweet.
Meanwhile, the rates of illiteracy continue to climb, showing that at least one of my points here is correct. Reading is just too much work. It’s much too time consuming. Somehow it makes me wonder whether I’ll ever see a headline asking, “Have We Reached Peak Book Publishing?” Yet, we see these headlines asking this about podcasting. Does it not seem like everyone has a podcast? (Somehow, I could not picture Socrates hosting a podcast) We see a select few of them surfing at the crest of the algorithmic wave, heard and seen by the masses. Altogether, we’re changing topography, whether drifting into new “places” or crashing into unstable futures.
While I do think there are some good video creators (Dr. Berg!), there are very few podcasters who I can tolerate. I can’t believe I’m the only “consumer” who’s grown tired of seeing grown adults yell, scream, and laugh in front of a camera. For hours they do this, which also makes me wonder if shamelessness will ever become synonymous with courage. Seriousness has been taken out of the conversation completely, and my limited attention span can’t be blamed when I click out of the screen after only a few minutes. This is likely why the word “clown” is thrown around so often on Mr. Musk’s platform, “EXE.”
Eventually, an ego gets so massive, it can’t bear the hint of criticism, and so begins the blocking campaign. Snowflakes building echo-chambers. After a while, they become little more than feuding personalities, all of whom trying to sell something. The grifters! We then bear witness to a quick rise – internet stardom! – which is soon followed by a hard crash in the captured minds of those many souls lost inside their bright screens.
Ephemerality comes twofold. After so many cringy antics and dumb opinions, their reputation starts to suffer. Their star goes as high as its going to go. Suddenly these creators begin to hope and wonder: Will their content be as permanent as those chiseled tablets? “Once it’s on the web,” they repeat to themselves, “it’s there forever.” This is grossly overstated, as readers of the Rocky Mountain News found out. In 2006, the journal published on their website a 33-part series that explored a tragedy that happened in 1961, when a school bus collided with a train, killing 20 children. Putting the article on their website allowed for interactive content that apparently couldn’t be transferred to print. And then one day, the website went defunct, which sent the Pulitzer Prize-winning story into a digital abyss. (The writer of the story had saved the story, and reloaded onto his own site. That site also has seemingly gone defunct.)
Indeed, one of the main fears of being “deplatformed” is that the content will be erased from the web. If it’s not a documentary made by a serious producer, such content will likely find its best audience on one of the major internet platforms. But that’s risky. Recall when GeoCities deleted 38 million homepages. Or when Myspace accidently deleted 50 million songs. All the hard work of independent bands and musicians, who used that original social media platform to upload and promote their work, had suddenly vanished from the web. One wonders how much content YouTube has taken down over the years. Thus it remains on someone’s hard-drive, whether the creator’s or the random shore-dwellers. The task is then before them: to constantly and repeatedly reupload the video-audio content. If you wish to have the message seen and heard, there are few other options. Gone are the days of handing out CDs and pamphlets on the street (ah, the good old days of first-decade 21st century activism). Only at a couple events have I seen people handing out flash-drives. It’s not common.
We might then soon reassess the value of individual websites and domain names. Though I can see that happening, preservation isn’t guaranteed with those, either. According to The Atlantic, investigating this phenomenon (the story is behind a paywall; I’m sourcing from a blog that covered it), some 30 percent of websites disappear from the web within one year. As the above blogger writes, the internet is “not a place in any reliable sense of the word. It is not a repository. It is not a library. It is a constantly changing patchwork of perpetual nowness.” Even I used to refer to the internet as a “repository of information.” While we keep granting this definition, a number of archivists are hard at work trying to preserve what’s found on the internet (We can think of the Wayback Machine). It’s for this reason that I’m always loath to hyperlink to anything other than articles, which I can and do preserve by printing out as a document. Conversely, I won’t be downloading every single video or podcast that contains something useful. I fully expect much of that content to soon be gone from the web, and it’s just not worth the space on my hard drive.
Compare this to those other forms of media: chiseled tablets, as well as books. Greek Philosophy was saved only after the ancient works (stone and vellum) were translated by Islamic scholars. As for post-Gutenberg, the most censored titles in the world enjoy a cycle of life and rebirth every time they are smuggled out of an oppressive regime, thereby getting numerous reprintings. Should we likewise trust content creators and their consumers to ensure the permanence of their work? I would not. What about governments, which consider some online content to be important enough to preserve? Again, I won’t place any bets.
It is possible to lay out the welcome mat for AI, which could one day become our analyst and appraiser. People are already using ChatGPT to give book summaries, but in my experience using the program, ChatGPT is unequipped to give a proper education, as many of the titles on my bookshelf have yet to be absorbed by the machine. Assuming the conspiracy theorists are correct, and AI programs are in the process of absorbing mass quantities of online content, it leaves us wondering what and how quickly. Text is a no-brainer. But what about all those millions of hours of video-audio content? Even if AI doesn’t breakdown while siphoning through all that cringe, we still hope it remains impartial. “Could you tell me,” it will be asked, “how many times Joe Rogan has said the ‘N’ word?” And did the AI miss a few of Joe’s N-bombs? In a future with social credit systems, those Joes might not have any other audience.
For anyone who has watched dystopian movies or read dystopian novels, this comes across as very bleak. I don’t want my work to be analyzed by robots, no more than I wish to entertain a dumbed-down population. While the first is likely inevitable, the second is the more regrettable. Thankfully, paper provides for greater depersonalization.
Even as my handful of printed publications are filled with my strong opinions, they contain no facial expressions; nor are they like those children’s books with prerecorded sounds, and so one will not be blessed with my weird laughter and psychotic anger. I’d sooner shout off of a mountain than to snap a picture of my weirdly contorted face so it could be made a part of my “brand.” It’s not that I’m incapable of being a clown; I just realize that one loses some of their mystique the more they’re seen and heard.
It’s for all these reasons that I prefer my surfboard (haven’t forgotten my metaphor!) to be made of paper. Paper is where I clarify, improve, and finalize what I want to convey. Nearly all of my content starts with a pen and paper. As with plenty of other creators, something pops into my brain. I then scramble for the nearest piece of paper – accounting for all my many notebooks – and then scribble out a few words that capture the essence of what might be forgotten in a couple minutes time (will the thought return to me? It often does, and when it doesn’t, the fears of cognitive decline begin anew). After so many paper notes, I start a new word document, where the scribbles are turned (hopefully) into a clear sentence. As they’re being typed, questions arise, which give me the task of finding answers. Yes, I do search for articles on the internet, but I also start making a list of books, along with their prices, which keeps the employees of Amazon busy. I’m of the belief that book citations lend more credibility to a piece. How else to search for facts once forgotten, or ones unavailable online? And no, I’ve never read a book on a screen, and never plan to. I like the work to be in my hand – hardcover or soft, it makes no difference. Used books are perfectly acceptable.
This all takes time, but its really just a start. When all the noting and reading is completed, it comes time to compose. That I have been striving to do for 15 years. It’s not intended to make me seem special. If anything, I have a very difficult time getting started on a writing project. Its not easy to transform the “something” from your notes into a well-researched, well-argued piece of many thousands of words, all of which must “flow” coherently. It’s always a great horror to go back and read an old composition only to realize how wordy and unintelligible it is. Therefore, you conclude, the next piece must be given another week of editing! Then I’ll be able to remove that part in the text where I abruptly stop the point I was making so as to type: “Ha-Ha-Ha.” Next comes the removal of all the “um’s,” “errs,” and “ya knows’.” Paper provides at least that much precision, even if sarcasm doesn’t come across that well.
Increasingly, literary endeavors appear to be for naught. I can’t be the only independent writer whose had difficulty finding their niche. In all these years, I’ve written several hundred thousand words (this doesn’t include my diaries, letters, or short stories – which would be several hundred thousand more words). I’ve published one collection of journalism and two booklets. So far, it’s brought me no revenue and no wide readership. Needless to say, that fact frustrates. But if that sounds like jealousy, believe me: I would be apoplectic if I were to ever become an “E-celebrity.” Moreover, I refuse to allow my oeuvre to be hundreds of hours of video-audio content.
The end result of all this hard work is unknown. Like all delusional, self-important writers, I do hope to find some kind of readership after my death. As of right now, I have only a small handful of friends who read my stuff. Even though I get discouraged, I’ll keep at it. After all, I’ve always appreciated the aesthetic of a shelf full of books all bearing the name of the same author. Not only is it impressive, its sophisticated. I suspect that’s something that a lot of today’s most popular influencers will not be able to enjoy.
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