the electronic wave of the future

“Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self, “Cyril Connolly. Connolly has perfectly phrased the reason for why the future of electronic writing will lead to a loss of self and lowering of value. Let me step back a bit because that wording sounded very broad. Basically because of an overexposure to media and quickly written information, the quality and professionalism of the writing world will be lowered and fewer people will make the effort to create a well-crafted article.

So what does this have to do with losing oneself? Well one could argue that the whole act of writing is essentially one’s self expressed through words and phrases. In the future it will be of crucial importance to help quality writing strive by writing for oneself not necessarily always for the public. It’s when we start writing for the convenience of others that we are facing a problem. Electronic writing is faced with this immensely because the whole purpose of it is so it will eventually become widespread news that millions can easily read with the click of a mouse.

There are three ways that I see it having an impact: the individual impact, impact on schools, and a global impact. The individual impact could arguably be the most important, although it wouldn’t have any true significance unless all these individuals impacts combined to create a large scale global impact. The impact on our schools is especially important because that is where we receive the majority of our foundation of education and how we learn or interact with others for the remainder of our lives.

I’m not going to go further into the specifics of how it will be affecting our world because this paper is going to be focused on the exact direction electronic writing is going to take; the impact is not necessarily relevant as this time. Nevertheless, I feel it is important enough to mention earlier in the paper, thusly I have made a point to present this information.

So now to understand the actual direction that electronic writing will take. As I mentioned earlier, the level of professionalism will undoubtedly be lowered. To say more specifically, words are no longer going to be prettily phrased or creative sounding. Electronic writing will serve as an outlet for streaming information. Phrases will be concise, factual and to the point. There would be no point in creating nicely sounded phrases as padding for an article because that will essentially be useless. People are going to be unbelievable impatient in the future. We will be capable of multitasking to an unbelievable level and speed, we will not want to waste time doing something un-useful. That will feel unnatural and insane. Thusly, why would we want to waste time reading a nicely written article if there wasn’t any important information in it or if it took too long to read? We wouldn’t. Therefore writers are going to accommodate to our impatience and release articles to the Internetto get straight to the point.

Sure this will help us to become more productive and efficient, but is this really a good way to become? Couldn’t one argue that we are in fact becoming less human as we are capable of multitasking and processing information at a faster and faster rate? Humans are based off emotion. The future of electronic writing will have as much emotion as a blackboard, just facts, plain raw data that is written in a casual or direct fashion. Emotion will not be evoked from a powerful phrase or beautifully crafted wording. This is in fact turning us less human every day, as Jean Arp said,“Soon silence will have passed into legend. Man has turned his back on silence. Day after day he invents machines and devices that increase noise and distract humanity from the essence of life, contemplation, meditation...tooting, howling, screeching, booming, crashing, whistling, grinding, and trilling bolster his ego. His anxiety subsides. His inhuman void spreads monstrously like a gray vegetation.” Sadly, Arp is right. If technology continues like this and we continue to ignore the things that make humans, humans then we will begin to lose track of who we really are and what we can accomplish, “One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man,” Elbert Hubbard wrote in his 1923 book, The Roycroft Dictionary and book of Epigrams. The most emotion we will have in the future is being frustrated that our web browser isn’t loading faster. Frankly this kind of setting and world makes me very sad. Coming back to my original quote, we really will lose ourselves essentially. We will be capable of so much, however we won’t be capable of the most crucial aspect of all: being in tune with ourselves and our human aspect.

Hundreds of years ago, Shakespeare wrote words that influenced an entire continent and later the world; his words are still felt today and even in some of the farthest reaches of the earth. Since the dawn of the 21st century, there have been few writers who have come out with any works that have rivaled that of our classic authors. Sure there has been the Harry Potter craze and the recent phenomenon with Twilight, but none of these works rival those of the past, and its doubtful that they will be remembered a hundred years from now. We can presume that if this trend persists, which is most likely due to the continuing advancement of our technology dependent culture, then we are heading in a direction of less and less quality writers. Authors today, such as J.K. Rowling are weary of this new technology as well, saying herself “Never trust anything that can think for itself if you can't see where it keeps its brain,” Rowling is one of our few remaining authors who has tried to avoid this influence, she herself began her world renowned Harry Potter series writing on the back of napkins.

The lessening quality of our writers is not entirely the fault of the writer. Mostly the waning quality of our writers is due to the fact that the readers are not in high demand for well-written articles and books. Readers in our modern age are focused on the quick fix, immediate relief from the real world. They are not interested in reading great poetry or well written and thought provoked articles on the War in Iraq. Readers today want their novels quick and to the point; with action and adventure so that they can find an escape from reality, however “The machine does not isolate man from the great problems of nature but plunges him more deeply into them,” Saint-Exupery. Readers also want their news articles to give them the facts as quickly as possible and without fluff. The modern newsreader simply wants to double click on the article and see what’s happening in the world.

Of course with this change of high speed news and less fluffed articles, readers will be able to obtain more information and at a faster rate, inevitably it will lead to people being more informed with news around the world – which is a good thing. However, the reading comprehensions of our world will greatly decline and the ability for people to think for them selves. With all of this information simply being regurgitated to the masses people will only get the dry dull facts, but if history has taught us anything, the facts in history books are not always truth in life, and with these dull facts people will find it difficult to make up their own mind. This will lead to a more informed world, but an overall dumber one too.

In a world that is seeming to lose many of its morals and abilities to love, it is sad to see that emotion is being absent in our writings, if this continues there will be far less ability to love in our world, leading to an increase in violence and war. It would be very sad if we lose the greatest ability of humans, the ability to love and feel compassion, words has always been mans way of expressing that love. With the furthering of technology we will see a sad decline in our ability to feel emotion and feel empathy toward our neighbor. Like Einstein once said “It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity.” Einstein knew this lesson only too well, being one of the inventors of the atomic bomb; Einstein felt great remorse and guilt for his part in the Manhattan Project. He knew that technology was not only making a more dangerous world, in the sense of weapon technology, but also a world of declining morals and less imagination, and as the genius said himself “Imagination is more important than knowledge.”

This advancement in technology has lead our civilization down a strange path. No one can say for sure where modern technology will be in a hundred years, but I can guarantee you that the quality of writing and the expectation that our readers have will be at an all time low. Peoples dependency on the machine is outweighing our dependency on each other, “Where there is the necessary technical skill to move mountains, there is no need for the faith that moves mountains,” Eric Hoffer. If we do not deviate from this course we will find ourselves in a world of silent nature and deafening machines. It is my hopes that our future authors find new reason to reawaken the art of writing and to allow the world to appreciate the beauty of words. In the old world, which ironically we call savage, they treasured works of art like Shakespeare. We must find that joy and respect again for well written stories and unlock the great human potential that a couple hundred years ago was an important part of everyday culture. I know humans have great potential; we just have to take these blinders we call technology off and replace them with a new sense of the world and ourselves.