Sometimes I write something to get it out of my system, and sometimes I write to dig a little deeper into my system. I can usually tell the difference in a few ways; one of those is that one-off kinds of posts are often ones where I’ll begin with a title, while posts that are more exploratory don’t get titled until after I’ve written. And then there are posts like the last one, where I spent more than a day with the full post finished, just waiting for some sort of title to suggest itself to me. I didn’t end up happy with the title or subtitle on it. While it’s almost inexcusably meta to write another post about the problem of titling the last one, here we are, overthinking.
There are a few reasons for my title struggle, things that didn’t make it into the post, or things I thought about afterwards.
This is one. While I still think it’s accurate and fair to say that I’ve had a crisis of faith when it comes to the virtues of teaching “digital writing,” there’s also an extent to which I think the Wallace anecdote about the fish is more on-the-nose than I realized at the time. In the 2010s, there’s a sense in which my understanding of digital writing, coming as it did/does from a person/time that preceded digital writing, was no longer of much use to my students. In the same way that I simply stopped teaching HTML at some point, my whole understanding of the subject may simply have aged out of relevancy. I was starting to get students who were far more active (and in some cases, more successful) than I was with social media, and if I’m being honest, I have to consider that this may have prompted my crisis of faith as much as any principles that I may hold. So if I’m the older fish in this analogy, then there came a point where asking the question began to feel a little futile.
To be fair, though, the ecosystem also played a role. I developed all sorts of assignments that drew on web applications, freeware, and the like, and the 2010s were a period of intense consolidation. If you weren’t already one of the major players on the scene, then your surest route to success was to create some sort of trendy app and hope to get bought out by one of the majors. And that happened over and over and over to the applications that I used in that course. One example that comes to mind off the top of my head is an essay that Robin Sloan wrote about ten years ago, Fish: a tap essay. This was in the early days—the iPhone had only been released 5 years earlier, and the tools for creating iOS apps were largely non-existent. First of all, it’s a great little essay about the banality of “liking” stuff on the internet, but more importantly, it nudged my thinking about what an app could be, what an essay might look like in that environment, etc.
A couple of programmers, inspired by Sloan’s piece, created an online tap essay authoring tool. It wasn’t incredibly sophisticated, but it was free, and I built some interesting assignments around it that helped students think about some of the different affordances of digital writing. Back in the day, it felt like there were a lot more tools of this sort, mini-platforms that did one or two interesting things. Ultimately, the site disappeared, as the code got bought by someone and integrated into digital advertising (or forgotten entirely. One of the ugliest parts of the Great Centralization of the Internet was how much we lost to companies that would just buy up these tools because they could and then lock them in the proverbial storage facility so that there was less competition). It feels to me now as though there were a lot of sites that we lost that way in the 2010s. Sites that facilitated small scale wikis, or provided you with a suite of social networking tools, for instance. Heck, even Facebook was a much more interactive place before they realized that their native apps distracted users from having their personal lives mined for data.
It’s perhaps more accurate to say, then, that I experienced a set of overlapping crises to lead me away from digital writing. Part of it was certainly a principled stance on my part—teaching digital writing felt more and more like serving as an agent for a corporate internet that I found alienating. But the directions that digital writing was taking (Instagrammarians, influencers, streamers, et al) weren’t places that I had any particular expertise with, and to that extent, I was approaching a personal expiration date. The internet as a whole felt a lot less fun than it had—did they pave paradise and put up a parking lot? Maybe so.
I also talked about music in my last post, hinting about what’s been lost as we move from record stores to music as a service (Pandora, Spotify, e.g.). This could just as easily been about the disappearance of bookstores, toy stores, hobby shops. etc. There are a lot of areas where the texture of the world that I grew up in has been flattened by the internet (and subsequently farmed out to the cloud).
And I’m really of two minds about it. I start to feel friction whenever I sense myself moving in the direction of pure nostalgia, hence the way I cut myself off at the tail end of the post. I was thinking about the clips from High Fidelity, though, and I used to pair them with excerpts from Scratch, that 2001 documentary about DJing. There are some great scenes in there where DJs take us into the basements of these decades-old record stores, and there are just these massive piles of old records, slowly wasting away. They talk about the process of gaining access to, and searching through, and finding gems among these stacks, and the language that they use is archaeological.
At the same time, of course, I’m able to link to Scratch above because it’s available on YouTube in a way that my own copy of it is not. It’s on a DVD that I currently have no means of playing. Is it better for these books, movies, albums to be widely available, when the cost is just some dusty nostalgia on my part? Almost certainly. But I must confess that it still feels a bit like a devil’s bargain. Not just because we’re forced to choose between two good things (availability vs. history) but because, once enough of us make that choice, the choice itself disappears.