Wrtiers' relationship with the internet

Writers,

Let's take a look at recent history - ten years.

That's not too broad a scope for people to think around. Unless you're a child, you were alive in 1996. Unfortunately people are prone to forgetfulness. They live more in the context with their cultural perspectives and zeitgeists than they do in the reality of history, and the world around them as it really is.

I remember in 1997, going into the computer section of my library - and they still were using these elaborate text only internet systems - lynx... and their own custom inter-library networks through that. I was shocked. It was a moment of reflection for me... The fact is, that the writing on the internet at that point was not good. The best things to read - the ones which would profit a person the most - were written so awkwardly that a casual reader would not even know where to begin to approach them.

The most respected english teachers in my highschool were women... and they seemed to be like etchings in the middle of a block of glass, eternally preserved in this nostalgic state of mind. They still believed in fighting for women's rights the way people would have in the 1910s in the usa. They still believed that everybody had the right to learn how to read and write - just like they would have in the 1850s - during the literacy/college movements.

These english teachers were not nurturing future generations of writers. They were simply doing the best they could day by day with their own personal life struggles... doing their best to hold down a job in the middle of too many daydreams when they went home at night.

"Daydreams?" you say. "They aspire," you insist to me... "that's not a bad thing." Well, that interjection of yours would bring us into an entirely different conversation about perspective shift with how writers are percieved and how they live now, versus in the last several decades.

Now, the real problem, of course, was that writers did not take care of their own. The writers' guild is ill, and has been for centuries. No one seems to understand the importance of teaching communication, rather than just writing words on paper. No one seems to understand the importance of holding their colleagues to standards of ethics. Writers, of all people, ought to clearly understand how central ethics are in a person's life, and in a society's life. Writers do not teach the young. Writers let themselves be taken advantage of by publishers... and because of this, they eternally live in poverty.

Because of this, those who were called upon in the 1980s and early 1990s to give the internet it's substance and it's direction, did not. All these poor disheveled computer techs who desperately needed mentorship from caring wise writers of previous generations did not receive it. And the internet got off to quite a rocky start. Those rocky trends are still with us today in some sense. The internet with a 56kilobit pipe is still a text only playground. Text forms the paving stones of the net if you have to wait 20 seconds for each page to load.

So what happened to these writers...? they eventually said "doh!" which was the biggest word of 1996... when everybody saw microsoft windows '95 and they realized that they had to get with the program and start learning this new technology. And these writers discovered that they had a nice playground, a nice way to learn from eachother... a nice way to network. But even then, and even up until 2006, they have not lifted a finger to take proactive action to give the internet it's future.

In fact, we have lost a large scope of opportunity as of 2006, because the internet of tomorrow will not be a text based system. It'll be mostly focusing on images, including virtual 3d world technology.

So history has left us in the dust. We did not rise to the occassion, and the largest opportunity we would have had, has slipped through our fingers.

Now... whatever a situation a person or a society finds itself in, one sees how it came to be, one appreciates those trends... one appraises them, and one goes forward from here... Writers, being thinkers, are those who will always have quite a bit of ability to change their world if they ever decide to get themselves together and do it.

History took a wrong turn over the last decade because we were not there to greet it. The internet should have evolved into "free college", instead of "free speech." We should not have these wild eyed lawrence lessig fans talking so loudly about a "free economy" - the proper course would have been transitioning from a big industry economy where everybody works for and buys from big corporations... to a cottage industry economy. We cannot take two steps instead of one on these very large stepping stones. There are many things which have to be resolved if we envision eventually doing away with money. And there are many more practical ways to better our society slowly in the interim.

I mean you guys...! Writers and photographers have let themselves be utterly taken advantage of by the net. We have allowed our intellectual property to come to a place where it has a market value of $0.00. Thank god for the behemoths of the RIAA and the MPAA who are not letting the same thing happen with music and film.

There's no reason to fear a lack of generosity in our society if we take the slow road from big corporations to cottage industries, to whereever we want to go from there... Societies with a more heavy focus on cottage industry like Mexico and India are renowned for their warmth and generosity. A technology such as a computer which allows free manufacture of books, music, film, etcetera... will always prompt people to be more generous than previous generations were, who had to work to copy something. Who had to spend an hour binding a book by hand. More recently, who had to buy electricity and pay employees to run a factory to print compact discs.