The Future of Writing

J. Potts

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137440402
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This fascinating collection draws together perspectives on the future of writing in publishing, journalism and online sites. Discussion ranges across the challenges and opportunities for writing and publishing in the context of new content platforms, formats and distribution networks, including e-books, online news and publishing, and social media.

Part I

Writing and Publishing

1

Culture Is the Algorithm

Richard Nash

Abstract: Richard Nash ponders the future of writing by considering reading, and, in the contemporary context, searching and sorting. How, he asks, does writing come to be read? Units of culture – essays, books, poems, songs, films – come to the audience via algorithmically based systems such as Google’s search engines and Amazon’s People Who Also Bought. Nash argues that the integrity of writing will survive its encounter with Big Data, for the history of publishing suggests that it is possessed of a remarkable resilience.

Keywords: algorithm; culture; data; publishing; search

John Potts. The Future of Writing. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. DOI: 10.1057/9781137440402.0006.

A frequent blind spot in the arguments concerning the growing adoption of digital over print as a means for reproducing, disseminating, and consuming knowledge and narrative is that the book is not something that exists in opposition to technology, but in fact is technology. It is simply a technology that has been sanded down to a fine grain by hundreds if not thousands of years of contact with humans, technology that is so perfect it has become invisible, like the wheel or a chair.

To explore the ramifications of this, I’d like to look not quite as far back as John Potts does in his Introduction, but just back to the point where publishing as a commercial enterprise first becomes possible beginning with Gutenberg in the 1500s: publishing 1.0 in the parlance.

If Gutenberg and his immediate successors represent publishing 1.0, I’d argue that simultaneously writing 2.0 begins. Because up until the printing press, a writer was a person who transcribed. The writer was a person who existed to take the words of the culture, or take the words of God, and write them down.

The role of the writer was not to invent or express personal truths, but to reproduce: to reproduce the word of God or to reproduce the stories that everybody knew, to reproduce Gilgamesh, to reproduce the Greek myths, to reproduce information about how much grain was in the king’s silos, to be a conduit through which acknowledged and agreed-upon truths expressed themselves.

Printing was a much more efficient means for this information to be reproduced than the writer who now goes from being a person who is guaranteed a job, simply because they can write, to being somebody who is now competing with a machine. The monk and the scholar have to find something else to do.

Conveniently, over the course of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, Western culture invented genius, especially the Romantics. They invented the idea that the individual existed independent of society, independent of culture, and that the act of individual expression was meaningful. This was a Faustian bargain, of course. In fact, Goethe wrote a great deal about this particular topic, because the Germans in the nineteenth century were seeking to invent copyright alongside the English and had to provide a moral basis for copyright, to accompany the commercial basis for copyright that had existed up until then.

The problem that the writer faces is that they now have the ability to justify a job, because they are creating something that does not exist before, something that springs from their own head, not from the world around them (I speak here of how the law sees it, rather than how literary criticism has viewed authorship over the centuries). However, it also puts them in a situation where they are dependent now on another form of technology, typically not owned by them, to be able to reproduce their texts, to be able to take advantage of their newly found genius.

Several centuries later, that begins to change. I speak not of the Internet, though, not of the web, but of PostScript, the beginning of publishing 2.0. PostScript, and its subsequent incarnation, the PDF, is the first time anybody reading this essay could create something that printers could use to print, as opposed to finding a type-setter who had to be paid many thousands of dollars, assuming that one could even be found willing to take on a single project. The PDF is the first moment where an individual is able to produce something as high-quality as a billion dollar corporation.

This of course, has a very significant effect on the output of books. In the United States, the total number of titles produced increases fourfold from 1950 to 1990 and in the following seven years it increases fourfold again.¹ That first phase from 1950 to 1990 is partially driven by very incremental improvements in print and distribution technology including the construction of the US interstate system. This allowed for cheaper and faster re-supply, just-in-time inventory, stock control, all the various ways in which industrial manufacturing over the twentieth century became relatively more efficient.

Numerous social developments were also supporting this. The relative amelioration of racism and sexism in Western society allowed people who had previously been excluded from access to intellectual, cultural, social, and financial capital to now be able to imagine themselves writing 100,000 word narratives. Publishing in 1950, when 8,000 titles a year was done, was an activity of, by, and for white men.²

Now, I return to the data that I’d begun to outline earlier. From 1990 to 1997 we saw a very significant jump. Remarkably it starts to slow down. In the next seven years, from 1997 to 2004, it only doubles. Again, over the following six years it increases relatively less significantly. Note that these are print, not eBooks, and note that we’re enumerating from traditional publishers – and not including the ‘book’ titles coming from companies that repackage Wikipedia entries as ‘books,’ which start to account in 2008 for hundreds of thousands of additional titles.

So the dramatic increase in the title output of publishing is not in the last decade with the advent of the Kindle and the pervasive Web. The dramatic increase is in the 1990s as independent publishers and corporate publishers alike use the ability of desktop publishing to be able to dramatically increase the title count of books published.

However, in the music business the advances were much more on the consumption than production side early on. The MP3 standard is established in 1993, allowing people to consume music digitally, but the equivalent degree of access to production technology that pertained in the book world in the mid-1980s does not come into being in the music world until the middle of the 2000s. Innovation in the publishing world was supply-side, in the music world demand-side.

To consider the ramifications of this, let’s look at Netflix, a US-based company that began life as a mail-order DVD subscription service. It’s since shifted to more of a streaming video model, but for our purposes the original incarnation as a DVD subscription service suffices. Their basic model was that you pay $10 or $12 a month and you got to have three DVDs out at any given time. It was quite a successful business because we all have movies that we always meant to watch and had never got around to watching, as we didn’t have time to watch them in the theaters, they didn’t end up on television, and the local video shops had a very limited inventory.

If you’re a fan of esoteric Japanese cinema or weird 1970s American grindhouse, you were out of luck in most cases. Netflix came along to solve that problem for you, to allow niche interests to be efficiently satisfied. That worked very well for a few years, but after a while Netflix began to see that people had now watched all the movies they had always meant to watch and were starting to cancel their subscriptions. Netflix had to figure out how to get people to watch things that they didn’t yet know they wanted to watch. They began to use algorithms to identify patterns in how people rated films, to identify, in a word, ‘taste.’ The ability to predict taste would allow them to suggest movies that people did not yet know they wanted to watch, based on rankings from people with seemingly similar tastes (i.e., similar rankings of films). To improve the algorithms, they announced a prize, the Netflix Prize, to be awarded to the first person who could improve the algorithm’s ability to predict how people will rate movies by 10%.

The race to win the prize became quite a media phenomenon. Jordan Ellenberg, for Wired, interviewed a number of hundreds of mathematicians around the world who were participating in the prize. Said one, when asked why he was participating: ‘The 20th century was a matter of supply. The 21st century will be a matter of demand.’³

About nine months after the Wired article, the New York Times Magazine also covered the prize. At that juncture, the leading groups of mathematicians had managed to get around an 8.5% improvement of the way there. The journalist Clive Thompson wanted to figure out what was the remaining one-and-a-half percent? What are the flies in the ointment?

It turns out that more than a third of what was left were movies like The Squid and the Whale, Napoleon Dynamite, Sideways, Lost in Translation; quirky movies; character-driven movies, voice-driven movies; movies that effectively behaved like novels – suggesting that there are certain areas of culture that might not necessarily be as amenable to algorithmically driven prediction as people might have hoped.

What was the book publishing industry’s solution to demand side problems? In the United States it was exogenous: Oprah. Oprah was the saviour of the American book business in the eyes of the American book business (in the United Kingdom there was Richard & Judy, in Germany, Elke Heidenreich, lest one think that this was an American thing, and not a book business thing). Oprah’s book club arrived just as publishing really started increasing their product count and it had the magical ability to generate two, three, four million copy sales of books that might otherwise have only sold 25,000 or 50,000.

What I would argue, though, was that Oprah was not, in fact, the saviour of publishing. She was, rather, saved by publishing. Oprah was the host of an afternoon talk show, up against five or six similar shows, a pack in which she was early on in the middle. What she realised, consciously or unconsciously, is that she was in a business – broadcast television – that was unidirectional. It may seem to be very powerful but it was powerful for an hour. For one hour she could talk to 10 million people. When that hour was over, she left their living room and someone else was now talking to 10 million people.

Once she started her book club, Oprah never left. Oprah was in your bedroom. Oprah was in the bathroom if you read there. Oprah was in the cafeteria when you were having lunch with your colleagues. Oprah was in the bar or restaurant, Oprah was in the car with you if you listen to audio books in your car. Oprah used books to build 24/7 mindshare, as the marketing consultants might describe it. This allowed Oprah the platform to develop her next phase in her media career, a 24-hour cable network. At thi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• Part I  Writing and Publishing
• Part II  Creative Writing
• Part III  Journalism: Estate 4.0
• Index