Most People Aren't Authors
They may, however, be DJ's
There’s a famous quote that you can find cited in lots of places, where an ancient writer laments the fallen state of the world, where corruption is rampant, children won’t obey their parents, “and everyone is writing a book.” Or maybe I should have scare quotes around “quote” and “cited” in that, because while it’s frequently repeated, it very likely doesn’t actually exist.
I was thinking about this because Freddie deBoer posted a thing yesterday about the disappointing lack of quality original video content, which pivots to a broader complaint about the unintended consequences of lower barriers to entry:
But there’s another dimension of this that I’ve thought about for awhile now: I fear that because it’s so easy to make something, now, people feel no pressure to make anything particularly ambitious. I worry that, now that the urge to create can be scratched by making a half-assed video in 10 minutes or by playing video games on Twitch for a couple hours, there’s no particular reason for people to dream bigger and invest more time, energy, and emotion into their work. Once upon a time, if you wanted to make a film that would be viewed by more than a few dozen people, you had little choice but to go through the process of getting that film released in at least some theaters - maybe at a festival or in arthouses or college screening rooms or something, but shown in theaters one way or another. And that was hard. There were barriers to entry. Those barriers in and of themselves weren’t good, but that reality meant that if you had a burning desire to reach others through that medium you had to really invest yourself. You didn’t half-ass making a movie when you had to get your hands on a hard-to-acquire camera and use expensive film and employ a crew and work hard to somehow get it in front of an audience.
Now, you can just make some lame YouTube video, and though everyone who watches it will forget it within a few days, you might well scratch the itch that in another era would compel you to do great work. It’s the same with writing (you could print something out and hand it out on the street, at best, without institutional support) or music (you could perform your work live, but even then you’d have to beat the bushes for opportunities, and pressing your albums was expensive), even visual arts (without some amount of gallery access and ability to generate publicity you’re pretty much confined to showing your work on the street).
This struck a bit of a chord with me, because I’ve been at this blogging thing since 2002— in geological analogy terms, that’s after the dinosaurs but before the giant armored sloths— and back in those early days of the medium, there were a lot of arguments about what the long-term consequences would be. A lot of the big names in the early days were all about politics and media, and tended to see it as a transformative force for journalism, making “Every Man His Own Pundit” in the words of a T-shirt I may still have upstairs (though I think it’s moved into the basket of workout shirts…). I argued at the time that while the effect on the punditocracy was likely to be relatively clear and immediate, the more transformational long-term effect was likely to come from lowering the barriers to creativity— from giving people the tools to make and share books and music and video of their own.
Looking back on this from nigh on 20 years later, I think there’s a case to be made that both sides had it wrong. On the media/punditry side, while there was a brief and wild period where things genuinely seemed in flux, it pretty quickly became professionalized. A bunch of former bloggers ascended to staff jobs at various publications, and the “blogosphere” came to be dominated, on the politics and culture side, by people who were salaried members of the commentariat, or career-oriented folks who saw writing a blog (and, later, curating a Twitter persona) as a stepping stone to a position in relatively traditional media. A lot of the variety and originality leached out of the discursive space, replaced by a kind of boring professionalism— maybe a bit more opinionated and less staid than the pundit class of 1999, but not substantially more interesting in aggregate.
On the creative side, I mostly agree with deBoer that the revolutionary technology hasn’t unlocked a vast flood of exceptional new works. That’s not to say there aren’t any— there’s new and interesting stuff out there, and the expansion of Internet techmology genuinely has enabled the creation of entirely new creative forms like the gaming video streams that SteelyKid and The Pip are intermittently obsessed with. I’m not sure “The Dream SMP” is going to endure like the works of Homer, but as baffling as I find the whole thing (I am, after all, officially Old), it’s something genuinely new and has a very substantial core of fans who are fired up to watch people spend hours and hours doing real-time role-playing in a shared Minecraft world.
While tech has opened up new areas for creative expression, though, those seem to fairly quickly come around to the same sort of distribution patterns and practices of older forms. There are a handful of wildly prolific and successful stars— YouTubers, TikTokkers, Twitch streamers, podcasters, etc.— who make bank doing these new forms, a somewhat larger corps of jobbers who do solidly professional work, and a vast number of people who dip their toes in for a brief period then stop.
On reflection, though, I’m not sure that’s really that much of a problem, because I’m not really convinced that everyone has a book (or movie, or album) in them. Or, to put it another way, I think that while deBoer’s criticism about lower barriers is interesting, I’m not sure it’s all that broadly applicable. That is, I don’t think there are all that many people out there who thread the needle between having the capability to make great art but also having low enough motivation for that art to be satisfied with having it just seen by their friends and a handful of bored randos on the Internet.
I say that in part thanks to the perspective that comes from having written and published five books now (and as a bit of procrastinating against putting together an idea for number six). Because, you know, that process is really hard, even if you skip the part where professional editors and copyeditors go over your final text and suggest revisions and just go straight to pushing out an .epub. It takes a fairly particular type of personality to grind through writing and self-editing that amount of text even when you have a fat advance check sitting in your bank account, let alone as a nights-and-weekends hobby sort of thing. And putting in the work needed to get better is another huge committment that’s really only going to work out for a small subset of people who have the right make-up to enjoy the process in its own right.
That’s the real reason why the various technological revolutions of the last twenty-odd years have generated new forms, but not a vast amount of great content: most people just aren’t cut out to be authors. Or musicians, or podcasters, or video producers. New technology does lower some of the many barriers between the people who do have the ability and getting their work out into the world, but the barriers that it lowers aren’t the most daunting of the lot. The real barriers are mostly internal. Which is why there are still relatively few book authors, even among the set of people who prospered in the heyday of the blogosphere.
And that’s why most blogs run for a while and then stop, why most YouTube channels have a handful of videos and then fall silent, and so on. People try things out, and find they don’t enjoy it enough to make it feel worthwhile to sustain the effort, so they stop. And I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing. I say this to students about course choices and summer research all the time: learning what you don’t want to do is also giving you useful information about yourself, and your potential career paths. When I give talks about science communication on the Internet, I cite this as a feature, not a bug: the barriers to entry are really low, and the barrier to stopping is nonexistent. So it’s very easy for people who think they might want to do public communication to try out one of these new media, and if you find you don’t enjoy it, it’s even easier to walk away.
This reminds me a bit of a thing that Ryen Russillo has said a number of times on his Ringer podcast, when asked about careers in radio: that he’s seen a lot of people guest-host a sports talk show for a day, and say “Hey, that was fun.” But doing it five days a week, forty-odd weeks a year is a whole different game. Only a very small number of people have the right combination of character quirks to make that work.
In the same way that most sports fans have enough Takes to fill a day or two of a show, but can’t hack it as a full-time host, I don’t think most people have it in them to write a book. But they might have a month or so worth of really good blog fodder, or a few episodes of a podcast, or a handful of videos that will amuse and entertain their friends. And having the technology to allow those people to get those things out into the world, however imperfectly, is probably still a net win. It’s just not all that revolutionary in the end.
To end this on a slightly more upbeat note, though, I would say that I think there is an angle I hadn’t really considered back in the day, namely the curation aspect. This was always there in blogdom, but I think it’s really the primary expressive mode available to ordinary users on Twitter and Facebook. Most people aren’t generating great content of their own on those platforms, but they can select what content from other people they choose to share and amplify, and that can be its own form of expression. Only a very few people are cut out to be rock stars, but most people can be DJ’s, at least to the degree of pulling together some mixes of stuff that reflects their tastes and interests, and sharing them with the world. A lot of that is kind of rote and repetitive, of course, but there are always some quirks in there, a few things that cross my path through friends, or friends of friends, or further iterations thereon, and broaden my view of the world at least incrementally.
And, as the song says, that’s how everything gets played…
Pending the outcome of a bunch of rapid Covid tests, I’ll be taking the kids down to my parents’ for the long weekend. This will likely limit my output between now and the middle of next week. If you want to see new stuff as soon as it exists, though, here’s a button you can click:
And if you have thoughts about technology and creativity, or just want to reminisce about the heady days when it looked like blogs might change the world, the comments will be open:
I think you and I stand for a stubborn tendency that was visible in early blogging and never went away (and thus is here still). I accept the argument that some form of modest monetization is important simply to make the point that writing is labor, labor should be compensated, etc.; my friends who were in the writing biz used to despair so much about early blogging because we were just giving away what they rightfully charged for without any sense of the profit-seeking circling around us looking to buy it all up. But I think there is still a line between "I do this largely for myself" and "I do this for a gig economy living" and in that line there is still something at stake about the public sphere and about the creative possibilities of blogging. The moment that this is just a gig and nothing more is the moment where you're having to chase the influencers, chase the "more attention", having to work every day to get some eyes on a link, having to do what the algorithms tell you to do, having to hire an SEO firm to boost you. I'm stubborn about this because I have the luxury of another living--I don't judge. But I do think that other gig world is captive to a structure that isn't really trying to raise up a better and richer ecosystem of conversation and thought. That includes Substack, which is very clearly sold on the single recipe that they think earns them money, which is newsletters that are singularly obsessed by one dominant theme--because they think (with some justice) that this is the only way into a heavily inhabited ecosystem for a new entrant. The people who got there first, as they do, can write whatever the hell they want, and the same power law distributions that were alive in the early blogosphere work in their favor. It's the logic of Big Tech investment, of always chasing the next new thing. Somebody's got to look out for the good old thing, and I'm happy to take that on.
So I've read a fair amount from YouTubers and streamers about this issue, and it's really important to highlight how much of this seems to be demand (or algorithm) driven. You'll see plenty of creators talking about how they wish they could branch out, be more experimental, spend more time with each video, play different games, and so on. But that doesn't seem to be what viewers want, so here we are.
Substack and blogging can actually run into the same issues, where the sort of articles that generate traffic and subscriptions isn't necessarily the most socially beneficial.