After months of preparation, All’s Fair in Love and War, Texas is finally live. Check it out, tell your friends, tell your friends’ tweens and teens!
I realize it might not look like it to the untrained eye, but this website was a lot of work. (Work which, I have to admit, I mostly enjoyed.) It’s built on Wordpress, but it was my first attempt at building a WP theme from scratch. So I had that learning curve to tackle, which was respectable. (If I had it all to do over again, I would probably start out with the Thematic theme and build a child theme from there. I discovered Thematic when building a website for my husband’s job, and it’s wonderful.)
So I built the theme myself. And then I ran into some coding problems. See, from the beginning I knew I did not want to create just anther blog-based serialized novel. There are TONS of those on the net. Given my penchant for the web and “new media” in general, I wanted to create something that, as far as I was aware, hadn’t really been done elsewhere. Building upon some basic beliefs I have about how web users assimilate information and knowledge (about which I have an article coming out on A List Apart some time this fall) I knew I wanted to create a narrative that had many points of entry and exit. I wanted my readers to choose for themselves which narratives to follow. And moreover, I wanted to take all the work out of it. I wanted choosing a narrative to be intuitive and easy.
So the first thing I needed to do was create metadata for each story. Which characters are involved? Where does this story take place? Which story line does it fall into? And I needed to display this metadata in a way that would make sense to the reader, yet wouldn’t be overwhelming.
Turns out, there’s not a way built into Wordpress to do this. You can tell Wordpress to show you the children of certain categories, but you can’t ask Wordpress to show you the children of X category ONLY if this post belongs to the parent category (an subsequently, only if it belongs to the children categories!) This was a fundamental navigational aspect I needed for this site. I needed to say, “Okay, Wordpress, show me the children of the Characters category that this post belongs to, and then show me the children of the Places category this belongs to, and then show me the children of the Events category this post belongs to.”
I tried to make Wordpress do this. I really did. But Wordpress just stuck its tongue out at me. Real mature.
So I cried. (Yeah, neither mature nor productive, I know, but I’m prone to breakdowns when code fails. This is after the cursing has ended.) I cried because I couldn’t get it to work, and because if I couldn’t get it to work, the entire project was going to fail. Without this aspect, the website would be just like tons of other web novels out there.
Then I posted about my troubles on Twitter where a very kind English bloke offered to help me. And to make a long story short, he fixed my problem. And he’s awesome.
Then I ran into another problem. Each story potentially belongs to several different narratives – certain characters, certain places, certain storylines. I wanted my readers to choose how they read the story, but how was I going to make it possible for them to continue in their narrative seamlessly? I mean, when they got to the end of the story, the “next” button would always point to the next chronological post, but not necessarily the next post in the narrative my reader had chosen. So if they only wanted to read posts featuring the Prime of Darkness, they’d have to locate the POD archive, select a post, read, then go back to the archive, find the next post, read it, and so on.
Unacceptable.
I needed to provide navigation that suited the narrative. But how could I know which narrative they were on? How could I know how to help them get to the next post in their chosen narrative?
I considered a lot of options. I thought about adding navigation for every possible exit point. But even with a healthy dose of Ajax, that seemed clunky (and it wasn’t easy to code, as it turned out.)
Then I stumbled upon a plugin that allowed me to do exactly what I wanted. When you choose a link from an archive, the next/previous navigation remembers what archive you came from, and lets you navigate only that archive. So if you’re looking at the Prime of Darkness archive and you click a post, you will navigate only that story line.
Not only acceptable, but awesome.
And after that, the site took off running.
I ran into other, less technical, problems, too. The fact that I can’t draw was a huge obstacle, so I decided to just include illustrations where I could create something that looked halfway decent. I worked hard on the character avatars, and while certain avatars that I made early on could stand to be redrawn, I am mostly very happy with them.
All in all, I count this project a huge success. It works as intended. (There is one small bug that I still don’t know how to fix, but it’s a bug I can live with for now.) It’s different from the other hundreds of digital narratives out there. I’m proud of the voice, and the character, and what I’ve managed to accomplish, more or less by myself.
Years ago I worked for a semiconductor company with a compelling initiative: to bring internet connectivity to 50 percent of the world by the year 2015. It was an idea that excited me then. I imagined children in Botswana and Uruguay with their OLPCs signing on to the internet for the first time, exploring literature, art, cinema, critique. I imagined them gleefully clicking through a complex, net-native narrative that was educational, entertaining, and unfolded in an organic, meaningful way. I imagined them blissful participants in a wonderful, intricate, global conversation.
And then I realized that the web I hoped these children would find was a web that didn’t exist yet. And worse, I realized that we, the web creators, were doing very little to make that web a reality.
We made a mistake early on, at the very beginning of the worldwide web going mainstream. When we all rushed out to grab a .com, when we collectively decided that .com was the extension to have, we set the web on a very lopsided course. We unconsciously gave the web over to business and commerce — an ownership and dominion Sir Tim Berners-Lee certainly didn’t envision or intend, and one that hasn’t done us enough favors. We’ve engaged in many conversations, given many presentations, and written many articles on why good web content, smart design, and semantic, standards-compliant markup are important for business. And that’s important — somebody has to make the business case in order to protect web professionalism as a viable industry and fund our technological and philosophical advancements. Without the porn industry, we wouldn’t have DVDs.
However, we’ve lost sight of the other side of the web. Our approach to the web thus far has been very yang: organized, compartmentalized, hierarchical, linear, objective. And that’s been great for folks who want to sell a product or idea, or disseminate information. It hasn’t, however, been so great for folks who want to learn, experience, and explore. If we want to build a more balanced web, if we want to build a web that is good for culture as well as good for business, we have to start having different conversations and asking different questions.
What would the web look like if .art had been the extension to have?
How can we help erstwhile users become enthralled readers and contributors?
How can we take what we know about how people learn to make the web better?
“They laugh alike
They walk alike
Sometimes they even talk alike!
You can lose your mind…” *
…but “users” and “readers” aren’t the same people.
Except when they are.
That’s why writing good web content is harder than you’d think. Because site visitors are shifters, changing from user to reader and back again in the blink of an eye (or the click of a link.)
We talk a lot in the web industry about users. What users want, what they need, what they’re trying to do and how they want to feel. From a content standpoint, we talk about how users consume content, how they read (or scan) and how they expect their content delivered to them.
As a result, we’ve spent a lot of time talking about ways to deliver our users the content they want as efficiently as possible. We talk a lot about chunking, bullets, and front-loading. And for the most part these are all very useful suggestions when we’re talking about creating content for users.
But what about when we’re creating content for readers?
I’m guilty of the long form – though perhaps guilty isn’t the right words as I feel no shame or remorse in that. I publish online but I write specifically for readers – people who sit down to read, not just scan. My “ideal reader”, to borrow a phrase from Stephen King, isn’t necessarily looking for specific information. He isn’t trying to get a quick tip out of me. He’s here for the journey. He’s here for the experience. And because I know this about him, I can write to his passions, to his interests, and to his heart.
But I have the privilege of knowing my readers are readers for as long as they’re with me. Not everyone has that luxury. Because most of the time, our readers alternate between reading and using.
Imagine a typical visit to Amazon.com. I come as a user – I want to find a product. I need to be able to navigate the interface to find what I need amidst thousands of like products. But once I find what I’m looking for, I want to learn more about the product and verify that it’s what I want. I read product descriptions. I read reviews. I want to absorbed – I’m not looking for instant gratification. I turn from user to reader, and suddenly the type of content that I both want and expect changes. But once I am done reading and learning, having made my decision, I want to click “buy” and zoom through the checkout process. I, once again, am a user.
So when we think about what our visitors want, we have to consider their role at the moment they encounter our content. There are no hard and fast rules about what constitutes good or even appropriate “web writing”. The rules change based on the circumstance.
If your shopping cart content is rich and prosaic, you’re probably doing something wrong. On the other hand, if your article on caring for a dying loved one is little more than a list of bullet points, you probably deserve to be punched in the face.
Writing good content means writing to the circumstance. It means writing what your visitor needs and expects. It means being flexible enough to change your style with as much ease as visitors change roles. Readers and users have different needs – even when they’re the same person. Treat different things differently.
*When cousins are two of a kind! (Thanks, Patty Duke Show!)
As part of an ongoing project, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how to make the web better for learning.
Yesterday, I was nostalgically flipping through an old copy of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Nature, a booklet I’ve had since high school. The summer after our senior year, three friends and I purchased a copy of The Portable Emerson, cut out the Nature chapter with an Xacto knife, and had it bound. A group of amateur philosophers, writers, and artists, our goal was to create something beautiful out of something that had so inspired us. We wanted to collect our disparate views and emotions of this work and share them with each other in an artistic fashion. So we spent the summer passing the booklet around, reading, adding notes in the margins and the white pages we had cleverly added. The artist among us added illustrations; our philosopher included favorite quotes by Kierkegaard and Nietzsche (which often had nothing, specifically, to do with the text, but was obviously inspired by something she saw in the pages.) At the end of the summer, the booklet was well loved and worn, and filled not only with margin notes but also with art, tangential thoughts, and the personalities of the four girls who had given pieces of themselves to the work.
Even though I’ve read Nature several times since that summer, I found my friends’ notes inspiring, and not merely because they brought back memories. Their insights did not always mirror my own, and having immediate access to another person’s perceptions, thoughts, and reactions is a valuable part of the learning process. This is why class discussions are so beneficial. Talking things out is helpful.
Blogs make conversation about a piece of online writing possible: readers can leave messages, ask questions, share information about the work. But in reading deeper, more complex works, I always find this commenting system very limiting. Reading user comments at the end of a work feels tacked on; it doesn’t feel organic the way reading margin notes in a library book does.
When I’m engaged in an online reading, I want to see relevant user notes contextually. I want to see their thoughts, questions, and links in the place where they make the most sense. Post-reading conversation in the comments is still good and necessary, but as I’m reading, inline margin notes would do wonders for my ability as a learner to absorb, recontextualize, and integrate these other thoughts.
This morning, I stumbled across Clive Thompson’s article on Wired about the future of reading (specifically reading books), and from there found The Golden Notebook Project which attempts to do something similar to what I dreamed up. Seven women read a single book and included their notes on the page – as a reader, I can see the notes immediately instead of having to read them all at once at the end.
I like the approach, but it doesn’t quite go far enough. I want to be able to read someone else’s article, highlight a particular sentence, and link that sentence to another piece of relevant information elsewhere – whether that’s an image, an article, or a video. But unlike a Wiki, I want personalities preserved. I want to see who is making the notes, who is thinking the thoughts. I want my reading of this document both to inform me but also to allow me to explore new relationships.
It would get messy. For popular reads, it would be impossible. But I still like the idea. I like the possibility.
But what I would like even more would be a central repository where works could be published specifically for collaborative notation and hyperlinking. I want to see works that are creative commons (or which the author has granted permission) to be republished on another website – a virtual library of sorts – where registered users can comment and link. Reader comments and annotations can be rated by other users such that certain comments can be filtered out when they become overwhelming. I think I’d prefer to see comments on mouseover or on-hover rather than on the side of the page – I find that format distracting. But I do think there’s possibility here for learning, for exploration, and for discovering new relationships and resources.
Of course, as with all user generated content, a huge problem would be separating chaff from the wheat, combatting ego monsters, dealing with trolls, and the various other methods people employ to ruin online experiences. So I recognize this pie-in-the-sky collaborative annotation and hyperlinking could be too fantastic for reality. Still, it’s what I want. And maybe if I put it out there, someone can make it happen in a way that works. Who knows? I have faith.
I admit it: I was one of those dorks who was so pumped about the release of Wolfram Alpha that I compiled a list of potential questions to ask the magic machine as soon as it went live. Gripping my pen in hand, I hunched over my Moleskine and scribbled down the questions my inner child most desperately wanted to know the answer to:
How many licks does it take to get to the Tootsie Roll center of a Tootsie pop?
How much wood could a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?
What is the meaning of life?
What is the 69th digit of pi? (I actually know this one, since I know the first 180+ digits of pi thanks to this awesome song)
Where in the world is Carmen Sandiego?
Of all the things I could have asked — and eventually I did get around to asking some good questions. I learned, for example, that there are 7 x 1000^22 stars in the observable universe — what I most wanted to know were questions that have been part of my character development since childhood. Questions that are the foundation of my generation. Questions that, in all honesty, I did not expect Wolfram Alpha to know.
I secretly wanted to see it fail.
So imagine my surprise when, after smugly typing ridiculous question #1 into the search box, WolframAlpha returned:
“All right, smartass,” I thought. “I bet the nefarious dudes behind Mathematica knew somebody would ask this. I’m not surprised you knew that answer. Let’s try another.”
So I straightened up in my chair and asked ridiculous question #2. Surely it would have no idea what I was talking about. But, despite the odds (or perhaps not— it isn’t like I have the faintest idea how WolframAlpha actually works) it returned:
Now, if I’m being honest, I don’t entirely accept that as the correct answer. The answer is (according to my own childhood), “He’d chuck as much as a woodchuck could if a woodchuck could chuck wood.” But then again I recognize there are regional differences in these sort of things, and a lot of time has gone by, and seeing as how I don’t think Wolfram went to elementary school in North Hollywood in the early 80’s, I was willing to give it the benefit of the doubt.
Wolfram Alpha: 2. Amber: 0.
All right. So Wolfram Alpha could answer some “how much” and “how many” questions. Fine. But what would it do if I threw it a curve ball? Surely, surely Wolfram Alpha would stumble over its Mathematica-founded feet when I asked it the most fundamental existential query of all: What is the meaning of life?
But I probably don’t even have to tell you what Wolfram Alpha had to say about that. Okay, I’ll tell you anyway.
In retrospect I probably should have known better.
By now, of course, I was getting a good laugh not only out of my own hubris, thinking it would be this easy to trick the machine, but also out of how interesting this experiment had become. Sure, I’d only been asking questions about pop culture but those are precisely the kinds of questions I didn’t expect it to have an answer to.
Thinking that it was time to ask it a question it should know, I decided to ask a math question about pi.
I was disappointed that it didn’t sing the result back to me, actually. Because that would have been so rad.
Amazed and more than a little put out that I still hadn’t been able to stump the computer, I thought about my final question. It would have to be a real zinger. It would have to be something deep, something profound whose answer I had sought but still had not found. And after a few moments of soul searching, it came to me in a flash. In a fever, tongue slightly breaching the barrier of pursed lips, I typed out my coup de grâce, my final question, the question I most needed to know: “Where in the world is Carmen Sandiego?”
I waited while the computer thought. I bit my lip. I bounced a little in my seat, waiting for it, waiting, knowing that I would finally know what my little girl self had never known:
Dashed! Destroyed! My eyes popped open is disbelief, my spine as straight as an arrow as I slammed my hands palm down onto the top of my Ikea desk. “No! No, Wolfram, you do know! I know you do. I have faith!”
I typed the question in again, but Wofram Alpha still didn’t know. It had no idea where in the world was Carmen Sandiego.
I admit it was a cheatful question, because Carmen Sandiego isn’t in any one place; she gets around. (She wouldn’t be a very good thieving villainess if she always hung out in the same spot). Still, I was hoping for something. Anything. Any answer would have been better than what it gave me. After all, when I later asked it, “Where’s Waldo?” it confidently responded, “Arkansas.”
Ah, well. Perhaps it’ll learn still. I have high hopes for it; it’s already performed beyond my meager expectations. As for now, as to the whereabouts of Carmen Sandiego, the world may never know.
You don’t need a degree in literature to notice a current trend in web writing. You can’t surf the web without running into articles, blog posts, and even interface copy that is sarcastic, self-righteous, question-talky and overly sincere. You’ll find myriad articles with advice about “how not to suck at…” or admonishing you that your blog (or your résumé, or your handshake) sucks. You’ll find bloggers and copywriters oozing disdain and annoyance all over their keyboards. (Try to read a couple posts from any popular mommyblog and you’ll see what I mean.)
At the other extreme we have websites that are trying too hard to be your friend. Twalala.com tells me they “pinky-swear” not to divulge my password information. Moo.com wants “to change the world. No, really.”
The tone of currently fashionable web writing is awful. It’s embarrassing. It makes me want to scratch my ears out. It’s too much — too sarcastic, too friendly, too unreal. And it’s unnecessary. If your web team has done its job adequately, the entire site should lend itself to openness and trustworthiness. If your site works, is aesthetically pleasing, and I can find my way around, there’s no need to overdo the language. I don’t want to be friends with your website. I just want to do whatever I came there to do.
But the worst offender, the most egregious trend in current web writing, is the question talking. You’ve all read it, and you’ve probably even heard it in real life. It’s the bizarre new phenomenon where we break statements into questions for emphasis.
That? Is awesome!
I’m guilty of having done it. Which gives me even more reason to hate it.
In the old days when I learned English grammar and punctuation, we used question marks for one thing: questions.
Is that awesome?
Will it be awesome?
Could it be awesome?
Should it have been awesome?
Must it had to have been awesome?
These are questions.
“That? Is awesome!” isn’t. (Either awesome or a question.) I assume that that the real effect we’re going for here is emphasis. But we already have a wonderful tool for indicating emphasis.
Italics.
“That is awesome!” gets the point across and allows the reader to hear what she wants to hear. If, like me, your reader is so tired of the ubiquitous question-for-emphasis that she simply can’t bear to read it anymore, she’ll be so thankful that you left her to own devises. By resorting to the simple, non-trendy emphasis that is both timeless and culturally universal (or at the very least, more universal than the weird question thing we’ve been up to for a few years now) you’ve given your reader the freedom to interpret that emphasis for herself. You’ve given her the freedom to hear:
or
Or whatever. You get the point.
And while that might seem trivial, letting your reader dictate the tone she hears actually establishes a better relationship than forcing her to hear things your way.
If I were any more egocentric, I might be tempted to believe that the phrase about “best laid plans” and mice and all that rot was about me.
My intention was for “A Timely Raven” to be wrapped up just before Halloween. I wanted it to be a period piece, of sorts. But when life got busy (and I fell tragically behind on my prop-making), I resigned myself to the fact that there was only one of me, and I had to prioritize.
Halloween comes but once a year. Trick-or-treaters would not wait for me to finish my story. Hence, the story got pushed to the end of my to-do list.
Setbacks aside, not only is the final vignette of A Timely Raven published, I have begun building a platform for the other spin offs, and for the growth of the central project. It has always been my intention for “A Timely Raven” to grow into more than a singe Halloween tale; I have always intended for it to be an ongoing journal of a raven living in Austin, his adventures, the people he meets, their lives, and ultimately, their deaths.
Those of you following Tatum’s storyline will be pleased to learn that in the next few days, her story will pick up again on the new platform and be carried through to the end. I’ve enjoyed doing this; it has given me something to look forward to.
And those of you reading Emily & Lily–you’ve not been forgotten. Their story picks up again this week as well.
As for the rest of it, we’ll have to see how it goes. We’ll have to see what Raven has in store for the rest of the year. It might be a while in coming – the website has not yet been built and I have other projects eating away my time. But I hope that you will find it all worth the wait. I hope this project will prove a real contribution to the genre of online fiction.
The last few weeks have been a dizzying but wonderful storm of story writing and Halloween prop building, and now that there are no props left to build (not for this year, anyway!) I can return to the writing without distractions.
One of my favorite aspects of writing A Timely Raven has been exploring different ways to use the web as a medium for storytelling. Lots of people publish online fiction; not a lot of people are willing to tell their stories in a non-linear, interactive, multimedia fashion. Perhaps there’s good reason for this; we all know how to read books, and if we mimic books online, our readers know what to expect and how to tackle what we’ve given them.
But what’s the fun in that?
Don’t get me wrong — I have a deep and abiding love for the printed word, and my adoration for books and libraries and tangible, sniffable reading materials is nigh unbounded. Yet, if storytellers are going to publish on the web, shouldn’t we use it to its fullest its capacity? Shouldn’t we explore the various methods it provides for shaping an enthralling, consuming story?
And to that end, why should storytellers and novelists have all the fun? Why shouldn’t web content writers use the web to the fullest as well?
Although I’ve long wanted to write an online story, the real reason I began writing A Timely Raven was because I wanted to explore different ways of using web apps and social media to develop and integrate online content. I wanted to see if a solid content strategy could be developed using traditional storytelling methods and online media. I wanted to explore how multiple narratives could spring from a single point of entry, allowing users and readers to “choose their own adventure”, turning a website into a mere starting point for a guided, useful treasure hunt that resulted in accumulated information that could then be transformed into knowledge.
Last year, I took some time off as a web designer to work as a graphic designer in an instructional design setting. This taught me two important lessons: 1) I love web design, not graphic design, and 2) instructional design can be extremely useful for developing content strategy, as it considers the various ways people learn, and integrates different approaches to learning (visual, aural, kinesthetic, etc.) into curriculum development, much the way a good website uses multimedia to reach its various audiences.
My approach to content strategy has always centered around education, information sharing, and learning — I was never interested in trying to sell anybody anything as a primary goal. Working in instructional design gave me the tools to do my job as an educator better, and once I was able to take what I learned about learning models to the web, the rest seemed to fall into place.
One thing was clear: a solid content strategy includes creating an integrated, holistic web experience that extends beyond a client’s primary website. A good content strategy has to incorporate all online presences: social media apps such as Twitter and Facebook, community sites such as Yelp, and even location-awareness-building tools such as Google Maps and CommunityWalk. Wherever an organization has a presence, that presence needs to be integrated unobtrusively and naturally into the main storyline to build a total user experience. And in instances where those tools aren’t being utilized, a strategist has to know how and which tools to use to develop the multi-faceted online persona that every organization needs.
So, to that end, the exercise of writing A Timely Raven has been profoundly useful. What I’ve published here is just the tip of the iceberg (and not yet complete; there is one vignette left still to publish) — what I have planned for A Timely Raven should end up being quite an undertaking. (Hell, I figure if I’m going to tackle a project, I’m going to throw all the awesome at it that I can.) But before I can rock that project, I need y’all’s input.
Question: What are you favorite web apps or social media tools that might be appropriate for use in online storytelling? What do you know about how a web app can be used that other people might not know? (You might be surprised to discover, for instance, how many people wrote to tell me they had no idea Google Maps could be used the way Raven uses it in the story.) What tools and media should organizations be taking advantage of to extend their online presence?
As I sit here watching the Presidential debate, I am simultaneously reading people’s responses on Twitter (specifically, all the talk about McCain repeatedly using the term “my friends”).
I’m fascinated by the responses. I’m fascinated by the similar things so many people have picked up on. I’m fascinated by the way we relay our thoughts and feelings, and more interestingly, that we are relaying our feelings about the election and the candidates with utter strangers via virtual real-time conversation.
Someone told me that what she likes about Twitter is the fact that it makes her feel less alone. She can be by herself in her home office, and yet being surrounded by Tweets from both friends and strangers centers her and helps her see herself as part of a vast network of artists, writers, politicians, mothers, and carpenters all out there doing the work. Twitter, for her, is a window through which she can see a busy world.
I am watching the debate alone, but I am also watching the debate with hundreds of other people. Hell, with hundreds of other people who are annoyed that John McCain keep saying “my friends”. I can choose my company that specifically. That’s astonishing.
My mother was taught that neither politics nor religion is discussed in polite company, and yet one generation later I can sit here and not only read but participate in disparate “conversations” about these politicians, their eccentricities, their gaffes, their policies, and their presentations. We are free to discuss our fears, what we found amusing and what pissed us off and, astoundingly, to feel like our opinions and feelings on these things matter.
Maybe that’s the real value of technologies like Twitter. They make us feel that we matter.
What could we do as people, as individuals, if we felt that our opinions our strengths, our unique qualities truly mattered? What could we accomplish if we believed with our whole hearts that our words, thoughts and actions could actually affect and change the world around us?
I’ve always known technology would change the world. I’m not sure I was aware of the many degrees of truth nestled in that belief.
I treat myself to a latte at the coffee shop every now and then. It’s one of the few ways I can make myself get dressed in the morning. (I have concocted a dozen ways to drop my kids off at school without so much as brushing my hair. It involves disguises: hats, scarves, and not looking the car-door-opener-ladies in the eye when they wish me a good day). Recently, I began seeing a woman there with two children reading a workbook I recognized as Saxon Math — a popular homeschool curriculum.
I homeschooled my daughter for a little over a year: I taught her to read, to add, to user her imagination. After a while my patience wore out and I kicked her to the public school curb. However, as she gets older and her brain needs more challenging, I’m finding that her public school curriculum isn’t cutting mustard, and I’m needing to spend more time supplementing what she’s learning in the classroom.
Last Wednesday, I saw the woman again, and I decided to go over and talk to her. This isn’t something that I normally do. In fact, I’m very shy around strangers. When I was little my mother would give me a dollar at the grocery store to buy a candy bar, but I was always too afraid to give it to the cashier. No candy bar for me — my loss. My mother said she always thought I was just being a pain in the ass, but if I was, it’s an awkward proclivity that I’ve never quite outgrown.
But this is my daughter’s education at stake, so I walked over to her and introduced myself. “I noticed your kids doing Saxon Math,” I said. “If you don’t mind, I was wondering if I could pick your brain about a good English curriculum.” I explained my position and expressed a concern that my daughter wasn’t reading the right material to expand her vocabulary or sharpen her grammatical skills. “I read all the time,” I explained, somewhat exasperated, “and was an avid reader at her age. But I don’t know how to help her get the most out of what she’s reading.”
The woman said, “What do you spend most of your time reading?”
“I read on the internet a lot, actually,” I said, realizing the truth of it for the first time.
The woman chuckled. “Oh hell, that’s not reading. Can’t get smart on junk.”
Her comment took me aback for a second. All the blogs and articles I read — that doesn’t count? The intelligent conversations I contribute to, though admittedly few and far between, aren’t valid if conducted over the internet? But after I blinked a few times and realized that she wasn’t being condescending, I recognized the reality before me. That’s where we stand as internet readers and writers — purveyors and consumers of junk. That’s how bad our reputations have gotten. That’s how lousy the web is considered to really be.
A few weeks ago I was debating with a friend who said she would never vote for someone who wasn’t well educated. When pressed as to what that meant to her, she said she meant someone who had attended an ivy league school (“Or Stanford, I guess,” she stipulated) and earned an advanced degree.
“I don’t know why we cling to such a narrow definition of education,” I said. “We talk about being educated as something that happened to us in the past, mostly when we were quite young all things considered. I’m 31 now, and my education continues. There isn’t a day you don’t find my nose in a book or find me researching the things that I believe will make the world a better place. Those of us who care continue to educate ourselves long after we have graduated from academic halls. Yet it’s where we went to school, all that while ago when we were young, that continues to matter.
“Why are we so shortsighted?”
“Well,” my friend said, shrugging, “It’s a mater of verification. I know what it means to have a J.D. from Harvard. I don’t know what you mean by your laissez-faire education. For all I know, you’ve been doing all your studying on the internet.”
BAM!
The internet was supposed to be the savior of information. It was supposed to be a great educator. It was supposed to be bastion of knowledge, a crucible for new theories, new ways of thinking, new dialogues and interactions. Where did we go so drastically wrong?
The other day I read an article on Slate about blogging, and how most money-earning blogs produce quantity over quality. But the article does go on to address Merlin Mann’s recent announcement that he will quit wasting time writing nonsense he doesn’t care about and get back to the business of writing what he loves and making more time to do good work.
Mann’s decision to do this struck a chord with me the first time I read it, too: I felt a twin soul at work, striving to get the web — and his life — back on its feet as something valuable and cherished, not some place to spew bullshit and watch the dimes roll in. Mann’s passion may not be beautiful web content per se, but in his own way he certainly contributes greatly to that.
The article concluded, “Friends don’t let friends read bad content.” And I said to myself, “And friends don’t let friends write bad content, either. My daughter’s reading that shit. We’re educating ourselves with it.” If I stop writing bad content, and if you stop, and if we all focus on what is true and worthy and brilliant, there won’t be any bad content to read.
Fantasy? Maybe. Probably. But the dream is the thing.
But how do we know if we’re writing bad content? How do we know if what we’re saying is true and real? I admit, sometimes it’s hard to tell. How do we take what is real and true for us and present it in a way that interests others, that arrests attention, that makes others not only look but see? When everything around us is false and distracting, how do we get down to the business of being genuine? And how do we do it day after day, alone in a wilderness of bullshit?
Tenacity? Community? We’re talking about a fundamental paradigm shift. We’re talking about taking our work seriously and putting all of ourselves into it. We’re about recognizing that the words we write and publish shape the way people think and live. If education is the constant internalization and interpretation of inputs, then the web is a significant educator, and I’m not sure it’s doing the job as well as it needs to. In fact, that’s a lie. The fact is I’m sure it isn’t. And I know that I have been a contributor to that.
But not today. That’s my vow. Not today, and not anymore.
