Digital Drivel

Only my second post, so I'm getting to it quickly. I doubt this will happen often.

The Spring rendition of Table and Fire Live brought Rex Miller who spoke on the shift in paradigm brought about by digital communications.

One of the significant premises was that we can all be publishers since the internet has allowed us that opportunity. That began me to thinking about one of these blogs. Took about six months, but here it is.

My only fear now is that I will fall into the pit that I first suggested was awaiting us all – instant publication of unedited drivel.

I proved my theory to myself within 48 hours when I found a somewhat glaring error in one of the T&F posts that immediately followed the live event. This came from one of the more technically proficient of the bunch, so I’m sure that my point was made.

The scariest thing to me is the tendency for many to attribute truth to anything read. “They couldn’t say it if it weren’t true.” Everyone with access to a computer and the internet, which is rapidly approaching everyone the US, and much of the rest of the world, can now publish. How will the volume of writings passed off as “truth” increase in the next decade, year, or even month? The phrase of the day is "mind-boggling." Can you say "mind-boggling" boys and girls?

When the printed word was our source, we could take some comfort in the fact that someone besides the author generally approved the article, book, or whatever. It was then proofread by someone else who probably marked everything they both knew was wrong, or even suspected might be wrong, both in grammar and in content.

Then we moved to broadcast. The time between drafting and publishing diminished. (Newspapers always had a short turnaround, but they had been the exception.) We hoped that what we heard or saw was edited for accuracy, and accepted that some errors would get through. Then the CBS “memo gate” hit, and no matter what you thought about the content, the way they circled the wagons and deflected criticism of their procedural blunderings . . . (I’m being nice.)

So how about the rest of us. We now can sit down at our computers, type some words into a screen, click on the right button, and we have become writer, editor and publisher, all in a few minutes. Its not weeks or months from final to the book store, or a couple of hours from typewriter to typeset for the newspaper, or shorter from idea to the little screen. It's seconds from the last word written to "too late to recall," and no one in between to help us think it through.

Digital communication is already hard enough on us older folk with its propensity for cryptic codes instead of grammatically correct sentences, especially in those IM posts. I have a hard time talking to my son who’s off at college through IM. Keep having to translate. Now I’ve got to worry that I’m taking someone’s word for something hook, line, and sinker.

Especially that Mike’s Retreat guy....