[LINK] "Web Semantics: Bad Writing Doesn’t Matter Any More"

[rfmcdonald]

Expanding on this post at the Self-Publishing Review blog, Bruce Sterling suggests dire things for the future of writing. First, the original poster.

It used to be the refrain about self-publishing that to do it right you needed to hire a professional book-cover designer and a professional editor. While there is no doubt that self-publishers should do this, it doesn’t really seem to be the case that this entirely matters anymore. Plainly, we’re entering a new phase where people approach writing differently. People will forgive problems for a cheap read.

Roxanne Gay has a post on HTML Giant which repeats the age-old mantra about gatekeepers:

Quality is certainly very subjective but even with that, given the self-published work I’ve read (admittedly not an adequate sample to really draw broader conclusions) there’s a reason most of those self-published books were not picked up by publishers great or small. There was no misunderstood genius in these novels. These books fell through the proverbial cracks for a reason. As an editor it was painfully easy to identify the weaknesses in plot, characterization, tone, dialogue, pacing and all the other elements that comprise a good book. Some of these books were adequately written but boring. Some of these books were plain terrible and filled with sloppy writing, making the very strong case for the value of a competent copyeditor and the value of a gatekeeper to say, “no,” this book should not be published, at least not in its current state. These were not books that could be published by anyone but the writer themselves.

So gatekeepers are good because they separate the wheat from the chaff, etc. etc. There is a major point missing from this argument: readers don’t care. Bad, “unpublishable” books are finding an audience. I cannot claim to have read many of the books on the Kindle self-published bestseller list, but without a doubt there are many books that some people would find totally inept, but are finding an audience with many honest 5-star reviews.

Next, Sterling.

This is the harbinger of a dominant electronic vernacular language. “Bad” is the wrong word for a major transition of this kind. It’s too big and powerful to be stigmatized. People are inputting and reading much, much more texts from screens than they ever see from a printed page, and the majority standard of textual expression, by a tremendous margin, is the SMS.

*The unseen literary player here is machine translation. It’s getting “better” fast, and we may soon be in a world where on-demand machine-translated texts become major literary influences. The real web-semantic breakthrough would be a machine-assisted ability to painlessly read texts outside one’s own language. At that point we’ll have entered an unheard-of state of linguistic globalized electro-pidgin.

*Grammatical spellchecking and “autotuning” of texts may change the literary landscape, too. “Bad” writing may be pursued and silently extinguished by the operating-system, much like a self-focussing camera. The Web will be supporting more and more of the scutwork of semantics.