The Web and the Future of Writing
By Chip Scanlan
This short piece by Chip Scanlan argues toward a central theme concerning web writing. And that is change, adaptation for the journalism writing in the twenty-first century. Adapting to what Scanlan calls "Broadcasting counterparts: tape recorders, video cameras, editing equipmentfor sound and video, and mastered the knowledge of how to transmit such material over the internet." This as he argues will be the new challenge for journalists to effectively get their message to readers and maintain their interest.
Scanlan develops an idea of information on the internet as an inverted pyramid. That is, gathering information on the internet is done by reading very small poignant bits of information that are connected to larger and larger parts of information pertaining to the headlines. The reason Scanlan believes can be attributed to audiences unwillingness to scroll down a page and read a story, unless they are genuinely interested. Scanlan's idea is to adapt the traditional ways of writing into other modes of communication commonly used on the interenet.
These "other modes," as I will refer to them, are what Scanlan considers the changed identity of old concepts, that is, the texts and documents of the past must be reconceived. The idea is an old one among our class discussions. The new "digital rhetoric" of the web is exactly what Scalan is referring to in this article. He believes that journalists must adapt to the new vernacular of the web and use it to their advantage. Our class has discussed the possible shift that writing in the future may have to some of the page with this emergent class of communicative medium, the other modes (video and audio).
Scanlan and his colleague Mario Garcia are markedly more optomistic about a writer's ability to maintain creative control over the operation of communication. Garcia writes in Redesigning Print for the Web that, "it is writing that I see the greatest possibilities for creativity, for pioneers to leave the legacy that historians will talk about." Both Scanlan and Garcia maintain that the internet is simply another venue for writing. Scanlan supposes that writing for the internet will offer just as many obstacles as print did, and that, "the challenge, to hold on to readers, is identical, even if the medium is different." Writing in the new digital platform will remain important.
Kathleen Welch, in her article, Electrifying Classical Rhetoric . . . supports the idea that writing will continue to play a prominent role in the development of digital rhetoric, but I wonder whether it will be the primary role.
I conjecture that writing will support everything that is on the interenet, but contrary to Garcia's belief that the interenet is a wonderous new venue for writers and Scanlan's view of a multi-dimensional journalist, I believe that writing will play only a minor role in the on-set of the new digital age. The age of video and audio.
I believe the internet goes beyond simply a new medium, a "different medium," I believe much like Welch, that the internet will usher in a new form of communication.
6 comments:
I found some of Scanlan's ideas to be very legitimate. We have thought about and talked about how digital writing is changing how we write and commmunicate, but I don't believe we have really touched on digital communication affecting the way we read. I agree with Scanlan when he says, to paraphrase, that as we read digital writing, news articles in particular, we will find ourselves scanning and searching for the link. I find this to be very true. As I have mentioned once in class when talking about the length of time we allow for a webpage to pop up before we start getting angry, I feel as if our patience as readers and writers is dwindling. We now expect everything to be fast. We want what we want and we want it now. In the context of what Scanlan is writing about, it could be a story. We see a headline, we want to know about it now, and very quckly at that, before we are on to something else. Who what when where why good-bye.
I found the following quote very interesting:
My Poynter Institute colleague Mario Garcia...believes the new medium will enable the reader to choose among the "quick read, the substantial read, and the encyclopedic read," something that print media have found difficult to accomplish.
Are websites going to be forced to start posting multiple versions of the same page, just so they can keep up with the Joneses?
I also found it odd that this article was writing about how technology was changing reporting, and it seemed to have a positive tone about it, although the first sentence in the fourth paragraph starts out with, "But journalists need to bring a little skepticism to new media..." For this reason, I got mixed signals from the article. Technology is great, but we need to be wary of it seems a bit ominous to me. The article seemed to say that the reporters needed to get hold on the new forms of media, and use them to their advantage. The only pitfall that was offered was that it was hard to do two things well while doing them simultaneously.
John
Tomorrow's journalist will have definitely been affected by the changes in technology as it will require "extraordinary focus as well as skill." This is what will affect pretty much every industry though, not just this business of trading words.
The part of the article I thought to be disturbing was where in so many words Scanlan mentioned that the problem with having the story now without following through with enough interviewing will eventually make it alright to have inaccurate news. Is it possible for technology to fill in the gaps of what is left unsaid... what do they say about a picture and words, right?
It definitely does inspire awe though to think of where we are headed with this influx of technological advancement. When it comes to getting the facts straight is it for better or worse? That's what concerns me the most.
I thought this was a really interesting piece. To comment back to John, I think "Technology is great, but we need to be wary of it" is exactly what he is saying and completely true. It is nice to have things faster, easier, "better" if you will, but will all of that come with a price? Are things getting too easy? I have wondered what this world would do if someday, for some reason we couldn't use any of our technology? I think everyone would freak out and go crazy. I know I go out of my mind with boredom whenever the power goes out (no tv, no video games, no INTERNET).
I think all of this new technology is almost dumbing us down. I mean sure, we can learn the language of HTML, we can talk to people across the world, we can listen to music just about any where at any time. But can half the people in this world sew, cook, fix things around the house? I just learned this year how to change my oil.
Ok, I'm done talking now
Just one non-intellectual thought. The article says, "...This will be a challenge for the journalist of the future, who will be expected to work simultaneously in several media..." I once watched a television program on James Bond, and they went to the "real" spies to find out what it would take to be a Bond in real life. The answer (from someone in the NSA or CIA or whatever) was that in real life, its not even conceivable that a single person could ever be proficiently trained to do everything Bond does (car racing, hand weapons, vehicular weapons, helicopter pilot, jet pilot, multi-lingual, wine knowledge, cigar knowledge, gambling knowledge, scuba diving, etc. etc. etc.) and that after a point, spies just can't juggle that much information and training, and it even becomes impractical. The Mitchell comment in this article made me think of that. Will there come a point where there's simply too much multimedia and technology for one person to learn and use efficiently? No James Bond reporters in real life, either.
dylan's point about reading is interesting -- we really don't talk about it too much in writing classes, even though the two activities -- reading and writing -- are identical in so many ways. It seems to me that the way we compose meaning from a digital text as we read it (some words here, a few headlines and sub-heads, a video, a graphic) informs what we're doing when we compose digitally. We're still moving along a narrative line, but the information isn't arranged along a line anymore. McCloud's comics demonstrate this non-linear linearity. There is literally a line between panels, but it moves in all different directions.
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