If we observe the last two hundred years we see any number of graphs jolt upwards like they never have before.  Population, resource use, literacy, poverty, we live in a time of extremes.  It is not unreasonable then to rationalize that the internet has led us into yet another one of those cataclysmic changes, this time in the availability of ready data.  At this very moment I am simultaneously typing this, reviewing Aristotle’s treatise on rhetoric and exploring a new website that aspires to “make all systematic knowledge immediately computable by anyone”.  No doubt then, that modes of expression would then alter to fit this new paradigm.

Adopting the concept of digital nativity may be the first step in recognizing a growing cognitive shift as those who grew up in a intellectual environment void of boundaries and full of tangents take the mainstage of society.  Make no mistake, there will be benefits.  Games of telephone can cease their crazy-making when all that is required to communicate an idea is a link to its original source.  Intellectually, the ability to follow up the same idea to the point of exhaustion makes it possible for people to inform themselves faster and more conveniently than ever before, though this is not to say that the coin can’t flip.

If people get so used to communicating through reference rather than analysis and expression then I fear that those disinclined towards investigation may be more likely to just parrot what they are told by the person who says it most convincingly, and we already have enough of those.  The same follows with those who might search out sources to expand on their base of knowledge.  With a mass of sources, disseminating accurate information from a teeming pile of raw data will become one of the most important skills of all, lest rhetoric rather than truth become the measure by which words are valued.  Again, this is already too prevalent.

However, I do not believe that morality is or should be a guide to the way writing itself is expanding.  To that we can credit the change in media.  Until the advent of the internet it would not have been possible for me to write these words and have them in your hands before I had time to reconsider them.  Nor would it be possible for me to reconsider and alter them after publishing.  With Twitter leading a race for one million people to follow a celebrity you have to note that despite the silliness, there are at least one million people on a site specifically intended for writing.  I know that LiveJournal hit one million a long time ago.

Now a key point: I do not think writing is changing.  I think, as I have said, it is expanding.  People still write novels the same way they have since Satyricon and essays written by modern scholars have the same tone as ones written by Aristotle.  What we are experiencing is an emergence of a new style of narration that resembles the same forms that we have been familiar with for ages but is written and read in a different context and environment than we have seen or would have been possible pre-internet.  This new style is informed by the immediacy of it’s availability: the directness of its communication, the malleability of its publication and the availability of information and technology, from encyclopedic links to video and pictorial aid that are used to buffer its message. What I find to be the most interesting about this new style is that it is self taught and therefor relatively unrecognized outside of scholarly circles.  For most of us, this new digitally informed style is very simply the way it is.

Got the mental image?  I’m betting you do, whether you know me or not.  Am I hunched over a laptop?  At a table?  In bed? Am I drunk?  Words and style construct an idea of who I am and what I look like, user-icons that pepper links can construct a less vague impression and if you’re really dedicated (and a little creepy) you might actually find the shot of me after I dove stark naked into the Pacific and thereby have a clearer image of what I look like cloth-less than I may actually want you to.  Beware, it’s work-safe but only just.

Now consider if you had read that first line in a book, in an essay, or even in a magazine.  If a journalist in Rolling Stone begins an article with “I am naked”, they’re trying to convey something; a mood or an idea.  So why is it that if a lone blogger declares their bare state, we start to picture it?  I believe a lot of it has to do with the immediacy that the individual blog brings.  The lone blogger is not representing an entity like a newspaper or a magazine, only themselves.  Unlike a book or an essay, the message is direct and has had no stopping points like publishers or printers between the author and reader.  When I tell you I am naked, it really feels like it is me telling you that I am naked.

Even if I’m not.  Strictly speaking, I’m not telling you anything.

Nor am I speaking.

What we witness here are the effects of an ever developing method of immediacy in communication styles that were until very recently segregational by nature.  Dubbed by one as Media Immediacy, the instant gratification culture that has developed in the wake of the easy access the internet provides is, in ways, breaking down the barriers of communication.  Through this blog I am writing to you directly.  I have no regulating publisher, no editor, no proofer, not even a printer that I need to use to put the pages out.  The words come from my fingertips (through a keyboard, down the copper wires, etc), I click the button that says publish and you have my thoughts.  You could be anyone.  It is immediate.  Through this immediacy an intimacy of communication is also created.  You know that to a greater or lesser extent what I am telling you is unfiltered and so the things that might convey the mood of the piece in a less immediate media is now more important in the context of what my personal state is as I write it.  While not quite a new kind of punctuation, the state of the author does become an additional distinction by which the reader is guided.  If you can agree that one of the many trials of writer-to-reader is the overcoming of all that seperates them, i.e. paper, printer, editor, publisher, then the effect of media immediacy is to destroy as many of those barriers as possible.

I’ve been wearing clothes this whole time.

WordPress is new to me.  As such, I don’t have my bearings on its style and it’s hard for me to not feel clumsy within the confines of its formatting.  But this allows me to assert a particular point: different online-publishing sites will develop different forms of writing.  Twitter is by far the most obvious of these, constraining its tweets and microfictions to a particular character count.  On the other hand, LiveJournal allows for greater line-length than WordPress, Blogger or Myspace which are unique to each other in kind.

To exemplify this, I have examples that have been posted on various sites and will now be posted here.  Take a look at the contrast and note the difference in flow.

From LiveJournal:

“I love scotch but on Tuesday night I guess I made it feel uncomfortable, like I was pushing the bounds of our relationship. I think it was trying to be nice to me but slowly but surely it became uncomfortable with the firm hold I had around it’s neck and the way I just kept asking more and more of it, as though we would never see each other again. It may also have been the way I kept passing Scotch off to Ryan, like neither of us had any interest in the bottle’s well being. Untrue, I swear, I love Scotch, but I was being inconsiderate.

Somewhere around 3:15 on Tuesday night (or Wednesday morning, your call) Scotch broke up with me.

Yesterday I was pretty depressed. Devastated, even.

Lets be frank, yesterday I felt like God himself had climbed into a Buick and run my ass down.

I don’t think I’ll be dating whiskys for a little while.”

And the original article.

If you note the difference, the line length on LiveJournal allows itself a much more rambling feel.  Each of the last four lines are a single line, allowing for that single statement feel to carry itself a little further than it does when so truncated by the WordPress format.  I never would have written that post on WordPress, for I feel personally that the format strips the post of its funny.

Now consider a Twitter post:

“The stove in my kitchen is post-apocalyptic retro kitsch. I would take it to war.”

Versus the original site.

While WordPress, LiveJournal or Blogger might get the idea across, they won’t do it with much aplomb.  In fact, if I were a regular reader of someone’s blog and then they started making individual posts of 160 characters or less, I suspect I would stop reading rather directly.  There’s too much here in the “blog format” (despite the enormity of what that encompasses) to make tiny posts seem anything but frustratingly incomplete.  Conversely, Twitter adjusts itself to display each thought in its own bold and outstated way.  They do this through the use of larger font or smaller containers, a directly visible time stamp and a fair amount of flash (not the code).

Personally, I feel that LiveJournal lends itself to the greatest sense of 8.5 x 11 page-reading.  Each post has the potential for the feeling of experimental novella.  WordPress, on the other hand, feels a bit more like AP.  A single, condensed column makes each post feel like an article rather than a journal entry.

Additionally, some sites have more complete networks than others.  LiveJournal in particular simply lays out a page of everything your “friends” have posted and allows you to scroll through it chronologically.  This tends to encourage its writers to treat their page like more of a conversation than they might with something like, say, WordPress or Blogger where you must look at each person’s page individually.  Conversely, a WordPress or Blogger writer may pull some informality out of their posts so as to make them stand alone to any reader, friend or not.

Having spent a majority of my formative writing years on LiveJournal, I have developed a more conversational voice than I might have had I been restricted to writing short stories or had I been writing on a different site.  My personal sensibilities have always encouraged me to maintain a certain level of accuracy in spelling and punctuation, though much of that is due to my feeling that punctuation equals politeness and has less to do with the fact that I am writing online.  Then again, this too may be informed by my regular awareness that other people are reading what I put down.

For myself, it may be safe to say that my entire style is informed by the public nature of what I “say”.

I mentioned the cash-cow bit because Prensky holds an MBA and most of his theorizing lends itself directly to selling products and lectures but after some initial snark, I’ve retracted my inclination to hold this against him.  Profit tends to be the major motivating factor in most innovative thought, after all.

This leads me back to the sense that my writing is more influenced by the environment in which it developed than I’d previously considered.  So does being a Digital Native inform my style?  I think without doubt.

I’ve been trying to go at this paper from every which ways and sideways (which is not that ways) but the process of deconstructing the digital narrative is not elusive, it’s just… rudimentary?  The conflict, if you will, is that for all the complications of exploring how people communicate digitally versus how they communicate in the “real world”, or as I think is better termed “meatspace”, I find it most difficult to divorce myself from the sensation that this is just too damn straightforward to warrant exploration.  In my mind, writing in the digital environment is about as complicated as writing in a little diary in the back of a coffee shop with the indie turned to white-noise and and a fourth cup of Guatemalan liquidating your insides.  That is to say, you write where you can write and I mean that statement in its every possible interpretation.

I like this notion.  It’s an initial twinge of rebellion, form fitting to those who dislike explaining themselves (me).  But here’s the thing: The style of writing that you are presently disseminating from the symbols which you are now turning into silent sounds is a style that has been developed over many, many years of chunking away on the internet.  It is the way that I like to write.

I suppose it would be foolish to ignore how that came to be.

When I began this process I did so believing that the effect of the digitization of communication was fairly straightforward:  it has changed everything.  But I didn’t have much interest in trying to deconstruct everything, rather I decided to explore how the digital world has informed my own writing style and how I could extrapolate my observations in order to make an overall statement about digitally informed voice.

First, foremost and most challenging for me was to identify the media I wanted to use to convey my idea.  I bounced between standard essay format, wiki format and a blog.  I eventually chose to use blog for stylistic and utilitarian reasons.  Standard essay went out the window fairly quickly because I feel that essays require a particular formality of voice and I wanted to do away with that in favor of the less restricted voice that I find common in internet writing.  Succinctly, I wanted the piece to be an exploration rather than an explanation.

I eventually discounted the wiki concept because I felt it was a little too loose and given to tangent.  While it allowed me to link and extrapolate to my heart’s content, I felt that any good exploration should be like a journey that begins and ends in the same place, though altere.  Wikis lack beginning and are endless by nature.  They are the Ouroboros of the internet.

I settled on a blog, particularly WordPress because of its stylistic sensibilities and the ease with which it embeds unobtrusive hyperlinks.  Additionally, WordPress formats with a pseudo-formality that I thought would reinforce my passage on function and form.  Best of all: an essay written in blog entries would at conclusion be read backwards.  I did not intend this to direct a particular message but rather to shake up the reader’s standard experience:  If read top down the essay will seem regressive, as though descending in to uncertainty.  For this reason in particular I began writing without a solid thesis but rather with an opinion: that deconstructing online writing was like examining a foregone conclusion and that writing online simply was.  I felt that I first had to make the admission of skepticism, primarily because it was my own lack of consideration that led to a more considered analysis, before I began to actually analyze.

I began my analysis by first introducing the idea that those who are raised with the internet perceive it differently from those who were not.  I felt that this outlook was necessary if one were to agree to the subsequent ideas because they all base themselves on the perception that my online writing was developed from a sense of naturalization with the digital environment.  Having used Marc Prensky as a talking point to jump off of in class and having been skeptical of him for the same reasons I was skeptical of the analysis made him the most rational reference.

My next post was based on the idea that writing style is developed and informed by the media which it is published on and that additionally, the sense of always writing for an unknown audience must have a notable effect on an author.  The latter of these points was only touched on here.  Most of it was saved for the subsequent post.  Having been on the internet for quite some time I had posts that I was able to refer back to for purpose of example.

Next, I felt it was important to break ever so slightly from convention.  Beginning my post with a declarative statement, especially one about my nudity, I thought would lend itself very well to exploring the idea of immediacy and how it affects the writer/reader relationship.  I thought also that this would be a good time to illuminate the potential falseness of this immediacy by bracketing the post with an opposing declaration at the end.  I would have liked to give more time to this notion of false representation but I felt that it was something perhaps left for a separate exploration or perhaps a later post if I decided to continue.

To conclude the graded portion of this essay I felt it was necessay to fully embrace the concept of a digitally informed writing environment.  Where as I began skeptically, I wanted to end assured.  I also wanted to highlight my primary conclusion from the exploration: that while my digital writing is very much informed by the media I developed it on, it is merely an additional option for writers and is not supplanting any other style.

If I struggled with this project beyond formatting and my own initial resistance toward analyzing the effect of the internet on my style, it was that my examinations led to what felt like a damn breaking.  I isolated what I thought were the three most observable and explainable influences but they were by no means the only things I had considered.  I am considering continuing this blog into the future, if only because the ideas are very worth exploring.