Reading and Writing: Past, Present and Future Tense
By Alfie • Jan 12th, 2009 • Category: FeaturesFirst of all I get out my keyboard and unfold it. I don’t have to worry about the charge on the batteries because the batteries in this thing seem to last forever. Months and months. I DO have to unfold it a while before I start using it, however, because I keep it in a pocket and sometimes I find that I’ve been sitting on an edge of it — and it takes a while for some of the keys to recover from that. Sometimes it takes as long as twenty minutes for the dents to pop out, as it were. I’ll replace it when I sell a few more pieces.
I might not have to worry about my keyboard’s batteries, but I do have to worry about my phone. At least three radios on it run constantly — and it’s an HTC brand. They make lovely kit, but their battery life is frankly crap. Before you buy an HTC you’re going to count on, spend a month with a Tomagotchi so you can get used to the feeding schedule. In any case, I have a charger handy. And I’m using it.
The rule is when I’m pretending my phone is a computer I plug it in. That way it has juice for when I really need it to be a phone.
Nope, there are some keys on the Bluetooth keyboard that still aren’t working. I’ll just use the built-in thumb keyboard for a while….
…and there’s your overview of what it’s like to be a modern writer on CURRENT technology. The mechanics, anyway. The shiny wears off your gear pretty quickly. Then you have to pound it and swear at it and baby it to make it go. And, let me remind you, mobile gear takes quite a bit more of a beating than the desktop variety. That’s the trade-off for not working in a study or an office. That, and checking the bar-top to make sure you don’t put your stuff down in a puddle.
I’ve got enough of a browser to give me a few hints when it’s time for quick research, no boot time, and no formatting distractions. Publishers have people for that. Straight ASCII works just fine and pretty much always will.
The rest of the current situation is who I write for and what I write.
The best way to put it is I write for people who read. Give that sentence the few seconds of thought it deserves and I won’t have to elaborate.
It doesn’t necessarily mean I have /time/ to write, nor do my readers have much time to read. And it’s a big bonus if what I write is readable on something you can carry in a pocket, too. See, you and I both have lives and only a few seconds here and there for leisure. Fortunately for us both there’s been a serious resurgence in the short-attention-span markets.
No one has time to read newspapers, but everyone who cares even a little about what’s going on in the world subscribes to an RSS service or two or reads the occasional blog of someone they can trust to scream if something truly raunchy happens. I, for one, truly care about what’s going on in the world. I subscribe to a bazillion RSS newsfeeds and enslave my own demons for keyword searches and data-mining. I have the resulting Twitter/SMS ticker robo-spoken realtime into my ear via a Bluetooth headset. (Please no one tell Warren Ellis he’s part of that stream. Thanks.) I want to know, and I want to know NOW. So I can BE that person you trust to scream. As time permits.
Ah. The full-size keyboard is working. This should go faster now.
Well, that’s the present. What’s the future?
I say we’re most of the way there. It’s true. As much as technology seems to whiz by, it stabilizes when customers are happy. Television, for example, plateau-ed out for about thirty years. The fundamentals didn’t much change. There were just incremental improvements in the consumer’s experience. Color, stereo sound, more channels, more choices. Telephones froze for fifty years. To mention a completely different form of entertainment, the basic technology of handguns hasn’t changed in a hundred years. We do eventually stick with what works. For a while, anyway.
There’s not much more improvement needed when, /almost/, I can sit down wherever I want and write whatever I want and send it wherever I like. Once we achieve that, and it’s stable and solid, I’m fairly sure we’re allowed to coast for a while. In truth, though, that’s only half the issue.
Let’s make an agreement. Let’s say I say what I want to say in whatever manner is convenient for me to say it, /and you can listen in whatever way is convenient for you to hear it./ How’s that?
Let’s both carry a little sack of however many radios we need to get by — expensive long-range high-bandwidth bastards for streaming audio/video, maybe a much cheaper low-bandwidth channel for trickled-in text and notifications and triggers and other overhead, and then maybe something high-bandwidth and short range for our own personal network. But that’s not a phone or a PDA or a computer or anything. It’s just a router and some radios. After that, we can have a little screen or a pair of headphones with the personal network radio in them, and we’ll be able to switch them on the fly to whatever local channels we care to put them on — ours or a friends or a local public stream. Then we can have cameras and microphones and, yes, still a few keyboards, all on the personal network so we can speak and write and show people things. And maybe a few storage buckets so we can cache our dearest media closest to our hearts and not have to pay as much for remote streaming.
Optimally, anyway. The truth is that a naked piece of hardware isn’t sexy enough to sell in a modern market. Every damned piece of the setup will do double- or triple-duty — playing MP3s and checking our e-mail and notifying us when stocks we’re tracking hit “buy” or “sell” thresholds or even masquerading as blinky jewelry. Whatever it takes to makes sure we buy five when we need only one and burn through battery charge way more quickly than necessary. And then we have to be savvy enough to untangle the chaos of add-ons and redundant services — or owe plenty of favors to our more savvy friends and relatives who can do it for us.
Even so, the words “phone” and “computer” will just drop completely out of the modern lexicon. We’ll just see and hear and speak and write and show, and the details of how we do it won’t much matter. After that, it’s all going to be a matter of sample rates, resolution, bandwidth, network coverage and battery life.
But we’d better keep a handle on how to make it brief, contentwise.
Fortunately for myself, I’m a big fan of Dunsany, Borges, and Kafka. I’m one of the last thousand people on earth who really digs poetry, both reading and writing, and knows enough to take it seriously. I understand the value of writing short fiction in 500 words or less, in 50 words or less, in 140 characters or less, balancing length against /impact/. Because of that, I’m prepared to compete for my slot in the ranks of the next generation of journalists, educators, reviewers and entertainers.
It’s no guarantee of success, mind you. I have no illusions about that. But I’m prepared to compete. How about you?
Hmm. I’m leaving something out. Oh, yeah. Money. How will writers get paid?
Well. It’s not going to be by selling copyrighted copies, that’s for sure. Imagine, for instance, having to pay fifty cents — even a nickel — for every television show you’ve ever watched. Or started to watch. Television would have died the death it’s dying now twenty years ago. Or never even launched. Nah. Broadcast radio, broadcast television — they’ve shown us the way forward. Subscription channels for premium content, free channels for second-rate material, all with tame artists on the payroll generating content and, by naked quality and reputation, drawing consumers so they can be forced to watch/listen to ads. All paid for by organizations with a message they /really/ need to get out that no one in their right mind would listen to voluntarily — “Now that our tamed entertainers have put you in a good mood, you’re ready to consider that your life will be better if you finally break down and buy our crap.â€
If there’s any other model that would work, the radio stations would have adopted it back in the 1930s. We just need to sit back and accept it. And writers of the world will spend much of their lives giving it away for free in all kinds of public settings until they finally get signed by a label.
/Literature/ is another topic altogether.
———-
Laszlo Xalieri is a published novelist and short-story author, he has run (in the past) a five-year-long stint with a twice-monthly non-fiction essay column over at the now defunct but still archived http://www.twoheadedcat.com/ , he writes sporadically over at http://www.thefoonote.net/ , and works as an IT-focused business analyst/operations manager for a small investment bank and a few operations that the bank runs.
Blog/portfolio site http://www.ngc2632.com/
Short Fiction: http://microhappy.us/
Supershort fiction bits at http://twitter.com/xalieri
Alfie is a web and mobile troublemaker.
Email this author | All posts by Alfie