Sharing the Unshareable
A recent post on the mysteriously popular Thought Catalog has been about the nature of audience: that blogging has Given People What They Want. The intention was good. Flaming sux they said, which ya know, anyone with half a brain is okay with. And I agree that blogging is giving people what they want, somewhat. Call me a doubting techno-optimist. I think technology is generally good, even as it creates ever newer and more bizarre problems.
I incoherently tackled one of the main problems in a previous post: the problem of urgency on the Internet. We all know that the newest post in the tumblr/twitter/Facebook feed is the most valuable - which, of course, is how conversations work. (It’s funny that no one really talks about how print isn’t dying - it’s actually growing as it takes over a portion of our orality. Think of how often lol is printed and not actually loled.)
Tl;dr is a cliche; complaining about it is just as much of a cliche. But I’m a long-form writer. And while other people may view this sort of thing as academic - something that will sort itself out. I have to try to figure out how the fuck to get someone to read something I’ve written that is longer than 300 words and is not non-fiction. Who is my audience? Why would anyone care about what I’m doing?
The issue is, at bottom: how and when do people read? Long-form written narratives require time. Part of the original reason people read novels was to cultivate a sense of solitude amid timelessness. I read to feel that I have an eternity to spend doing something that is enjoyable. Like going for a walk, the pleasure in novel-reading (for me) is the illusion that time no longer exists (even as the novel hurries me along its own narrative).
This is not compatible with how reading is generally performed on the Internet. When there is a sense that something new (and by definition, better) is waiting behind the next refresh, what point is there to trying to read something long?
The Internet is turning our lives into shareable bits. That is its function: to pass information from one node to another. So it is gradually privileging our social side. But one of the thrills of the offline world is its privacy. Like listening to an album on vinyl, reading a novel in print means that the experience is (mostly) unshareable. And while many of the best moments of my life have been in the company of other people, many of the parts that have defined me as an individual have been experienced in solitude and contemplation.
While this is true for me, I wonder how true it is for others. Do other people just get tired of reading in their off hours, having exhausted their use of language online? Do other people only want to remain plugged in, forever socially available to other people? Do other people not feel that their most private thoughts are their most cherished thoughts?
In other words: what are people doing when they aren’t online? By definition, it’s almost impossible to ask this. Not that people don’t talk about their IRL lives online. But the parts that really matter to this understanding - the private parts that people can’t talk about online because they are too precious to share as a shareable nugget - are the parts that the online will never pay much attention to (and therefore, essentially not exist).
This has probably already been discussed and described more cogently and thoroughly by someone else online. But it’s just blather to say: cross my fingers that my work resonates with the unshareable parts of my readers.
