Siddity in the City

This morning, my link-hopping led me to this Slate fiction series by Dahlia Lithwick. Now, being neither married nor with children, and now voluntarily removed (fled) from the NY metro-area world of parenting insanity, I’m not incredibly interested in the content of this story. I am, however, very interested in the writer’s process.

She effectively crowd-sources the anecdotes that build her characters’ lives, soliciting stories from readers on, say, kids’ picky eating habits, which she then works into the plot. This is brilliant. This is baffling.

I’ve had several conversations over the last few months about writers’ own role in the devaluation of their work. In context, those conversations were about entities like HuffPo turning a profit on the backs of unpaid writers in exchange for exposure, but @kdc took it a step further to posit that in the future, the professional journalist’s or editor’s role, in light of the power of the crowd and community journalists and bloggers, may just be a curatorial one. It may in the end come down not to the old school pavement pounding reporting and writing, but organizing the endless stream of data the crowd generates and looses on the digiwebs. (Uh, see: Post, Huffington. I don’t like it, but it’s working.)

It seems, getting back to the Slate piece that provoked this rambling post, that the future is now. Not only is it now, it’s spread from reality to fiction. And if the primary gift of the fiction writer–the ability to make shit up–is no longer a requirement, if writers of fiction are just going to start plundering the crowd for convenient material, well what the hell are they for? Clearly not every writer will do this, and there is something daring about the fact that Lithwick is trying it at all, but seriously. What have you birthed but a hodgepodge of the memories of others? Doesn’t this leapfrog beyond using observation as inspiration?

I chew the whole mess of it in my head, as usual, and am, as usual, of two minds. The first: One wonders if this is as good as it gets for the marriage of old and new media. Entities like HuffPo. MediaBistro just launched an entirely community-sourced Posterous blog. Entirely. The future is now. And, while that may not yet be a profitable enterprise, or even cutting-edge when you think about it, it looks like old media is finally taking workable steps to getting the reigns back around all the talent running wild around the internet. (Are we still officially capitalizing “internet?” Any copyeditors out there wanna tell me what the cool kids say?)

The other, because I am and always will be, at heart, a hopeless fantasist, is this: are we witnessing the first baby-steps towards an actual hive mind? Consider: we have (and by “we” I of course mean those of us fortunate enough to afford access to) a network of digital interpersonal connection so advanced that at no point do we need to be without input from the crowd, even when physically isolated. Services like freaking Foursquare and Yelp (descendants of services like DigitalCity and Citysearch) have made it possible to track not just where your friends have been, but where they may be, right this minute, if you and they are both connected to suitable devices. Augmented reality programs can officially overlay your world with interactive, useful data from traffic reports to terrain mapping to real-time sports scores (again, assuming you can afford the tools). We’re all in each others’ faces and business and pockets everyday all day already, even at some personal risk: Dooce is a verb, most of us still peep Facebook and Twitter in the office, leaving digital trails of incontrovertible evidence of personal business on the company dime, we text in traffic. And we’re doing it with smiles. How much easier, then, as the networks get faster and the devices lighter, more easily carried and concealed?

I often joke about being a cyborg and wanting the internets jacked directly into my brain RIGHT NOW, about wishing my Twitterfox feed would just stream right across my left eyeball. Here’s the thing: I’m not joking. If the tech were available now, I would be the 10th in line to do it. (I’ve never been a first-adopter. Just sort of an after-the-leaders-but-before-the-crowd type.)

In the future, will our race be known as Googles? Will we constantly crowd-source data prior to every minor decision? It only takes a few keystrokes now; how much more willing would we be to do it were it as simple as a nanosecond of thought? And the next time an interviewer asks where I see myself in five years, will I slip and say “as a data-aggregating entertainment borgcierge, delivering the wittiest, most-accurate, real-time updates of the finest dining, shopping, and travel destinations in the world?”

Do I need Ritalin? *shrugs* I need to finish the dishes. And get back on the Twitters. I’ve missed so much during this little extended brain fart, I know it.

(I’ve been meaning to post here more frequently, or at least to return to regular writing. For most of the summer, for one reason or another, I fell off the one wagon I’ve ever been consistently on, and it’s been surprisingly difficult to hop back on. For instance, I woke this morning planning to put in an hour of writing, either via blog or short-story work. I made coffee, had breakfast, did dishes, sat down to write, got up and did more dishes and mulled over all the nonsense above before realizing the dishes could wait, but if I didn’t sit down and start typing immediately, I’d never start. Is this post a topical masterwork of wit and logic? Newp. But shit, some days I have to keep reminding myself: a writer writes. Anything. A writer does not mull over somewhat interesting-to-them theories whilst rinsing the dishes, fending off fruit flies, and then march off to do anything but write.)