Posts Tagged ‘the internet’
On Writing and the Internet: Data Is the New Alcohol
In Snow
Everybody thinks they’re really uncool. And at one point one of them gets eviscerated with a blade made of glass.
(Stephenson mocks such people a second time in Anathem in the form of the dudes who carry jee-jahs.)
And yet I have essentially chosen to be one of them. I’m blogging and tweeting and Facebooking on top of the king-hell amount of e-mailing and magazine writing I was already doing. A lot of writers do. Instead of — or at any rate in addition to — building up lots of words and releasing them in big novel-sized chunks, we’re constantly dribbling them out. Like we’re the victim of some unfortunate literary prostate condition. I tell myself it all serves the fiction in one way or another, but the truth is I just like talking to people directly, w/out the intermediary of paper.
I already regret that last simile. About the prostate.