Do you know Felix Salmon? No, it is not a variety of fish with orange-red innards that is a delicacy in these parts. Felix Salmon blogs for Reuters on financial matters, one of the few I admire for clarity and judgement in the blogging world.
In one of his earlier blog posts which I had missed reading till recently, he has confirmed what I feared the most; that in internet sheer quantity beats quality. Unlike the past when the newspapers appointed a battery of experienced journalists as sub-editors to re-work articles before they were sent to the print shop, the trend seems to be to ‘throw up’ more on the online format so that ‘more’ is shared and searched for; to hell with all aspects of good writing - accuracy, logic, graceful turns of phrase, wisdom and insight, puns and punctuation.
When I see the quality of blogging in our mainline newspapers like Hindustan Times and Times of India or the quality of e-zines, this trend seems have caught on here as well. Publishers seem to be running some kind of a sweatshop with young literature graduates grinding out blog after blog. And the editors seem to be holding the whip: “throw up more and more, quantity over quality”.
Not for them the old style of engaging the best of writers, spending on research and coming up with pieces that will stand the test of time. The world of internet publishing seems to less tolerant of other alternatives, the market forces tend to drive out older options, whatever their continuing merits, to extinction.
Not that I claim that writers in the print media achieved good writing most of the time. Since even the aspiration can be exhausting, I would confess from personal experience, probably not many took to writing. Now that a leading blogger has confessed that bad writing is inherent to the online world, I am inviting the readers to reflect upon the generally overlooked losses that the modern communication paradigm imposes.
I still remember the letters my father used to write to me in lovely style after I went to live in Chennai or the letters my Mama used to write to my mother, with vital insights into people and places long buried in their collective memory – not to mention the handwriting. Now this form has already been lost to e-mail. I do not remember to have written a single letter by hand during the past 2 decades.
Many may feel it is a minor sacrifice when compared to the evident gains of cheap, easy and instantaneous global communication. Yet it would be ironic if, in our enthusiasm for diffusing our ideas as widely as possible using Facebook and BlogSpot, we were to commit overmuch to these transient supports of knowledge, wholly abandoning the proven methods of durability.
Let me rush to see to my Facebook page, another 50 posts might have appeared on my ‘Wall’ during the time I took to write this piece on a cold and grey Saturday afternoon here in Melbourne.
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