Originally it was going to be “over the last twenty years” but I decided to be more flexible.
A lot of discussions about how society has changed or how the world is different always circle around to smartphones, social media, “no one talks to each other in person, they’re on their phones always” and the like.
Outside of those topics, what else has changed, by your perception?
From an artistic perspective, self-“publishing” (and I use quotations quite on purpose), changed writing as we know it and drastically dropped the average reading level of the public since now any chimp can bang their fist on a keyboard for an hour, upload it to Amazon and call themselves an “author” beside Stephen King or Umberto Eco.
It was always hailed as “the end of the so-called gatekeepers”. Without stopping to realise that gatekeepers/publishers exist for a reason. So that the public zeitgeist isn’t completely overrun with utter crap.
The response to having your short story or novel rejected used to be “okay…I’ll learn, practice and get better for the next time.” Now, it’s “screw you…I’ll pollute the zeitgeist with my 3rd grade level grammar nightmare with or without you and put it right up there on the shelf next to the actual writers.”
Just imagine if a doctor flunked out of med-school, and instead of trying harder, just said “screw you, I’m going to open up my own surgery and put it right next door to you and there’s nothing you can do to stop me…”
What a crazy stupid world we live in.
Writing is an art, anyone should be able to do it and judge for themselves whether their work is good enough to share, and just because it’s been published doesn’t mean you have to read it. I would rather have to actively look for a book to read next via reviews than have what’s on the market mostly controlled by some businesses.
Writing is so much more than just art though. Writing is also education. Writing is also a chronicle of culture and of history. Writing educates us about our past and our future and our present in a way that goes beyond statistics, dates, figures and memorised names. It, in a way that other art forms can only touch on, enriches our understanding of ourselves as a species and our place in the world
We know, at least in part, about Antebellum south, not just by reading history texts, but by reading Mark Twain. Our knowledge of the dustbowl is similarly enriched by Steinbeck. Thanks to Homer, Ovid, and others, Ancient Rome isn’t just dusty stats and numbers, it’s a living breathing history that you don’t get from history books. Thanks to Orwell and Huxley we can look at our present world and see warnings rather than being completely blindsided by current events.
THAT is the power of writing.
And you’re saying that this generation’s contribution to that; this generation’s contribution to the future’s understanding of us is some asshole’s Edward Cullen Slash fic?
That’s ridiculous.
Am I elitist in this opinion? ABSOLUTELY. UNASHAMEDLY. It’s too important NOT to be.
You want to write your own dumb-ass crap, that’s perfectly fine. We ALL did that. We used to write it, share it among our friends and family, have a good laugh about it, and then put it in a drawer and never think about them again. I myself have a filing cabinet FULL of those things.
But what we didn’t do (at least not in the mass numbers technology allows us to do now), is enshrine those horrible pieces of shit into the zeitgeist just because it’s free to do so on fucking Amazon. We didn’t pollute this generations contribution to the future with our own laugable crap just because we could.
Some people eventually got good enough that our work deserved to be included in that zeitgeist, even if it was just a couple of short stories making it past the so-called “gate-keepers”. But more of us didn’t, and never would.
We still write, because you are absolutely right in that a person who wants to write their own crap without bothering to learn, or get better, or even understand what makes good writing “good” in the first place, is welcome to do so. It’s a very welcoming art form in that respect.
But leave what gets remembered by history to the people who are actually fucking good at it.
What’s going to be remembered are the things that are truly worthwhile. I for one have no problem looking stupid in front of the other generations if it means there’s more creativity and knowledge being spread around.
I believe your view on this matter is due largely in part to the fact that so much content nowadays is easily accessible and quality control doesn’t happen behind closed doors nearly as much anymore. You are seeing with your own eyes a bunch of dumb shit that would usually get rejected by publishers instead of the general public. But if some are as bad as you say they are, then they’ll get rejected all the same. You really think someone in 50 years will be reading some trashy hunger games ripoff? No, they’ll be reading what’s actually worthwhile. With freedom comes choice, and with choice comes confusion and the option to choose wrong. I still prefer freedom. If you want to protect the sanctity of writing or something like that, support authors who you think do good work, don’t complain about the stupid ones.