A New Book

Everything has changed. At nearly 47 years of age, I stand on the precipice of the future and realize that the dreams of my youth have been made irrelevant by life and technology. Things are changing so quickly and I’m adapting with the speed of a slug – mired in salt.

One problem with the rapidly changing world is no one realizes how much it is changing. We whir along and change without even thinking about it. I realize that hardly anyone reads what I write on this blog, but I think nothing of the fact that I sit here on a Sunday morning in slippers, typing and in a moment my thoughts will be accessible to anyone who cares to listen. This is were you get humility, because no one is really listening. We are all too busy talking and worrying about ourselves to give anyone else much thought.

Writing Dream: Be published. When I was thirteen, being a published author was the holy grail of all I wanted. Instead of pursuing writing, I ended up in the law, but I’ve clung to this dream of being published. Publication brings about serendipity. Your words get out there and you have no idea who will actually connect with them. My wife gets to put up with me because she was published. So all seems right with the world, my dream to be published is still alive and kicking.

Wrong – sort of. The infrastructure of the past and the machinery of publication still spits out books. Every Sunday in the New York Times I can read reviews of the latest and greatest. I’ve developed a fondness and attachment to particular authors, living and dead, reading almost everything that they write – Philip Roth, Paul Auster, Bret Easton Ellis, Dostoyevsky, Kafka, Saul Bellow, Douglas Coupland, Chuck Palahniuk – the list goes on and on. I read them, connect and think I want to be like one of those guys. (Yes, honey, I realize that they are all white males and about half of them are Jewish, but I still read women authors, too. You being my favorite woman author and so much more than just a friend.)

I realize why I have no friends to speak of – my friends are authors and their books. Being friends with an author is easy. They don’t ask of anything other than you spring for the price of the book. In fact they tend to hate creepy stalkers and emails, so they prefer it if you put their book on the shelf and leave them alone. If you are busy and ignore them, they don’t care, as long as you keep reading.

Publication always felt to me like the one sure way to obtain immortality. A book bound with your name on it could speak after you were dead. Now, it is possible to literally speak after you are dead with recorded voice and video. Nearly any aspect of our lives can be reduced to digital format and “published” for the future. The philosophical implications of the ease of publishing are seemingly endless with one of the biggest questions being does the urge or desire to publish one’s life interfere with living one’s life?

Author’s by nature must be at least a little exhibitionistic and simultaneously reclusive, J.D. Salinger any one? They flash us with their words, not their presence. And they want us to look at the words, but they love the barrier the book and word creates between themselves as people and the reader.

I know because it is that desire for connection, understanding and dialogue that has compelled me throughout my life to want to write. I want to talk to my friends the authors and the social structure is such that I talk to them by putting out my work for others to read. My value in the conversation is determined by the audience I develop, not by what I say. I want to be published because I don’t want to violate the social norms of author-hood.

And yet, the world is changing. I can see it, feel it and realize it and the dream is fading with every Google search I commit or every “friend” I add on Facebook. There are better ways now to connect with the authors, the friends of my life than books. Publication was all about access, public knowledge and public acceptance. Access to text has gone from extremely difficult to instantaneous and easy. My original desire to be published was so that others could have access to my words. Technology has eliminated that need.

The problem has shifted from access to letting the public know and care about what I write. The previous social milieu of books was a sub-genre of the celebrity culture, a culture where our heroes walked on Olympus, dropping words like lightening on us mere mortals. The digital age is crumbling Olympus and words are flying everywhere. The old guard remains fortified by publishing houses and Barnes and Noble, but the attack on them is relentless and continuing unabated.

Carnegie Libraries, public libraries, law libraries and school libraries are fading into the digital abyss. Why go to the library, when I can find any book at home on my laptop or Kindle? When an entire library of a University is digitized by Google, why pay all that money and take up all that space? It doesn’t make sense and cities and schools will stop doing it.

Suddenly, my desire to be published seems silly. Throw out a book into the enormous and never shrinking, constantly expanding digital slush pile. Within my lifetime it appears that most, if not all books ever published will be available digitally. No single person can ever attempt to read or comprehend all that material. The Renaissance Man or Woman has been killed by a tidal wave of text and information.

With the publication of a book, there was always the possibility that someone would stumble upon it at a much future date. Publication was about social recognition and a stamp of approval from the society that there was at least some merit to the words. The pesky one and zero that digitized everything changed that – the one and the zero don’t discriminate, they accept all comers. I’m laughing a little bit this morning when I think back to the dismay I used to get walking into Barnes and Noble and wondering how even if I managed to get a copy of my book on the shelf would it ever get read, there were so many choices. I had no clue. It is a million, possibly a billion times worse than I ever imagined. (Translation technology is improving at such a rate that it is going to be easier than ever to translate books between languages, so for us English writers, the competition is about to jump by about 4-5 billion more potential authors.)

So I’ve dreamed a new dream. I haven’t always followed through on adapting to rapidly changing things, but I still have the same desire to be published, but I’m going to do it for a new digital age.

1. First I’m going to take a page out of Facebook and look for friends for my writing and friends for me. This is the replication of my own author focused friendships I’ve developed over the years.

2. I’m going take a page out of Blogger and Word Press and use the ease of publication and search to create a digital persona for myself that will hopefully stick around for awhile after I’m gone.

3. I’m going to take a page out of Google and include everything and make my digital persona searchable.

4. I’m going to take a page from the publishing industry and provide human editorial control over the content. Having everything is cool, but time consuming for a reader. Editorial control allows for different layers of friends from the mere acquaintance to the best friend that knows everything about you.

5. I’m going to take a page out of cloud computing and move my information, writing and digital persona out of my laptop and office and on to the cloud of the new Olympus, a digitally replicating and growing Colossus of new information. It is out of that Colossus’ Chaos that a new world is being created.

6. I am going to take a page out of my upbringing and look for integrity in my digital persona, so that it matches up completely with the flesh and blood version. Those who know me will wonder how this is even conceivable given the numerous facets of my identity, but I’m becoming more convinced that privacy, especially as an author, is a rapidly dying concept. Creating an integrated digital persona is the only method to eliminate privacy concerns. We are all celebrities now.

So far my new book is only six pages of infinite length or at least the length of a lifetime.

ON DIGITAL PERSONA, FLESH PERSONA, AND PRIVACY

I’ve been fascinated by the idea of persona lately, whether it be a literary persona, a work persona, a dramatic character persona, a psychological persona or the new incarnation of the digital on-line persona. I find myself constantly donning masks to the point of wondering who I am. Am I the husband? The parent? The lawyer? The writer? The sinner? The saint? Am I my digital persona? Who the hell am I?


Social networking sites like FaceBook and MySpace are exercises in persona creation. I get to pick and chose the facade I give the digital world. The more devout afficionados of the digital world create their own websites. The real world is reflected in the digital world, but it is a funhouse mirror warped by the design and desire of each person posting.


The creation of a persona or societal mask is nothing new. High school is where every adolescent cuts their teeth on persona creation and the high school personas are predictable – the hot girl, the bookworm, the jock, the drama queen, the rebel. Go rent a copy of The Breakfast Club if you need a refresher course. Adults aren’t much better in the lawyer’s suits, the houses on the hill, the cars (or big trucks) and the entire fashion and makeup industry.


Digital persona are frighteningly easy to create, desperately hard to maintain and control. Fleshy manifestations of persona aren’t easily copied or replicated and due to years of culturization more easily interpreted. Changing one’s flesh persona took time and effort and was a gradual process. I’m no Luddite, but the digital persona swoon can make me light headed.

Another downside is the Narcissistic quality of digital persona, basically a "look at me" culture. Maybe that is why it always feels like high school – it is the adolescent technology screaming for attention. How will digital technology mature? Or are we to be always mired in MySpace and FaceBook?

As I was writing that last paragraph, I realized that I was a little bit off put by the fact that the geeky technology, which used to provide anonymity and protection to my anti-social side has turned into an exhibitionistic orgy with the explosion of social networking sites. I’m the nerd with glasses again being simultaneously turned on and socially overwhelmed by the cheerleader.

The technology has advanced to the point where maintaining a digital life is a little bit like being an adolescent whose diary is always accessible to their parents. Whatever you post, whatever you say, whatever floats off your keyboard into the internet ether is probably and in most instances lost forever, yet on occasion, it comes back transfigured into something unrecognizable or terrifying, often carried by the panting mutt, Google.

Google sounds like goggles and those Google goggles are peering at your every move trying to reduce your fleshy persona into a consuming, buying, advertising accessible animal whose data is slowly being filled in. Google is trying to clone you and anticipate your every move and like Pavlov’s dogs we salivate because Google gives us what we want. Google is the digital Big Brother watching our every move.

My predisposition has always been towards privacy – be it digital or earthly. Yet, I’m starting to wonder if privacy is such a great thing. I’m still very interested in protecting things that people want kept private, but I see a benefit to the lack of on-line privacy. The benefit is by being constantly googled, goggled and gapped at, the mature development is to create an on-line persona with integrity that includes the various flesh incarnations’ strengths and faults. In a world of ones and zeros, the digital persona that best reflects the real person will give the real person the most value in the real world. Become one with your digital self.

The other factor in this privacy debate is that the Internet is essentially the marketplace. Humans have always congregated for social and economic exchange and the two have always gone hand in hand. Posting on-line is supposed to have an economic impact for the participant. Do any of us really expect privacy in the marketplace? The two are incongruous. You enter the marketplace (and I envision street bazaars or farmer’s markets) and nothing is private. To resurrect a cliche, people who live in glass blogs shouldn’t post stones – or something like that.

Simply realizing that the on-line world is a big market free-for-all changes all sorts of perceptions about on-line privacy.

We now convey information more freely, but we are still working on the infrastructure for how that is to function economically. Our libraries are manifestation of the willingness to pay economically for ideas, but the pricing of those ideas has always been a conflict. I’m writing this sitting in my library at home, cocooned in books. Many of the authors died impecunious – Thomas Paine and Oscar Wilde are a couple that spring to mind. Great ideas and great writing have not always ended in an economic payoff. Dying has often been one of those great mechanisms for validating an artistic position. The point is the old system wasn’t always that great at allocating economic resources to benefit the writer and artist and the new system suffers from the same problem, but also offers some unique solutions.

The main solution I see is that it allows us to create social networks that match our own predispositions. I’m no economist and I’m a little bit upset that they made economics such a dry topic when I took it in college, because I’m fascinated by it now, particularly as it pertains to writing and art. I read a short story by Tolstoy, "How Much Land Does a Man Need?" this week. The moral of the story is essentially don’t forget your mortality in your acquisitiveness.

How much income does an artist need? This is the question I find intriguing in light of the internet culture. I wonder how much income would I need from my writing to pull the literary equivalent of a Gaugin and chuck it all and move to Tahiti and spend the rest of my life swimming in the warm tropical words. I do the math. 1000 fans at $10 a month and I think I could probably do it. Math is an evil thing, because 10x1000 is such an easy equation. You see someone with 850 friends on FaceBook or you see the amount of traffic other blogs receive and it almost seems do-able.

The problem is that the art suffers if you turn from artist to huckster to get your thousand, so the art must come first. Which brings me back to the original thrust of this post – what is a digital persona? Is it the huckster selling? Is it the tortured artist? Is it the social butterfly? Is it the bitter misanthrope? Who am I and why have I donned this digital mask and entered this new frontier? In the past, I’ve always been just a little bit fearful of what I’ve posted on-line, wondering about the what ifs were a client, a potential reader, a judge, another attorney, my siblings or my parents to read this. The answer is amazingly simple and amazingly difficult all at the same time – be a person of integrity and it doesn’t matter.