Writing through the years, what convergence in the future ?

It all started with books, newspapers, magazines, personal diaries and written letters. Now we talk about ezines, blogs, free newspapers and emails. Writing has not disappeared as some are saying but rather changing.

After reading so many feeds and blogs, I couldn’t help but wonder why the hell our new generation is so addicted to writing stories on the web. Since many years, young people slowly left the books for the Internet. So everyone was saying at that time that the new generation was different. This new generation was evil and source of many problems for the elders. They don’t like to read book anymore, they want everything fast (Internet, love, money, etc.), they can’t wait to get what they want and finally they don’t know how to write properly any more. Remember the debate regarding the future of literacy and new communication means like short text messaging on mobile phones (this debate still exists). Nobody is writing letters any more but they now send emails with a few words. People just don’t have time anymore.

A dark future was drawn for this generation.

At the very opposite, my opinion is that short messages services or email were a good thing as they helped people to think, summarize efficiently and write quickly. It’s a lot more difficult to use short message words to build a comprehensive sentence than to use ordinary sentence structure. This has developed new skills among this new generation. Now they can can think fast and organize ideas more efficiently.

A few years later, we discovered it wasn’t as bad as described. If you look at the way the blogosphere has emerged on the Internet, we can say that people are still as literate. Even more they have strengthened their literacy. For your blog to be widely read and recognized, you must write a perfect english. And if you look at the number of posts that famous bloggers are able to produce during the day, you can’t say they don’t know how to write.

It has also improved communication. In the past the only way to widely communicate was to be a journalist, to work in a radio station , work on TV or to write a book. And even with that you’re not really free to present and share ideas and opinions.

The “normal” persons were left with family, friends, lovers and colleagues (sometimes they were lovers too) to share opinions and thoughts. That’s not a big audience and to really share thoughts you have to find the right person that is interested in the subject and is willing to listen to you. People were in fact full of frustrations. Why this stupid man on TV got the right to say these things while I’m here watching him. That could be me !

Internet first and then the blog phenomena brought a new power to talented people wanting to share with the world. That’s really a revolution. Never in the past you could reach so many people with your single tiny opinion in such a fast manner.

It is quite funny to think that the old personal paper diary was fulfilling the same need but this diary was kept secret. Now bloggers expose their life to the world. The difference here is probably the feeling of staying anonymous on the Internet (we know that is not really true). In fact the real reason is that the diary was kept secret because you could tell on it things you couldn’t say to the people that surrounds you. It was kept secret from the family and friends. With the Internet you share with the world except the ones that surrounds you. This is completely the opposite. So it is still a secret diary but shared with the world. The same phenomena can led people to talk about their private life on TV whereas they never did it with their family and friends.

I think blogs are the link that was missing to bring back together the old and new generations. In fact bloggers are writing what I would call the next generation of newspapers or magazines. In the future I’m pretty sure we’ll see a convergence between blogs, newspaper and magazines. Today we are already experiencing the free newspapers that contain articles structured like a blog article. There are consumed quickly in the bus, tube or streets. Ordinary Newspapers have also come to the web where their future is now. People are buying less and less newspapers. The problem is that I don’t see how all this will converge if it ever converges.
One next step could be to see blogs as paper magazines. That would be quite a logical evolution. But as soon that a blog will come to paper, it won’t be a blog anymore because the paper distribution world is led by centralized power. The good thing with blogs is that the writer is completely free to publish. There is no lobbying or pression from above.

Finally one thing won’t change for me. I don’t see how a book (that tells one full big story) could fit in these new behaviors. I think books will still be consumed as today for a long time still. You can’t read a 500 pages story on the web, that just doesn’t fit in the way Internet is consumed. The only way would be through podcasting and audio books maybe.

To conclude it is very hard to guess how all this will evolve in the future but it will surely evolve !

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