Free Culture and the Undead Art of Writing on the Web

I read Lawrence Lessig’s Free Culture: the nature and future of creativity in October of 2006 with something like rapture and soul-deep sympathy. In 1994 I was a freshman in college, and I latched on to the advent of the world wide web feverishly, excited by the prospect of publishing my essays and articles without the intervention of pesky intermediaries like acquisitions editors and publishers. I wrote and published dozens of articles, established forums and mailing lists, and engaged in online conversations on topics ranging from religion to philosophy to sexuality over a span of a dozen years. Web technology immediately changed information exchange in ways I never dreamed of: thousands of voices which would otherwise never be heard learned to speak for themselves, acquiring their own audiences and followings, sparking conversations and tendrils of thought that burrowed their way into the public mind, changing our culture from the inside out.

In those early days of the web, I published an eight page essay on artificial intelligence, a 10 page paper on modern feminism, and a whopping 18 page paper on modern mythology and ritual (amongst dozens of smaller papers). I received countless emails from people interested in my work who wanted to collaborate on projects, refute an assertion I’d made, or who simply wanted to chat with a likeminded person. Needless to say, regardless of the fact that my work was long, people read it. They read it with glee. They read it in spite of bad typography and formatting—they read it because it was compelling, thoughtful and interesting. I don’t care what anyone says—that is the first real rule of writing, on the web or anywhere else. My writing was alive.

But over time, “rules” around web writing sprang up here and there, and as business finally began to grasp the importance of the web, “web writing” became overrun with zombified copywriting, which in turn became the norm. Scholarly 18 page writings on feminist mythology weren’t so easy to come by any longer, though in the early days of the web this kind of writing was abundant. As the internet became the tool of the masses, the quality of the writing—the content—suffered, even as design flourished.

For years I’ve lamented the lack of beautiful, rich, engaging content on the web (or at the very least, the ease of finding it) but I was never really able to articulate why until I read Lessig’s book. Lessig’s ultimate argument is that we, the writers, the artists, those of us that create ideas and instill them in our culture, have a moral obligation to provide free culture, to wrest control of what we read, view, and consume from corporations and government and provide it ourselves, for ourselves. We have the obligation to make the fundamentals of our culture—our literature, music, film, art—accessible and readily available to those who want to touch it, absorb it, learn from it. To my mind, this means making our cultural building blocks available on the web.

While Lessig’s book is mostly concerned with the legal methods of making this happen, my concerns are artistic. If writers are culture creators, if writing and literature is the soul of our civilization, what are we doing to ourselves if we let our largest source of free literature run rife with crap content crafted to sound like marketing copy? What are we doing to ourselves if the “rules” we teach web writers center around brevity and killer headlines?

While I appreciate the power of concision, I also believe in aesthetic writing. Emotional writing. Powerful, fluid writing. The writing I enjoy reading isn’t grabby or snazzy, though I recognize other readers prefer those styles. All I ask for is the choice to read and write the voices that appeal to me without apology. Short story writer Quentin S. Crisp echoed my sentiments when he writes, “It irks me when particular styles become compulsory, or when other styles are maginalised.” He further laments, “There’s this attitude, ‘If you haven’t grabbed me with the first sentence, I don’t want to know.’”

I’m sure a lot of people feel this way; I simply don’t worry about those people. The web should brim with writing that is both verbose and lyrical as well as straight and narrow. Literature on the web should reflect the myriad personalities that shape it.

“But Amber,” I hear you protest, “substantial research shows that people don’t read online! If I start writing long, wordy essays, no matter how beautiful, many people won’t read what I have to say!”

You’re right, of course. Many won’t. You’ll have to fire those readers.

A few years ago I read a book titled, Managing Customers As Investments which suggested that not all customers are valuable. Some customers cost more to keep than they are worth. For example, a customer who buys a piece of software but never any of the upgrades will still require support, but the cost of that support exceeds what the customer contributes. If you stop supporting her product, you’ll lose her as a customer, but you ultimately save your business money.

The same concept is true in writing (as in any transaction). I could decide to tailor my writing style and subject matter to my lowest common denominator, to the least attentive, least intelligent, least curious reader and use small words, short sentences, and bland ideas in hopes of retaining as large a readership as possible. Or I could be true to myself and my craft and write what I love in a way that moves and inspires me, and though I know I will lose many of my readers, those that stay with me on the journey will come away enriched and fulfilled. They’ll have gained just as much from the reading as I did from the writing, and we both profit from this arrangement. I’m not sure anyone is served by writing for the masses: good writers choose whom to write for, and fire the rest. In general, writing isn’t merely a public service; it’s a personal investment.

When we try to shape our intelligent thoughts and uplifting insights into the mold established by copywriters relying on bullets and chunks, we’re really just giving CPR to a corpse. Every time we sacrifice elegance and depth in order to keep a few lazy or impatient readers, we contribute to the zombification of literature and free culture. Writing on the web isn’t completely dead—it lumbers around half alive, unnatural and creepy as the undead. I see glimmers of hope from time to time, moments of truly joyous, deep, artful writing in blog posts, zine articles and the like. These signs of life give me hope that though much of the web stinks like a rotting corpse, something deep inside still glows, and with careful tending can bubble back to the surface. I don’t believe writing on the web will ever completely die, but it will take effort on our parts to bring it truly and utterly back to life. I hope it happens sooner than later; I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that our culture depends on it.

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