Fortunately writing doesn’t require an audience

Keywords: miscellaneous

There is a little bit of narcissism required to be a writer, to believe that people actually give a shit about what you think. And after the publishing of my book, with the podcasts and the interviews and the speeches I’ve given, I’ve come to realize that people read my words and still don’t understand me. Perhaps because they project their own experiences into the writing, perhaps because so much time has passed that I am no longer the person who wrote that book/those words, or perhaps because I am such a shit writer that I can’t express myself well enough to be understood. It feels like a mixture of all three of those possibilities. By the time you read these words, I’ll already not be the person who wrote them. I’ll have hopefully grown, and I’ll have moved on. And there is acceptance in knowing that the words I write are ephemeral to me. Too bad the people who read my words are seemingly locked into the space and time in which they are written.

https://bambooandbananas.org/on-writing

The Consumer Audience is Obsolete

Today, you have no audience — today, when you write to express your ideas, you do so within a wide variety of logical systems.

There are no news consumers sitting in laid-back postures, there are no fans leaning in to your news narratives. Your story is moot.

Well, speaking of conservative candidates, I just drone on and on and on and on, never letting anyone else get a word in edgewise, until I start foaming at the mouth and fall over backwards…

Monty Python’s Flying Circus – The Naked Ant [S01E12] — e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTLeBybJhSo&t=449s

The passive consumer audience is brain-dead.

Active production of meaning is now a matter of interacting with natural languages (cf. wants.blog ). It is participatory, it is emergent, it is generative, creative, and does not merely follow a narrative prescription. It evolves from day to day, context to context, and it is connected. It does not need no education, Google — no central authority, no golden algorithm to solve each and every problem. It is decentralized, distributed, networking.

Zita is engaged in helping to build this world — why not participate, too?