The End of Writing

I’ve been reading Tom Mallon’s newly published The Very Heart of It: New York Diaries, 1983-1994. Tom is my former George Washington University Department of English colleague and enduring friend. He was kind enough to send me a copy of his book when it was published.

I came across a startling entry from December 1989, composed as Tom is starting to write on a newly purchased computer with a modem that can send electronic files over phone lines — quite a change from his career-long practice of writing in longhand then typing on a typewriter and faxing or mailing pages to a publisher. He’s sure technology is going to be ruinous for his students:

DECEMBER 11: I now have several pages of Aurora 7 [his book in progress], an entire book review, and a portion of a Booth biography on the hard disk. I’m getting the hang of it … I can see why it’s positively bad for the students, though. They hit hundreds of keys, fiddle and play and convince themselves they’re writing.

Plus ça change … in my experience new technology is consistently imagined as ruining writing and therefore thinking for students. Not that I am immune to that narrative of decline: I remember when I started writing my college papers on an Apple computer in 1986 I wondered if I was short circuiting the agonizing revisionary process that longhand transcription to typewriter demands (reader: the agonizing revisionary process is infinitely multiplied by a word processor because change is so easy to make and make again). Despite technological change writing seems to endure … and students seem to master new affordances with more agility than their elders.

But that is not to say there are not profound cultural effects when modalities of composition and distribution change. Computer assisted writing and editing enabled the outsourcing of authorial and editing jobs that had long been an academic mainstay. The internet, the World Wide Web, electronic access and the so called democratization of knowledge pushed these unsought changes further. I’m old enough to remember the condemnations of Google Books as a technological innovation that depended on invisible and underpaid labor. And the arrival of Wikipedia, which so many of my colleagues outlawed on their syllabus in favor of traditional print reference books and encyclopedias alone. Students meanwhile embraced and adapted, forcing their teachers to embrace and adapt, and what had been disruptions became normalized into classroom practice. I’m not writing now to justify any of these changes, and am not offering an apologia for the use of AI, but simply observing that technology keeps changing how writing can be undertaken and sustained in ways that are uncomfortable, unpredictable, and often easier for students to embrace and deepen than for their teachers.

In reading through Tom's diaries, which because of his career are also deeply about the publishing scene in NYC in the late 1980s, I'm struck by how he is unknowingly memorializing a world about to vanish: proofreaders who live on the Upper East Side and are well paid writers' allies, publishers who socialize with each other and work like crazy to cultivate talented novelists and nonfiction writers, a writing community that is in general celebratory of interesting new work rather than reflexively critical, communities sustained by writing as a practicable profession (one you could enter without having to have at least two or three other jobs that are NOT writing). It is very much a culture that seeks more writing of all kinds rather than a narrowing of writing’s value. Little of that world remains, with the consolidation of the publishing houses into a few international megacorporations that have no author-focused identity and little appetite for literature as a social good. Proofreading and printing are now often outsourced to inexpensive entities overseas where the labor is underpaid. The industry that was robust in 1989 no longer exists, except as a kind skeleton of its former self. NYC publishing was no paradise by any means: gods help you if you were a nonwhite writer looking to have your voice heard. Yet the internet and widened electronic access to writing of all kinds ensured that this world of print would, like traditional journalism, not be sustainable.

The diaries also record Tom leaving his tenured position at Vassar College to become a full time writer. He describes an English Department tearing itself apart over petty battles and self aggrandizements rather than thinking seriously as a communally about what the future of an English department at a time of vast technological change might be.

Unlike some of my colleagues and friends, I do not believe AI is the force that will bring about the vanishing of the humanities in academia. I also see that my students (and my 21 year old daughter) are way ahead of so many of us when it comes to working with AI as an essential career, study and life tool. I recognize I am a naive optimist who has generally been curious about new technologies and what they afford rather than someone who has ever believed we can forbid them, exile them from academia’s walled garden, or otherwise pretend we are set apart from a world that moves and changes, mostly in deeply challenging ways.