;-) Neterature: all the quirky, jerky kinds of writing that is/are on the World Wide Web — blogs, fan fiction, role-playing game sagas, news filterese, spam poetry, prose parodies, etc.
Neterature: Usually energetic passionate innovative and irreverently funny. Not always great or even good. But the best of it is young and sassy and undeniably full of life, in ways that on-the-page writing is not so much anymore.
And it’s blooming everywhere — in e-mail and instant messages and, more and more, spilling off the screen into our daily parlance. It’s changing the way we express ourselves. —Linton Weeks
—iT was a dark+stormy Nite (Washington Post (will expire soon))
A good survey. Ultimately, it sides with the wistful “because we are no longer crafting our stories and poems on paper with pens or typewriters, gone are the days when we were forced to think through everything before we wrote it down,” which is 1) an overstatement and 2) missing the point. We come into contact with lots of bad online writing, but those of us with weblogs can make it easier for everyone else to find the good writing. Bloggers are editors — not in the sense that we fix other people’s mistakes, but because a weblog archive is the table of contents of an anthology; a single richly-linked blog entry functions as a separate codex.
Weeks gives a good survey of writing culture online, but still applies old media criteria to it — which is rather like admitting that a horseless carriage does a lot of things horses do, and a lot of things that horses can’t do, but questioning them because you can’t breed horseless carriages. Of course you can’t — because horseless carriages aren’t horses.
A neuropsychiatrist is quoted as saying that, when you read online, “Your critical faculties are in abeyance.” They needn’t be. People can be trained to appreciate modern art, fine wines, and just about anything else that follows discernible principles of aesthetic and meaning.
I do find it very amusing that Jakob Nielsen is introduced as someone who teaches people how to write online. His specialty is usability in human-computer interfaces, and of course he’s great in that realm. But only by trial and error have he and other usability specialists determined what kind of writing permits people to use technical documents most efficiently. Nielsen has no expertise in the use of writing to persuade, inspire, entertain, etc. He has never claimed that he has, of course — it’s this article that presents him as a writing expert.
I played hooky to go see Wild Robot this afternoon, so I went back to…
I first started teaching with this handout in 1999 and posted it on my blog…
In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. @thepublicpgh
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Okay, I'll be the one to say it: He's a pompous ass. While what he says about much of the text available to read on the internet may be true, he is comparing apples to oranges. I do not necessarily see all writing on the internet as a poor replacement for text literature, but as a progression from and improvement over telephone conversation. Much of what is written is not by people who consider themselves "writers" (although anyone who writes is a writer, according to Frost's feelings on poets and poetry). But much of it is extremely well written and some have talent that would never have been developed or shared to entertain others. Some, is appallingly bad. You can shut a book, you can turn off the TV, and you can choose to avoid a lousy weblog. I just think it's terrific that people ARE writing again. Before blogging, when's the last time you wrote a letter to a friend?
Bashing an emerging culture is easy. Very good analogy with the automobile.
And yes, many bad blogs, groups, message boards, etc. exist in both writing and content, but that is part of the culture. Just as I do not listen to every person/idiot/wacko that I meet, I will not link to or read often every blog out there, or generalize the entire medium because of their presence.
This Nielsen needs to try drinking from a half-full glass.
Thanks for sharing. Can I just label him an obnoxious know-it-all and be done with it? I read through the entire article, and here's the irony. I found myself doing exactly what "everyone else" is doing; scrolling too fast, skimming, and link hopping. But I don't like the way he's ended his article. It sounds like he needs to do a little more research. I don't think people are going to appreciate being pigeon-holed.
"Neterature: Usually energetic passionate innovative and irreverently funny." -- And he's got horrible punctuation too!