All writing is occasional writing, but recently the occasional side of things has got out of hand. This is a complaint you will have heard before, but it bears repeating, if only because the sliver of time called the present seems to shrink week by week. It is as if every short article that wants to be read by more than a dozen people must now identify, preferably in its first line, the media event which occasioned it. Each sentence must have some bearing on something that happened no more than ten days ago. Never mind that these appeals to the present often read like sublimated expressions of the writer’s anxiety (a fear of irrelevance, poverty, forgetfulness, loneliness) — the truly successful essay manages to transform all this fear into good-humoured verbal energy. Today everyone writes frenziedly.
The formal features of hypertext have something to do with this. Everyone knows that the ranking of a web page in a given set of search results is partly determined by the number of links pointing to that page. (Links originating on other commonly linked-to sites confer a higher score.) The apportioning of visibility on the big social media sites is the result of an identical process: the network’s users are all connected to one another, more popular users are connected to a greater number of less popular users, and an article will succeed or fail depending on which nodes in the network are willing to link to it. Early theorists and designers of the internet (like Alan Kay) always claimed that liberty was encoded in its non-hierarchical structure — the web has no centre, it consists of end-to-end, peer-to-peer connections — and it is true that the organic allocation of attention by the network does sometimes allow for insurgencies. Things linked to by a big node are granted a high degree of visibility, but the same level of visibility would result from a larger number of links from smaller nodes. There’s always a chance that the marginal can become momentarily central, provided the ‘marketplace of ideas’ remains as frictionless as its designers intended. The problem with this arrangement is that anything asocial becomes completely invisible. The world constructed from electronic communications is one in which attention gives substance to everything. Things unwitnessed make no sound, leave no trace, lack solidity. The situation is different in the world of paper and ink. Not all printed books find an audience, but as long as they aren’t pulped they have a very long afterlife. The internet isn’t as ephemeral as we tend to imagine — it has a material substratum, and things posted here don’t vanish as readily as we’d like to believe — but unlike print culture the web is capable of swift and total erasure. It metes out oblivion effortlessly. Is your writing really signal, or is it just noise? It might look like noise to certain housekeeping algorithms. Writing which circulates on the internet must have the character of legal tender if it hopes to survive and be read: it must be valuable or intelligible to other people, it must be current, it must owe its legibility to an existing network of words and images. Otherwise it disappears.
Fearful of becoming invisible and isolated, more and more writing starts to take on the characteristics of journalism. In the same way that government-issued reports and sociological studies are the formal opposites of the realist novel, the articles and essays that circulate today are the negative form of the last century’s communiqués and manifestos. The manifesto was a group statement which complemented an action or event that the group itself had a hand in — an exhibition, an act of terrorism — whereas today’s saleable essay represents the individual voice of one who wishes to comment on things beyond the individual’s control: a war, a scientific discovery, a TV series. Stylistically, however, the essayist may sometimes use the peremptory tone of the communiqué, the same way Stendhal imitated the precise objective language of the Code Napoleon. An element of outspoken individuality helps to disguise the drudge work of annotating the present. Without this individual element the essayist risks being forgotten by the readers.
It’s strange to see people your own age become columnists. It’s particularly strange now, in the UK, because among the current crop of young writers there are several who owe their position to the events of 2008 and 2010, i.e. the crash and the protests, glimpses of anti-systemic turmoil which informed their politics and the politics of many of their contemporaries. All these writers had to do was say what they saw and they would be speaking for many of us. Yet to become a columnist something else is required: the columnist must link their political perspective to their personality. The moment this happens everything starts to become frozen again: the wave recedes, an old pattern reasserts itself, advances are handed out, people reconcile themselves to the things they are contractually obliged to criticise. There’s probably nothing to be done about it.
You sometimes remember (sat in front of your desk, staring at your computer, vegetating) that there is no shortage of brilliant young writers. They are everywhere. The roar of keystrokes sounds like a blast furnace.