June 1, 2006:
Have We Changed How We Use and View the Internet?

Welcome to my new weekly (or biweekly, depending on my whim and workload) column, "Coffee on the Deck." Why this particular title? Well, if you've followed my newsletter editorials for the last two or three years, you'll know that I spend quite a bit of time longing for a few minutes to simply enjoy my deck (with or without a cup of coffee, but more often with), where I can listen to the birds and feel the breeze and generally let the world move on without me.

Unfortunately (from the on-deck perspective), I live in Virginia, and the opportunities to enjoy the great outdoors are often few and far between. There are those times, for example, when the deck is covered with two feet of snow -- but more often, it's either raining or scorching hot, or both (like today). "Heat stroke on the deck" doesn't seem like the ideal column title (though some may disagree).

So while I may wish I was sipping coffee on the deck, more often, I'm sipping coffee at the keyboard. Such is the writing life!

The column below appeared in the June 1 newsletter, which was actually delivered on June 2. Most future columns, however, probably won't be in the newsletter, but only on the web. This particular column is my response to my own question to our readers, "Have we grown jaded toward the Internet?"

Well, Have We?

It occurred to me after I asked this question that I have been "involved" with the Internet for almost precisely a decade. It was in 1996 that I began to get involved with the Inkspot website -- and began writing about the "relationship" between writers and the Internet. Needless to say, a great deal has changed!

For example, around 1996 or 1997, I tried to pitch an Internet-related book to Writers Digest Books. They weren't interested. Why? Because, they told me, they really didn't see writers getting that "involved" with the Internet! Another publisher, who was handling my pet book, turned down my offer to set them up with a free book catalog site online, because they didn't think that pet owners were going to be involved with the Internet! (So much for the vision thing...)

If you've been "online" for the past decade or longer, you can probably remember those heady days when everything seemed new and exciting. In those days, I wrote articles that used lots of phrases like "for the first time, we can..." We could find information on just about any subject in the world without visiting a library. We could talk to writers around the world without paying for a stamp -- or for a long-distance phone call. We could participate in a writer's group without leaving our living-room. We could subscribe to free writing newsletters that are packed with more (and more current) information than most of the paid subscription magazines. Best of all, we could send our queries and articles directly to an editor by e-mail, saving on paper, stamps, and those annoying post office lines.

The ether buzzed with promises of future benefits for writers as well. E-books, we were told, were going to, at long last, level the playing field for writers who didn't have the clout or connections to get noticed by "big commercial publishers." Since e-books cost so much less to create and distribute, e-book publishers would be able to afford to take on less profitable (but no less worthy) authors. At least one article confidently predicted "the death of paper" by 2005. E-book publishers sprouted like weeds, and most got weeded out.

All this excitement ultimately led to the dot.com feeding frenzy at the end of the 1990's -- a frenzy that was bound to bust. When it did, it took down some wonderful sites along with it, including Inkspot. It was from the ashes of Inkspot that Writing-World.com was born.

As we entered the new millenium, however, I think the excitement was beginning to fade. Instead of promises, we found ourselves facing threats: Viruses, worms, and the ever-increasing tide of spam. Writing groups became embroiled in flame wars, and sometimes perished. For many, the convenience of being able to order practically anything online became offset by fears of identity theft and credit card fraud. The tone of much of the correspondence I received at this point was not of excitement but of fear: People were afraid to sign up for a newsletter because they thought it would open them up to more spam, and many wouldn't even open an e-mail for fear that reading a message from a stranger would infect their computer with a virus.

Writers who dreamed of achieving fame and fortune through e-books discovered that the majority of readers still preferred to curl up in a comfortable chair with a cup of coffee and a perfect-bound chunk of paper. I've lost track of the number of companies that have promised to bring out the perfect e-reader, or some form of "electronic paper." Nor has it helped writers to have those same old mega-publishers jump onto the e-book wagon -- hijacking it into yet another means to reap greater profits for by publishing the same big-name writers and charging the same fees. (I did find it amusing to read an article in which publishers were trying to rationalize high prices for e-books by claiming that their greatest cost was royalties, when for decades they've been telling authors that royalties have to stay low because of the high cost of production.)

But beyond the issue of "fear" (viruses, fraud, identity theft), "annoyance" (spam, virus hoaxes, popup ads) and "disillusionment" (a dwindling electronic marketplace), I think writers have found themselves facing another Internet-related burden: Overload. I believe there is a tendency for just about any technology to begin as an opportunity -- and to end up as an obligation. Take the telephone: At first it offered a wonderful new way to communicate with someone instantly, even if they were miles away. But eventually it became something that one felt obligated to answer, even if one was in the middle of dinner or a show or whatever. If your sister called to lament her woes for an hour, you felt you had to listen -- even if you were an hour away from deadline. Worse, it became (like the Internet) a tool for telemarketers, scammers and predators.

In the early days, I found it exciting to log on and find 30 or 40 e-mails in my inbox from writers and readers around the world. But over time, the burden of answering that many e-mails every day began to eclipse the excitement. The fact that one could now communicate with practically anyone in the world at the speed of light now meant that one was considered obligated to do so -- and people could get downright hostile if you didn't answer them in a "reasonable" amount of time (i.e., five minutes ago).

We also began to suffer from "information overload." How many of us are able to simply throw away magazines that we subscribe to, without reading them? Yet now we are faced with a hundred times as much information those print publications provided. Could we afford to ignore it? If we didn't "keep up," would it jeopardize our ability to compete in the marketplace? It was nice to get one or two high-quality e-mail newsletters each week; it became overwhelming to get ten or twelve, many of them mediocre or simply rehashing the same subjects (and markets).

Finally, I think we all have increasingly begun to suffer from the plague of the 21st century: too much to do. I have yet to talk to anyone who feels that they have fewer demands on their time than they did five years ago. And this, too, I believe is related to the "opportunity becomes obligation" tendency of technology, especially "time-saving" technology. There's the old adage, "a penny saved is a penny earned." But a minute saved isn't a minute that we can put away into our personal time-savings account. It's a minute someone else wants from us. The fact that we can do things at the speed of light means that we are now expected to do things at the speed of light. The fact that we can accomplish ten tasks in the time it once took to accomplish two doesn't mean that we have 80% more leisure time. It means that we now have eight more tasks to accomplish. Being able to do things faster means having to do more.

For example, when most of my writing correspondence arrived via the postman, handling that correspondence took about an hour a week. Today, handling e-mail correspondence can take an hour or two a day. In the old days I would have considered five letters in a single day a "flood"; today, if I received that few e-mails, I'd wonder if my ISP was down.

Yet, ironically, the e-mail flow to my inbox has decreased, precisely because of that plague I mentioned. Even though Writing-World.com has more readers than ever before, I hear from far fewer of them -- because all of you are just as busy as I am, and a lot of you are probably a lot busier. A couple of years ago, a survey in Writing World would have attracted dozens of responses; today, with 16,000 readers, we're lucky to get ten. I've noticed far fewer inappropriate submissions; I suspect that the would-be writers who haven't bothered to learn how to study markets or write a query have become disillusioned by their lack of success and dropped out of the game. And the flood of spam and viruses has definitely decreased, partly due to legislation and partly due to efforts on the part of service providers to develop better filtering and protection tools.

So, do we still love the Internet? I think we do. I certainly do. I know I couldn't run my business without it, and that's exactly what most of our survey respondents said. For example, I got started working for a site/newsletter run by a publisher who lived in Canada (and whom I never even met until after Inkspot folded); today my newsletter is edited by a woman living in England, whom I also have never met. Perhaps it's no coincidence that most of the respondents to this survey (see The Inquiring Writer, Writing World 6:06) lived outside the U.S., and pointed out that it really is thanks to the Internet that they are able to sustain a truly international writing career.

Even so, I suspect that most of us have lost some of that initial excitement that we felt a decade ago. We no longer join half a dozen discussion groups; we no longer sign up for every free newsletter we find; and we no longer feel compelled to write (or answer) to send out a hundred e-mails a week. But this is far from a "bad thing." It means that most of us are learning to treat the Internet as a tool -- and to realize that for a tool to be effective, we must control it rather than allowing it to control us.

Now if we could just do the same thing with our cellphones...

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