Freedom of the Press

It is no secret that the tone of public discourse has declined of late. Rancor echoes through the halls of Congress, over the airwaves and across the internet. The Supreme Court recently ruled that even hate speech is protected by the Constitution.

The right to contribute to public discourse has been a central principle of our society from almost the nation’s founding, and generally has been exercised with a vengeance. With the rise of the internet, a new question has emerged: What ought to be published?

From my viewpoint, this is not a question of censorship in the sense that the powerful have the ability to suppress those with whom they disagree. It is more a question of what deserves to be disseminated.

With Twitter and Facebook, any person with a thought can promptly publish it to a world of breathless readers, or so we would believe. In fact, the new media gives voice to many, buy hearing to few. We broadcast into a void. The body of content on the internet is described as a cloud. Perhaps a better metaphor comes from astronomy: Dark Matter. Dark matter composes the vast majority of the universe. It probably consists of subatomic particles that never coalesced into anything meaningful, like a hydrogen atom. Mostly what dark matter does is obscure our view of what lies beyond, other suns, other planets.

All those Tweets, Facebook posts and blogs are dark matter that obscures whatever substantive, meaningful and pleasurable content may exist on the net.

We have been led to believe that we can find almost anything on the net. Certainly, it seems almost everything IS on the internet. The problem can be finding it. Search engines do too good of a job matching content to queries. A typical search on Google may yield a million hits or more.

But are they relevant? Are any of them exactly what you’re looking for?

The much-touted cloud is another matter. There are two aspects of cloud computing. One is that vast quantities of data, for example financial transactions, can be stored on remote servers, along with applications to search those transactions. If you want to return a sweater to Target that you bought six months ago, but don’t have the receipt, great. A clerk can find the charge using only your credit card number. Data miners can reduce billions of transactions to meaningful and obscure trends using statistics.

But suppose you’re a writer. You’ve posted your Great American Novel on Amazon. How is anyone other than you’re tech savvy mother going to find it when they’re looking for a Great American Novel to read?

It’s buried, just like it would have been at the bottom of a slush pile while your frustration with the uncaring publisher mounted. We writers grasp at the delusion that because someone can download it to their Kindle, they actually will. First, they have to discover it, which they won’t unless they know exactly what they’re looking for. Then, somehow, they have to realize after reading a page that it’s worth buying for a measly four dollars.

Good luck with that.

Garrison Keillor allegedly said, “The average eBook will sell ten copies, seven of which go to blood relatives.”

I come from a big family, and I haven’t even done that well, judging from my last royalty check, and I’ve got TWO novels on Amazon.

This is not to say that things have gotten worse. Access to publication has always been restrictive. Ben Franklin published Poor Richard’s Almanack because he owned the printing press. Martin Luther’s 99 Theses got published because some stringer tore them off the cathedral door and set them to type. After that, the news agencies picked them off the wire. Generally, things that got published conformed to social norms and the values of the elites who own the presses.

Publishers have always been selective because there’s an awful lot of badly written stuff out there. The invention of personal computers and word processor software has only made it easier for someone to assemble 300 pages into something they fervently believe is a novel.

Now that drivel can go directly to Amazon, with no one standing in the way to say, “That’s awful!” And the sum total of all those titles is a cloud of dark matter obscuring whatever delight someone else has created that actually deserves to be read. Widely.

A technological solution is unlikely. True, several startups are working on software that analyze songs to predict future hits. Amazon uses similar technology to suggest future selections based on your previous purchases, but don’t count on something like that to drag you from the mucky backlists to the New York Times bestseller list. It’s not going to happen, no matter how beautiful your writing is.

Beat your own drum. Jump up and down and scream. Make a YouTube video. Hold an eBook signing event. Those are the things that will get you noticed, if only by the men with the white coats and butterfly nets.