Ami Isseroff, Israel-based Director of MidEastWeb, argues that writers will have to become more aware of the medium if they want to be read online: "I have found that requests for articles and self-expression do not produce floods of excellent material. If anything is submitted, it is often poorly written and inane, and if I dare publish it, I am justifiably taken to task by my readers. The Web could potentially be a means of interactive communication, but it seems that there are few communicators among us."
As high priests and minor acolytes of a new technology (the Web), we would like to think that it will have the profoundest influence on culture, society, politics, sex life and all other aspects of human activity. As writers, we are bound to reflect on the influence of the Web, and computerization, on writing.
As a Web activist, I would dearly like to believe that the Web will put an uncensored mass communications tool in the hands of the weak and disenfranchised. As a Web communicator, however, I have found that requests for articles and self-expression do not produce floods of excellent material. If anything is submitted, it is often poorly written and inane, and if I dare publish it, I am justifiably taken to task by my readers. The Web could potentially be a means of interactive communication, but it seems that there are few communicators among us. As an observer of history, I note that the means of communication are usually in the hands of those who have power. Effective mass communication, even on the Web, requires money and resources. Anyone can write for the Web, but without massive publicity resources, or the favorable attention of the media, very few people will read what is written.
Nonetheless, the new medium and its possibilities will surely have an effect. If we look at the history of writing and communication, we find that most essentials have not changed for a long time, despite technological innovations such as the printing press and even television. The essence of style is contained in the statement "Change the order of the words and you lose the whole thing", written by Marcus Tullius Cicero about 2,000 years ago. The underlying motifs of the heroic epic have remained essentially unchanged from the Illiad of Homer down to the latest regurgitation of Star Wars. The essentials of narrative prose were contained in the Old Testament, the Epic of Gilgamesh and similar stories that were born out of the oral tradition that preceded writing. Literature is unlikely to change, because the human "soul", the way we think, is unlikely to change.
Undeniably, each technological innovation has brought changes in the quantity of writing, changes in forms of writing and changes in readership and tastes. The major changes, if any, that will be due to the Web are still ahead of us. Currently, the Web reaches only a tiny fraction of its potential audience, so it is still not a major player. The Web will not fully mature for another ten or twenty years. The mature Web might be accessed by two billion people who pay an insignificant sum for connection time. They will be able to download a novel or a high-quality movie in a second or two. That Web will be much more like television than what we have today, which is approximately a medium for electronic rendering of illustrated books or articles aimed at afficianados. We can hazard guesses about important directions, based on what we think that future Web will be like.
Illustrations will become a more integral part of literature and writing. Histories will have copious maps. Novels may have drawings of characters and scenes. Detective novels may have diagrams illustrating the movements of the protagonists on 'the fateful night'.
The Web will favor briefer writing. The dominance of long essays and novels in printed literature was partly due to the unfavorable economics of publishing and circulating brief essays or single poems. Charles Dickens, to our regret, was paid by the word. Most people do not have the patience to read long tomes. However, they are usually more willing to pay for a book than for a single sheet of paper, or for a fat newspaper rather than a thin one. This market constraint turns good short stories into indifferent novels, buries a single important essay in a lengthy collection or anthology, and inflates magazines and newspapers with commentary and "news" that are soon justifiably forgotten.
The Web will also favor very long books in specialty fields. Few might buy or read Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in print for example. However, if it is freely accessible on the Web, and if it also includes a search mechanism, it will at least be perused or searched by many for essential information. The Web is spreading from English speaking countries (especially the U.S. and Canada) where it is concentrated, to the rest of the world. However, the difficulties of producing materials in non-Latin alphabets - and the greater audience potential of English - may force an increasing dominance of the English language in literature, as well as in technical communications.
The Web, after all, is just another tool. It will make some changes in forms and techniques, but it will probably reflect the limitations of humans and society much more than it will affect them.
Copyright © 1999 A. Isseroff
Ami Isseroff is a technical writer and programmer who lives in Rehovot,
Israel. He is also a web author and director of MidEast Web, which
has a web site at 