Friday, July 20, 2012

When Writing and Technology Intersect


I’ll be honest. I’m a technologist. In my day-job, I’m a software engineer. 

I’ve worked on big systems, small systems, low-level assemblies, object-oriented designs, database creations, web sites, user interfaces, server processing, performance tuning, and a whole lot of other stuff that fills my C.V.. One thing my experience has taught me is this: in the world of software, there is very little new under the sun. As a matter of fact, IMHO, software is devolving. 

As more and more lives are touched by the automation of previously manual tasks, the programming has simplified. Machine-level coding has given way to scripting, which has given way to plug-and-play frameworks, which have given way to online data entry. Of course, there are still islands of complexity in the software universe, but for the most part, those are few and far between, isolated to high-performance developers like game programmers, trading firm plumbers, and search engine servers. Otherwise, it’s the people who have made it complex. It’s always the people. 

I have a feeling that writing is going the same way.

Consider this. How many of you out there would have guessed back in the Nineties that almost everyone you knew would be employed in some type of HTML-based occupation? Whoa – you say – what do you mean? I mean that everyone is on the web, and the web, at its core, is a construct of Hypertext Markup Language. Even after all the XML, AJAX, Python, Django, and other enhancements that have sprung up over the last decade, the average website still boils down to HTML, a language that didn’t even exist until 1991. In other words, the world you live in today is completely unrecognizable from the world you lived in as recently as a decade or two ago.

One thing is constant. Writing is the universal input. While computers at their base level may operate via the mathematical logic of zeros and ones, their usage is overwhelmingly language-based. The profusion of blogging, social media, and other personal promotion has taken over the network. The engineers work like Morlocks to support the fancies of the Eloi. The serpent consumes its own tail.

Many of you have probably heard of SQL databases. They work like phonebooks, or columnar tables of data, presented row by identical row, extending for thousands upon millions upon billions of records to the last thrumming sector of available drive space. But now, there are abstract databases like MongoDB, which specialize in fuzzy formats like blogs. They eschew columns, and replace them with ad-hoc assignments. In a strange, perverse way, these data mechanisms are the anti-devices, automated machines bent to the whims of a human world. 

This trend continues. Cell phones were a Star Trek fantasy once. Now, they are ubiquitous. Today’s fantasy revolves around wearable computers. As a writer, you’re always looking for new input. Imagine a world where you have to cope with that input. 

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