Goodbye to All This
Mark Dery’s final essay for True/Slant is a dirge—or, alternatively, a tribute—to involving, surprising, unabashedly literate long-form non-fiction in the age of online page-view driven skimmery.
The mark of a real writer is that she cares deeply about literary joinery, about keeping the lines of her prose plumb. That’s what makes writers writers: to them, prose isn’t just some Platonic vessel for serving up content; they care about words. Any chief product officer who says “quality online does not equal craftsmanship” is channeling the utilitarian gospel of the managerial class, an instrumentalist vision of journalism that presumes writing, online, is just a turkey baster for injecting content into the user’s brain. Undeniably, that sort of writing is everywhere, online, from here to eHow.com, an algal bloom of brain-cloggingly awful prose. It results in reader die-off, in the long run, because bloggers posting in a workplace culture that dismisses the importance of craft will tend, unsurprisingly, to turn out stories that aren’t well-crafted, and what isn’t well-crafted isn’t well-read.
This was precisely my experience in three-plus years on the IGN.com editorial team. I’m not sure why I expected more, honestly. I do know I left more convinced than ever that good writing matters. We should all savor it, and expect it.
