Digirati Rant

"We gone beyond writing..."
  Nora Boyle

As the Earth rotates at 1,000 miles per second and orbits the sun at 25, 000 miles per hour, news travels fast on our planet. Journalism isn’t just yellow anymore –it creates a Doppler effect. Writers become a function of this hyperspace. “...Headline news, around the world every thirty minutes...”

One must catch this lightning in a bottle and write in hypertext (HTML), produce graphics, translate into several languages and ‘program’ for this speed-of-light information age. Or, if you like Einstein’s theory of relativity, time does not move in a straight line, sometimes moving backwards and forwards, and stopping dead in its tracks. Hence, the occupational hazards of documenting ‘reality.’

With the advent of the Digerati, or the ‘online’ cyber writers, everyone is publishing. The bluestocking ladies of yesteryear are today’s cybergrrls, and a ‘man of letters’ transmutes into ‘webmaster’ or ‘online editor’

The printing press, now digitized, allows anyone authorship via website, e-zine, and of course email. The democracy of web publishing is available to anyone willing to invest in a computer. The mouse is mightier than the sword. The post modern writer no longer writes, he transmits.

The ‘Digital Divide,’ the remaining populace without computers greatly troubles the lawmakers, but it seems all are willing to make the jump. People without computers, fear they are left out, and indeed they are. They sense the transponders, antennas, satellite links, and frequencies of the electrical grid that is our society.

Those on the side of the computer illiterate in the Digital Divide will surely lack the intellectual capital of the other. All have heard the hue and cry: “...Not since 1450 when Guttenberg invented movable type, has there been such a revolution in communication.... yadda, yadda, yadda. “

To Will Shakespeare, a mere writing table and quill pen sufficed. Today’s Shakespeare would be online with a stylus and PDA (personal digital assistant) and of course, have a producer, an agent, and an entertainment lawyer. Will needs DSL, a Digital Subscriber Line, a high-bandwidth technology, accessing the Internet 126 times faster than standard telephone modems. He could email his producer the rewrites on his latest play, which is produced on DVD. Enthralled by this new age, he devises a play called “To Be or Not to Be Digital ”

And, Will Shakespeare would be prescient enough to see what USA Today reported: Around 2030 or so, the computer may very well be filled with liquid instead of transistors and chips. It would be a ‘quantum’ computer, employing quantum mechanics, and possibly allow for teleportation (“Beam me up, Scotty”).

Further, this quantum computer would be a ‘data rocket’ using atoms to calculate instead of computer chips. Since an atom can be up and down at once, it's not just equal to one ‘bit,’ as in a traditional computer. Scientists call it a ‘Qubit. ‘

And, if you are still muddling through the Middle English of computing, then read Nicholas Negroponte’s “Being Digital,” to catch up.

So, what’s a space age Shakespeare to do? Write content, of course, burn CDs, distribute via a website, with streaming video, and keep an eye on merchandising for E-Commerce.

Then, of course, there’s the piracy on the Internet’s high seas. Shakespeare would have encoded digital signatures on all his works before electronically transferring any file. He would also have a technology attorney to protect his rights, and say, “first thing, let’s kill all the lawyers.”

As cyber stalking, slander, and smut proliferate, and lawmakers attempt to tax the Internet, new and mutant forms of attorneys will spawn. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) currently on the table will include Meta keywords and domain names. The legal ramifications are many.

Will Shakespeare’s publishers and agents police the Internet to protect their cash cow, and file suit accordingly. He had to form his own company, KingsMen.com and pay dearly for Shakespeare.com, and thus writes about the subversive cyber pirates who steal strange new commodities, selling them on Ebay Underground, the black market auction site.

Illicit copies of the script, “13th Night”, chronicling a cyber pirate queen, appeared everywhere on the net, and bootlegged copies of the video and music were downloaded. These cyber pirates wield not swords, but mouse, keyboard, and laptop, laments Shakespeare.

If you have not yet paid for ‘your name.com,’ you might suffer the legal wrangles of a Madonna whom after several years and many thousands of dollars finally recouped her name from a guy who used it to direct traffic to a porn site.

The push by the software and music recording industries, which say the web makes it easier to steal and redistribute their intellectual property, a struggling innovative software company like Naptster or MP3 becomes a snake pit of attorneys, all because of the democratic freedom of E-commerce and free E-nterprise.

Statistics show most E-mericans watch TV eight hours per day, and the rest of the time they are at the computer. There is very little off-line writing or reading anymore. A small minority still actually ‘read.’

There’s a big surge in the novel as CD-ROM, or E-book, narrated by audio, including graphics, video streaming and virtual reality interaction. But, with readership down, newspaper and magazine circulation dwindle. ‘Screening’ is way up.

The Internet looks and feels more like TV everyday. The national audience watches TV and mutters to themselves, “...I could write this @#$#. “ But of course, the unions have such a stranglehold on that medium. The Internet unions will likewise proliferate, eliminating the mass culture printing press, it was in its golden age.

But for now, the Internet, aside from digital signatures, and self-destructing bugs in computer programs, is still a free-for-all. It’s a brave new world stage, and we are mere actors upon it. Only it is a virtual reality, and, we, mere ghostly ‘cookies.’

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