Symposium for the Soul

The question that most piqued my interest is this one:

Is the work we publish online only validated once it is viewed/consumed by others?

This was an interesting question for me because when I was younger, I was far less reluctant to share my writing. I wrote stories upon stories, but didn’t want my friends or parents or anyone seeing it. Obviously it was a self-defence mechanism. If no one reads it, no one can tell me I’m a terrible writer. I’ve mellowed out a little (but not much), and obviously having a website and a blog and various other mediums available to me, such as radio, I end up having to communicate.

Altogether, this question feels a bit like Schrödinger’s Blog. If no one actually sees something, does it really exist? Having a website, I obsess over stats. WordPress.com was great with stats, showing unique visitors as well as site visits. WordPress.org, at the moment, doesn’t have a visitor stats plugin that doesn’t involve those tacky counters on the website, at least as far as I can tell, which really bums me out. But are stats just a sign of external approval? Shouldn’t I be writing for myself? The symposium put forward several good points, but I’m still not 100% sold on viewing/consumption being the be all and end all of writing. (Although it certainly helps.)

Do you think the digitalisation of literary texts and the use of the e-reader will eventually replace the physical book completely?, or:

Are books dead?

Firstly, I love books. So much. Kids in primary school called me a “bibliophile” and I started crying because they said it in a really mean way like little kids do – “You’re a bibliophile.” I was a library monitor in Year 6, which didn’t help my rep. I have shelves of books and comic books in my home and I obsessively hoard books. But even I recognise that this superiority complex over digital versions are ridiculous.

I refer you to this post on Tumblr. To break it down: the image is of a Harry Potter book hollowed out with a ring inside it. The first few reactions go something like this: “Every time I see this I think to myself “You defaced a book? Hell no I’m not marrying you.”

And then you get the other type, which is what I subscribe to: “Books are not sacred, and mass market trade books like this are literally a dime a dozen.  Obsessing over books as an object entirely misses the point of why books have value.  Fetishizing books as physical objects seems very contrary to the idea of increasing readership among the general population, particularly given how often it comes alongside derision for digital texts as somehow sullying, degrading or otherwise “ruining” literature.  A book is not an object.  book is a vessel for a story.  Why the hell does the packaging matter?”

In essence: “#BOOKS ARE NOT INHERENTLY SACRED”.

Some books are very valuable of course, and physical books hold sentimental value much better than e-readers or tablets, but not every single book is inherently sacred.

There’s another really apt post on tumblr which I can’t find, but the OP (original poster) says something along the lines of “E-readers aren’t really books.” People catch on pretty quick and begin a chain of reblogs, which ends in a picture of a tablet (“papyrus scrolls aren’t really tablets.” That’s incredibly paraphrased, but I have no idea where in Tumblr this is.

In regards to the traditional essay format, I think it’s a good way of measuring knowledge in a very specific way. A lot of people don’t particularly care for essays, myself included, but it can be a good way of learning structure and applying knowledge in a reasoned fashion. As some of the symposium speakers seemed to agree, the essay still has its place.