The Anti-Editpus

Speaking as a semi-professional editor, I see the value of quality editing.  The wise, eagle-eyed, ink-stained editing wretch is a valuable person, indeed.

What I don't see is what point Gary Kamiya is attempting to make here:

...[E]ditors and editing will be more important than ever as the Internet age rockets forward. The online world is not just about millions of newborn writers exulting in their powers. It's also about millions of readers who need to sort through this endless universe and figure out which writers are worth reading. Who is going to sort out the exceptional ones? Editors, of some type. Some smart group of people is going to have to separate the wheat from the chaff. And the more refined that separation process is, the more talent -- and perhaps more training -- will be required.

We already use other readers to sort things out for us: My bookmarks are mostly referrals from writers I've learned to trust. Some utopians may dream that an anarcho-Wikipedia model will prevail, that a vast self-correcting democracy of amateurs will end up pointing readers to the most worthwhile pieces. But that is only "editing" in its crudest, most general form -- it's really sorting. In the chaotic new online universe, the old-fashioned, elitist, non-democratic system of sorting information will become increasingly important, if only because it enforces a salutary reduction of the sheer mind-swamping number of options available. The real problem is glut, and it's only going to get worse.

In any case, real editing is something different. It takes place before a piece ever sees the light of day -- and it's this kind of painstaking, word-by-word editing that so much online writing needs. If learning how to be edited is a form of growing up, much of the blogosphere still seems to be in adolescence, loudly affirming its identity and raging against authority. But teenagers eventually realize that authority is not as tyrannical and unhip as they once thought. It's edited prose, with its points sharpened by another, that will ultimately stand the test of time. There is a place for mayfly commentary, which buzzes about and dies in a day. But we don't want to get to the point where the mayflies and mosquitoes are so thick that we can't breathe or think.

The art of editing is running against the cultural tide. We are in an age of volume; editing is about refinement. It's about getting deeper into a piece, its ideas, its structure, its language. It's a handmade art, a craft. You don't learn it overnight. Editing aims at making a piece more like a Stradivarius and less like a microchip. And as the media universe becomes larger and more filled with microchips, we need the violin makers.

If I'm reading this correctly, the thinking goes: Editors are good, because they help imbue writing with meaning and coherence.  Blogs, by virtue of their sheer number and amateur provenance, are full of non-meaning and incoherence and could use some pruning.  But not editing, exactly, because editing is something finer.  OK, I give up.  We should have more good things, which are good, and fewer bad things, which are bad.  And all this will be possible through the magic of editors!

The first problem is that I don't think that people who visit blogs think of them as part of a chaotic new online universe.  Or, that is, the online universe is no more or less chaotic than the universe (aka, Life).  When choosing a place to eat for dinner, I don't consider every restaurant in the United States (or even all the restaurants in Denver Metro) any more than I consider each of the tens of millions of available blogs when I go online.  No, sir: I choose from a subset of restaurants, whittled down to a manageable few with the help of various shifting criteria.

Readers bring this same sorting skill to the consumption of media; I don't see where we need to bring ol' Maxwell Perkins into the selection process.

Also, I detect an either/or fallacy at work.  On one side, we have the unedited blogs; on the other side, the broad category of edited prose. Does it need to be said that not all of these things are created equal?

Kamiya grudgingly nods to quality, well-edited blogs.  Sort of:

[S]ome bloggers don't really need editors: Their prose is fluent and conversational, and readers have no expectation that the work is going to be elegant or beautifully shaped.

But while praising edited prose he fails to differentiate Proust and People. Again, with my emphasis:

If learning how to be edited is a form of growing up, much of the blogosphere still seems to be in adolescence, loudly affirming its identity and raging against authority. But teenagers eventually realize that authority is not as tyrannical and unhip as they once thought. It's edited prose, with its points sharpened by another, that will ultimately stand the test of time. There is a place for mayfly commentary, which buzzes about and dies in a day. But we don't want to get to the point where the mayflies and mosquitoes are so thick that we can't breathe or think.

So: My blog is disposable, but that (no doubt scrupulously edited) profile of Matt Damon that I just read in GQ is going to stand the test of time?  This simply doesn't follow.

Kamiya has about half of a sturdy if unremarkable piece here. Still, he grossly overreaches by setting up blogs as the enemies of the good when there are plenty of well-edited crimes against the good in the mainstream media.  Enjoy your favorite at the dentist's office today!

Comments

[Richard]

Aside from the valid points you make, I wonder how exactly "...[E]ditors and editing will be more important than ever as the Internet age rockets forward." How will editors become important to blogs? Will the many millions of blogs magically have access to many millions of editors?

[Michael Becker]

I don't think we should take Kamiya's article as an assault on blogs. Instead, it is an assault on all unedited prose. Blogging just happens to be the most culturally visible example of unedited prose at the moment.

Then again, I don't even like to use that word "assault" because Kamiya is not assaulting anyone. He's standing up for a profession that helps writing become clearer and more concise, and don't forget that he was formerly an editor himself. He's got a reason for defending editors.

As for the writing that will stand the test of time, he's right about edited work lasting longer and mattering more (at least for now). Even those poorly written and barely edited magazine articles in your dentist's office reach wider audiences than most blog posts. By the sheer number of eyes on the bad article, it will be remembered longer than a post no one reads. And face it, blogging is generally a one-shot deal.

By that I mean that we write blog posts and seldom return to them, sometimes even forgetting that we wrote them--it's the same deal with newspaper reporting as I've learned. Sure, the posts may reside on a server's hard drive forever (until the EMP gets us), but if no one read them or if the author hardly remembers writing them, how long will they effectively last?

I don't mean to sound like an apologist for Kamiya or the likes of the atrocious Andrew Keen here, but I do want to suggest that there might be some value to the idea of editors online. I just don't know how we could possibly act on that idea with the way the real online world works now.

[Rake]

I see what you're saying.

What rankles, though, is that he's making a very broad generalization about the quality of edited prose; that is, that it's *better* just by virtue of being edited. (Puff pieces in People being more like a "Stradivarius" than blog posts, under this rubric.)

I happen to think these judgments have to be made on a more selective basis when you're dealing with such a broad spectrum of written material.

Now: Yes, I agree that article about Star Jones' gastric bypass in People is going to get seen by literally millions more people than will see this blog post, but that says nothing about the *quality* of either the article or this post. I mean is it better that the Star Jones article is less ephemeral than a blog post? Hell, I think we should forget about it as soon as possible.

In the end, I think his argument is confused. What he wants is a filter or oversight or quality control on blogs, his exemplars of wild, unedited writing. That will help him (and everyone else, presumably) determine "what's worth reading."

He uses editing as a stick to beat blogs with, while admitting that he doesn't have a clue how to use editing to "separate the wheat from the chaff."

I don't care to argue with him about the value of editors. What I do take issue about is that he tried to shoehorn blogs into his article when it's clear that (lack of) editing isn't his problem. His problem is that he hasn't come to grips with the blog form, and he hasn't learned how to negotiate blogs as blog readers do.