Un-Obsolete Yourself.

 

You can read the above here.

For about as long as I've been circling the sun and that's a lot of circling, people have been decrying the fact that "no one reads anymore." 

You can always find data that proves that point, and there's probably no time in history since Gutenberg was horsing around with his olive press that people weren't bemoaning the sorry state of human intelligence.

Of course, since we have a felon-in-chief who's never read a book outside of an Archie Double Digest and makes up history as it fits his racist invective, maybe it is truer now than ever before. In fact to be completely honest, a large portion of me believes that we do live in a dumbed down world. You only need to watch a TV show from the 1950s or 1960s, and you'll hear words and complex thoughts the likes of which are missing, almost completely, from public discourse today. There have been many times when I howled at the militarized moon and suggested that like the Romans of yore, we must have lead in our pipes leading to societal IQ-decline.

However, there's a counter-point out there, if you're looking for one. Kids might not know the state capitals like I did when I was ten. They might not be able to declaim Longfellow's "The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere." And while "only 14% of 13-year-olds read for fun 'almost every day', about half the figure in 2012," lamentations about communications technologies are as old as Cuneiform. Tom Wainwright, of the Economist writes,

Socrates disliked writing, arguing that the ability to write things down weakened the powers of memory....

Nearly a thousand years later, people were worried again, this time about a sinister new thing called the printing press.... Similar criticisms were made of the typewriter, invented at the end of the 19th century...One newspaper of the era opined that the typewriter 'destroys originality' and 'gives to everything that is written a mechanical touch'.

What's more, and back to kids, I'd say many of them on the other hand have a faculty for things which would have bleared my eyes back when amerikkka was a notional democracy. From computers, to software, to electronics they're way smarter than I was as a boy. And given the plethora of data in sports, they might also have a greater grasp of mathematics than I had. 

I think what we often overlook when assessing the relative intelligence of different generations is that we don't consider that those TV shows I enjoy from the 1950s were going to a much more rarefied audience than most shows do today. In the early days of television, for instance, the medium was almost wholly urban, white collar and college educated. It was a pretty select mass medium.

That digression aside, the Economist writes in the article pasted above,  

"People everywhere are sounding the alarm about a decline in reading. Parents struggle to cajole their children to pick up a book; professors despair that students cannot finish reading lists.... More than half of American adults say they have not read a single book for pleasure in the past year.

The panic is summed up in “The New Dark Ages”, a polemic by James Marriott, a bookish Times journalist... He rounds up the evidence that reading is in decline, placing most of the blame on smartphones, “predators of our attention”. “Dickens wrote in the reasonable belief that [his work] might be the most absorbing entertainment in your house—hence the average Dickens novel being about 800 pages...” 

Seeing as many readers in this space slog--maybe daily--through my writing, I can surmise they value the written word. For them, and for myself, perhaps there is some hope--and some not-to-be-overlooked value in what writers do--even if 'no one can read anymore.'

Maybe this is how writers--you and I--can market ourselves in a world that no longer values writing. 

The same Economist article says,  

...writing allowed cultures to “externalise” their thoughts, making way for more complex ideas and allowing them to be laid open to dissection... sophisticated mental processes, like logical reasoning and abstract categorisation, derive “not simply from thought itself but from text-formed thought”. Whereas oral delivery often employs a “backlooping” structure, the speaker rambling and repeating as they hone their argument on the go, writing allows for logically structured reasoning....

Let me repeat the above with "key words" highlighted. Key words that might persuade all those millions of clients and colleagues who say "nobody reads" of the importance of writing.

...writing allowed cultures to “externalise” their thoughts, making way for more complex ideas and allowing them to be laid open to dissection... sophisticated mental processes, like logical reasoning and abstract categorisation, derive “not simply from thought itself but from text-formed thought”. Whereas oral delivery often employs a “backlooping” structure, the speaker rambling and repeating as they hone their argument on the go, writing allows for logically structured reasoning....

In other words, it's writers who will help decipher (and make sense of) complex ideas. It's writers who will lay process and procedure open to dissection (so it can be understood.)

Here's an example from a zoom I had with my longest-running client not six hours ago. We were discussing an upcoming photo shoot of his technology, factory and offices.

CLIENT:       

The problem with shooting here is our factory isn't finished. It's kind of a mess. It doesn't look neat and architectural.

GEORGE:     
That's ok. That's good in fact. You're a science company, a technology company. Science and tech are never done, they're always improving and changing. If things are neat and tied up with a bow, that could imply that ​you're stagnant and not inventing.

CLIENT:       
Oh. You're right.

There might be a bit of ratiocination in the 98.7% genuine dialogue above. But that's ok. 

We might live in a post-reading, post-writing era. But cultures still need writing and the methodicalness of writing to "externalise their thoughts." To think things through with labor and intent not blurt and bombast.

I've had many conversations through the years with advertising writers I respect. Many of them do what I often do. Before we start with headlines, or TV spots or any other "content," we start writing about what we're trying to sell--what it does, how it's different, why it's better, why you need it.

We have a conversation via our keyboards with ourselves or a imaginary friend about what we're selling and why.

This is from Dominik Imseng's great book "Ugly is Only Skin-Deep." And this is how Bob Levenson, DDB's eventual copy-chief and Helmut Krone's third partner wrote about how he wrote.

In other words there's something about words. And the writing/thinking process that gets you to words that work.

Here's the obituary that DDB ran when B died.

Before we write an obituary for writing, it might make sense to read the writing in this obituary. 

It might remind us of our power. The power we have. The power we can use. The power no one, not holding companies, algorithms, or pomposticators can wrest from us.

To make it easier for you (and to repeat for emphasis):

I do not, cannot, will not, will never believe that jumping from facts into the realm of ideas is replaceable, machine-made-able, or will ever be obsolete.

Word.