Reason #11: You Think Web 2.0 Will Change Publishing

(I would have gotten to this eventually, but the timing is inspired by Meika.)

Web 2.0 is a wonderful, nebulous concept. It's a buzzword, a meme, a marketing gimmick, a catchcry, a call to arms, and yet it doesn't actually describe anything in particular. To programmers, it's an exciting way to build interactivity into websites, experiment with online communication and collaboration, and make nifty gadgets. To tweens, it's an awesome way to get stalked and to get busted puking into your mom's Beemer. To most humans, though, Web 2.0 finally delivers on some of the promise of the Internet that made you buy that first modem, back in nineteen fscking ninety-six.

Web 2.0 hacks, and the talentless masses who choke these channels with meaningless content, can pat themselves on the back now that Time has declared this river of shit the most powerful cultural force in existence. Dear god, now we're all watching each other poop, and rating it.

One thing Web 2.0 has done is bring us closer to Andy Warhol's prediction, and the metaphorical period of fame closer to a literal 15 minutes.

One thing Web 2.0 won't do, however, is put your words in a better order. There's only so much you can learn from sifting through garbage.

Every year or so some pundit declares the next technology to be a [some industry]-killer. POD, e-books, e-paper, Amazon.com, they were all supposed to have killed traditional publishing and bookselling by now, and we were all supposed to be sitting under healthy trees reading democratically-promoted writers on the one sheet of electronic paper, while flying cars whizzed by. But the dents made by these technologies are nothing compared to the impact of Dan Brown and JK Rowling alone. For every person who took a gamble on a POD author, or squinted through an e-book in the last five years, there are two kids and a high-school dropout who set foot in a bookstore for the first time to buy TDVC or Harry Potter and the Obvious Fantasy Reference.

POD, self publishing, e-books, Internet distribution - none of this is really new (not Web 2.0 new). Writers have always had the option of writing out more copies of their manuscripts to hand-bind and sell in the market. The only difference now is that e-books and POD make it a snap to reproduce the product, which means even the laziest writer (who manages to cobble together a first draft of some "experimental" fiction over decades of minimal effort) can become the sole proprietor of I Wrote This Myself Enterprises.

Because the barriers are lower, more shit flows. More books are published now than ever before, but quality hasn't improved. There's just more stuff in the middle, and much more stuff at the bottom.

Apart from experiments in interactive and collaborative fiction, Web 2.0 has meant nothing for how people write. Hell, we haven't even got an online or software thesaurus that beats reaching behind you for the battered copy of Roget's you bought in college. The cyber-fantasy of online, instant feedback and criticism is hampered by two obvious inertias:

• I can't be bothered reading your crap, let alone providing detailed constructive criticism; and
• Even if I did, you'd just get all huffy and tell me I'm wrong and too stupid to understand the deeper layers of puke below the crap.

And thus the dream of Web 2.0-driven fiction founders, on the rocks of obstinacy, continually dashed by waves of utter indifference.

So what does Web 2.0 mean for publishing? Not much. Publishing companies are big enough to absorb the shift to POD, when the quality of POD eventually rivals mass production. People still buy books for the same reasons, and how these books get in front of their eyes is less important than which books they choose - and they ain't choosing meika loofs samorzewski.