“The medium, or process, of our time – electric technology – is reshaping and restructuring patterns of social interdependence and every aspect of our personal life.” Sound like it could have been in today’s paper? Maybe a squib on the internet about blogging or some other social media? In fact, it’s from the opening statement of a tiny book first published in 1967, a book responsible for widely popularizing its author’s name, and for taking viral one of the great aphorisms of the century. That book was The Medium is the Massage by Marshall McLuhan, a title that plays on McLuhan’s oft repeated phrase “the medium is the message” which first appeared in his 1951 book, The Mechanical Bride, was further examined in Understanding Media: the Extensions of Man (1964), and echoed again in The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962).

Long before Annie Hall and Wired’s declaration of him as its “patron saint”, McLuhan saw mankind as nomadic gatherers of information, craving more and more from the rapidly expanding and intrusive media. Seemingly an “over-night success” by the early 70s, McLuhan had in fact been writing about the media and its effects on content for nearly a quarter century before the world woke up to his enigmatic aphorisms and pronouncements.

And that’s where most of us reside today, about 25 years behind realizing what in fact is going on all around us.

On the door to my office, as it has been on all my office doors for the past 35 years, is another aphorism and constant reminder from a very different time and place: “The fish is often the last to notice the water in which it swims”. So, I try to begin each day by paying attention to what is swirling all around, much of it often hiding in plain sight. As the office computer began arriving in the late 80s to replace its predecessor, the “typeball” IBM Selectric, it quickly became apparent to many of us that something quite profound and innovative was taking place, something that was bringing a change to the way we worked together, our productivity and communications. In less than ten years during the 90s, typesetters virtually disappeared from most of print publishing as Macs and PCs helped publishers move first to digital editing and type, and then into many of the digital design functions as well. In both print publishing as well as the music business, it slashed production costs, improved operating incomes, and internalized and democratized a more connected process of work flow from author/musician, to editor, to production and distribution. That digital interconnectivity was to have a profound effect on writers and musicians, as well as their business models, as the internal office and production network began to emerge into a much larger world of interconnectivity: the internet.

An even more recent transformation along these lines has occurred in photography, a particular interest of mine. Much like what happened in music as it moved from record to tape to CD to download, giants of the camera and film industry like Kodak have been left behind as its business model continued to rely too heavily on its film technology. Now consumers are in complete control of the entire process; anyone can buy a cameras that can carry hundreds of digital images, which in turn can be downloaded onto laptops, corrected in a personal Photoshop program, printed on a home printer or downloaded over the internet to friends or websites. Once again, that interconnectivity in the digital work flow has begun to materially change how we regard photography, how it is used, and how it is becoming an entirely new art form, unique to this century.

Writing, music and photography, heavily influenced, modified and re-structured through their respective democratizing technology and digital world views, are all evolving along similar lines, though their outcomes will be dramatically different from anything even Marshall McLuhan might have imagined. In particular, writing and photography share many of the same creative concerns as their readers and viewers struggle with questions of what is the true nature of the reality contained within their respective arts. I hope to explore this comparison further in future entries.

Nonfiction begins with the disadvantage of being known and described as something that it is not: If you’re looking for fiction, “don’t look here” is the not-so-subtle message of this particular medium. Nonfiction’s history has always been about the dissidence between its grand illusion of narrative order and the reality it seeks to reveal, between the apparent logic, accuracy and connectivity of its reasoning and the information, knowledge and, ultimately, wisdom it wishes to impart.

In the last fifty years the nature, sources and inspiration of nonfiction have been undergoing a sea change. Adding to the issue have been the difficulties writers of nonfiction have had in adjusting to the increasing sources of nonfiction material that have opened up through the expansion of the internet. Early on, the growing surplus of data acted only as an overwhelming and annoying increase in volume. Without context, the data often had no direction or shape, thereby limiting its range of access to its natural extensions into meaning, knowledge and wisdom. About twenty years ago, Information Anxiety by Richard Saul Wurman, first gave voice to this issue, followed recently by Information Anxiety 2, which offers new insights into navigating this explosion of data.

But all the while that volume was growing exponentially, reaching into a worldwide range and depth unlike anything before in history. True, there’s a tremendous amount of pure junk out there – data static – and we’ve had to learn how to make wise choices. The downside of the proliferation of information can be a kind of paralysis of decision-making – what some have referred to as the tyranny of choice, also echoed in the groundbreaking book, The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less (Barry Schwartz), which brilliantly describes the daily volume of choices we all face in everything from gum to cable channels. One can be overwhelmed by a virtual tidal wave of choices in data and sources, far too numerous and beyond all reasonable expectation for the individual to have the time or expertise to adequately absorb, review, check for accuracy, or set in context. But if more information was becoming available, and more confusing to sort through, more people also were able to access a wider range of choices, giving birth to the flip side of that tyranny in the form of what James Surowiecki’s book of the same title refers to as The Wisdom of Crowds.

Out of this chaotic, fragmented, electronic cloud of limitless information is emerging a new kind of nonfiction. Some would have it that what we’re witnessing has more to do with fiction absorbing/crossing-dressing with the styles and characteristics of nonfiction. But fiction has been playing these kinds of games since as early as the 1850s with novels like Moby Dick, and in the last forty years with ground-breaking efforts like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. The real transformation, especially in the last twenty years, is in nonfiction, and its raison d’être comes out of a quest to carve sense out of that chaotic cloud, to make of it an art of the real that both defies the wall of data as well as embraces it as a wellspring of an entirely new creative form.

This new nonfiction is very much the predictable result of the window through which we often first enter the internet; namely, the website. Take a look at any website, and what do you see? Virtual “islands” of information – words, pictures, videos, sounds – floating on each page that we must somehow engage and piece together like a story in order to know or understand something. We don’t “read” these pages in a linear order, but rather find the links that make most sense. The designs of these sites all are studies in the engine of metaphor and the art of persuasion, but with their constituent parts floating unconnected. They aim at enticing us to actively pull together the connections between these islands, and at leading us to make individual choices of direction and understanding as we work our way through them. The experience of websites is both fluid and intuitive, structured and completely without rules or roadmaps. At their best, their architecture and structures are dynamic and nonlinear, creating new cognitive models that can actually enhance, or change our understanding. Their effect is one of gradual accumulation, a rolling up of information: a new kind of story put together, in part, by the reader.

When a poem begins in our heads, it usually does so with some kind of descriptive imagery, turn of phrase, or metaphor. It jumps out at us from nowhere, or, as is often the case, emerges directly out of something we hear or read. Contained within this initial material usually is the thought that soon will become the poem, though at this point most of us really aren’t aware of it or even where it’s taking us; the poem forms around these first seeds, gradually expanding and taking shape. We collaborate with the poem throughout, always taking turns controlling direction and losing control, adding balance and subtracting disarray to the body of thought. With each new word or phrase, the poem lurches in another direction, sending a message to the other words that new adjustments are require to the whole. The best comparison is a flock of birds constantly adjusting to unseen reasons for movement this way or that; possessing the illusion of collective wisdom, the grouping really is responding to new and subtle directions communicated from the outer edges of the flock. Similarly, the way a poem knows what it doesn’t know, and becomes what it does, comes only after it has arrived.

THE WAY A POEM KNOWS

Something about the way a poem knows,
something that keeps us reaching into it

from a place of dreaming not unlike this.
The poem calls and sets a path in the dark

and light fields of our belief. The poem sees
the truth in the telling is not revealed in what

it doesn’t know, but in finding itself
released like a stream from its knowing.

Something about the way a poem finds
its place in our hearts, something that finds

the truth of what is meant to be but harder
still to say. Something about a poem that asks

and answers, setting loose the slow riddle
of its voice, something it freely confesses

to knowing, like the clear thread of this thinking
about to discover the way a poem finds its end.