Notes toward a theory of posting
Welcome to Reasonable Things, an occasional newsletter about music, language, and meaning from Joel Heng Hartse.
I've been thinking a lot lately about the triumph of "posting" when it comes to what used to be thought of as the vocation of writing. This is partly because the person who sort of inspired me to start this newsletter (whose name I will not mention other than to say it was a friend-of-a-friend and someone I had a distant acquantianceship with) seems to have moved their "writing career" away from things like books, essays, magazines, etc. and wholly shifted to the ecosystem of what I'll call "posting" -- that is, social media-driven "content" and the cultivation of "followers."
I also quit Twitter recently, and I'm trying to find ways to engage with the world of ideas in poublic via writing that doesn't involve social media. I'm not here to say that posting is 100% bad, but I'm trying to understand what it is and what makes it different from writing. What I ended up coming up with is below, but I will note that I probably should distinguish between writing as an action (which is absolutely part of posting) and writing as a vocation (which I see as fairly distinct from, if not opposed to, posting). I haven't done that yet, but I thought I'd share (post?) what I've got here.
Writing is a human* symbolic* meaning-making* process that involves mediating* language* with technology*.
(Note: All words with asterisks above can and should be defined with very long and tortured explanations. Maybe someday.)
(Also, I've tried to make this definition as expansive as I can, but I realize it is fuzzy. This would include songwriting if you've got a guitar and a fourtrack but don't actually put marks on paper to preserve what you've "written." It would not include "songwriting" if a song is made up using only the human voice. I reserve the right to change my mind.)
Posting is putting things on the internet in order to garner a reaction or cultivate a "following." Posting includes writing, but is not only writing. A person who writes things for social media platforms -- not just Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and the like, but also Medium, Substack, Blogger, and really anything that has "comments" and "followers," the ability to "re"-something (-post, -tweet, -blog, etc), is not primarily a writer, but a poster.
The immediacy of publication, the idea of a 'take' or a response, is paramount to posting.
The "content" of posting is more or less beside the point. Posting is about cultivating "engagement," or an audience for more posting. This is why "AI" is seen as important by people whose livelihoods involve posting, but is not welcomed by people who see their vocation as writing.
The practice of writing itself does not require an audience other than a putative Bakhtinian superaddressee - that is, a transcendant guarantor of meaning, even if that is only the faith the writer has in the intelligibility of his or her own writing. Posting requires "followers."
Writing and posting can both involve things like words, sentences, paragraphs, ideas, and arguments. But posting cannot be separated from its online ecosystem, whereas writing can function in any setting.
If "the writer's audience is always a fiction," then in posting it is urgently moreseo. A Poster tries to will their audience into being. Posting is for the audience, for the people, for the discourse. Even if there is no one reading.
Writing is a craft, posting is a performance.
That's all I've got for now. Let me know if you think it's worth talking about some more.
JHH
Burnaby, BC