The children loved L. Frank Baum’s stories of the tin man and the little girl and the lion but nobody would publish him. He saved up money and published his Wizard of Oz stories on his own. Same thing, Walt Whitman. Whitman’s Leaves of Grass were self-published.

In the past month or two I’ve been getting emails from vanity publishers enthusiastic to give me the opportunity to pay them to be published. It confused me a little. I’m already self-published. It’s still vanity of course; it’s just cheaper. It’s vanity on a shoe string budget.

Images are disposable. It used to be that pictures were taken, printed, put into important-looking books. They were tangible. They took up space. In 40 years time, what will children learn about their grandparents? Here’s a CD Rom of your grandparents. Only technology is the snake that eats its own tail and probably in 40 years CDRs will be as outmoded as the 8 track and besides that, CDRs don’t last 40 years. Maybe then: here’s a hard drive of a few thousand images of your grandparents. Only, well, like everybody with a brand new digital camera, it’s mostly pictures of ass and wang. Which makes me think that some enterprising company needs to start receiving CDs and Smart Disks and Flash cards to print the deluge of otherwise disposable images and put them in fancy looking archival quality books. More than a Lifetime Memories. Where Nostalgia Starts. Nostalgia Inc.

More people have cameras. More people are taking more pictures. But I still wonder what we are keeping for posterity.

It occurs to me that the same thing is happening with words and ideas. Everybody is self-published now. There are more than 10 000 blogs created every day. We have here a tall buzzing electric Tower of Babel. We’re all plugged in and talking. But it seems likely that in the eTower nobody in particular is listening. And more than that, where everybody is talking, nobody is taking notes. And quite unlike L. Frank Baum and Walt Whitman, all the voices – here’s mine too in the midst – are passing, transient, and yes, disposable.

Yes, perhaps after all, that’s a good thing. Ideas and speech ought to be an open market place. It would be hard to argue with that. Still, I expect it must be changing literacy. I wonder how many people read more blogs than books?

And if Shakespeare, if Walt Whitman, if L. Frank Baum were in their prime today, would they just be another voice, just another buzzing note in the pulsing cacophony of the eTower?

SS