“You don’t choose to take up writing; writing chooses you.”
This is what British novelist of Ukrainian origin Marina Lewycka believes and I tend to agree with her.
Every time I would try to do something that did not involve writing, I would hear this voice in my head scolding me and reminding me of why I am here. Almost as if the purpose of my life were to report on everything I experience and what I believe in. For whom? As part of what? It is a mystery to me.
The future of written text is another mystery.
I gave a presentation at a conference in Paris last week and some of the questions I got were around this topic. Will text survive? Or will it be replaced by video and sound? For somebody who can hardly take pictures with her Blackberry (luckily I have colleagues who are better than me at operating a camera…); this is a truly frightening thought.
I was reflecting on this horrifying prospect during my train ride back from Paris, when I stumbled into the news of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer closing down after 146 years for lack of ad revenues and being replaced by a slimmed-down online version.
According to Deloitte, one out of every 10 print publications will have to reduce their frequency, go online or close down in 2009.
How will the post-print world look like?
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