Lost in all the hoopla surrounding former President Donald J. Trump being banned from Facebook for two years is the news that his blog and website are kaput after 29 days. As a blogger myself, I was more than intrigued by this. Apparently, it was due to lack of interest on the part of the public. But could it also be that domain contracts, like prenups, have shelf lives? Maybe 30 days was the free trial.
But back to the blog itself: Why didn’t Trump’s millions of Twitter followers migrate over there? Perhaps they were more inured in Trump’s “haikus” to make the leap to the longer form. Or maybe Trump realized that doing a blog requires actual writing. (This reminds me of the old Woody Allen line about the woman who was tragically forced to give up the violin when she realized it meant actually studying the violin.)
Trump has had ghost writers before. He could’ve hired some poor, bedraggled intern for the job. But I suppose the reality of being a blogger, a writer, simply proved too ego-deflating. Writing — indeed all language — is organized in time. It takes longer to speak — and certainly to write and read — than it does to look at an image. If it didn’t, a picture wouldn’t be worth the proverbial thousand words. But time is the great enemy of our adolescent culture, which so fears aging and death. We live in what the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. called “the fierce urgency of now.” And yet, anything great in life — an education, a career, a marriage, a friendship, a stock portfolio and, yes, writing — requires the time to develop it.
But our digital age, the internet itself, is a threat to that development. It has the potential to destroy our reading concentration and thus comprehension and most surely our ability to write. Consider texting, which is all Twitter is. It’s supposed to be a great way to communicate personally, so short and sweet. But how is it faster than picking up a phone and making a call on speaker while you do something else? Oh, it’s great, people say, when you just want to leave a simple message like “See you at 5.” But couldn’t you say or leave that on the phone?
No, the real purpose of all social media is to serve as an advertising gimmick that gains eyeballs. Look at me, I can tweet. I can use emojis. Notice me. Like me. Friend me. It’s a beast that must be constantly fed.
It requires — in the parlance of the day — “content.” What it does not require is word choice, sentence structure, grammar, spelling and punctuation — in other words, the elements of writing. This is, of course, fine for those who know and will continue to use these elements. Then social media is merely a vehicle, like the washing machine, although without the emotional independence of the washing machine.
But for the unformed and uninformed generations that spell Saks Fifth Avenue “Sacks,” this is not an encouraging development. So when Naomi Osaka informed French Open officials that she was bowing out due to mental health issues, she did so in a “Hi, everyone” Instagram screed in which it was clear that she has not absorbed the idea of the paragraph key being her friend.
That may be understandable for an anguished 23 year old, pouring out her heart — although I suspect that French Open officials are more the monogrammed, heavy stock stationery types. When our ignorant internet age becomes dangerous to democracy, however, is when the publishing world dumbs down, because that’s the only way it can stay relevant and financially afloat. Instead of educating people to more sophisticated, nuanced writing and reading, we’re forcing the sophisticated writers and readers to level the playing field. That makes as much sense as injecting healthy people with cancer cells so sick people won’t feel bad.
Fortunately, there are still places where writing does matter, even if it’s given the communist-dreary name “content,” and that’s in books, magazines, newspapers and newsletters in which editors choose to exert control. (Social media could use editors rather than censors, but, of course, that would require paying them money, and no one in this country thinks writing and editing are worth big bucks.)
The other area in which actual “content’ is necessary is on a blog, which is nothing more than the digital equivalent of the old newspaper column. For that, you really have to be able to write. When I first heard Trump was doing a blog, I knew it wouldn’t last, because blogging, like all writing, requires applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair — having something to say, the ability to say it and the desire to refine it. This isn’t about lack of interest on the part of former El Presidente’s followers, who have demonstrated that they will follow him anywhere, including into the hell of Jan. 6.
This is about lack of interest on his part. but then I’ve always suspected he’s more of a long-form guy. Perhaps like Papa Hemingway, he could get up early in the morning and start pounding the keyboard, waxing poetic about the snows of Kilimanjaro.
As those digital denizens who spell Saks “Sacks” like to say — LOL.