A cyberspace hero is something to be.
The occasional bursting of dot-com bubbles influences the way society views those
who earn their living from internet related work, and I suppose that even in the
best of times the status hierarchy places the content provider considerably below
the programmer, or even the designer. Be that as it may, there's still at least
a bit of cultural status attached to writing for the web, status that has perhaps
increased in these blog-intensive times. After all, the readership for books,
so we're told, is on the decline, and as fewer and fewer people actually read
books, the percentage of reading that takes place on the web increases in relation
to the percentage of overall reading. With more people reading web sites, there's
bound to be an increase in the status of those who provide the content.
On the other hand, blogs are considerably cheaper than a dime a dozen, meaning
that though someone may be momentarily impressed by the fact that you've written
tens of thousands of words that are accessible on the web, that positive impression
deteriorates with the arrival of each new fad, gets transferred to some new cultural icon, rather
quickly. It's hardly comforting that the status of the book-author as cultural
hero is also on the decline. But books are physical objects that can be displayed
on a shelf and admired as an achievement. What's more, even people who have
little knowledge of the process of book production understand that it's a multi-step
process, and that, in addition to the writing there's also editing and publishing
and distribution. These numerous steps facilitate
a process via which a book becomes recognized as a valid cultural artifact, via
which it earns a seal of approval. Unlike a web site that can be viewed as a personal
conceit, a product that doesn't require any outside authorization in order to
be "published", a book, simply because it's been published and distributed,
has earned a certain degree of validation as
a cultural artifact.
Go to: Why don't you write a book?