What is a Writer?

I am asked to write about what is a writer.   Well, we all write and have done so since the first cave paintings and rock engravings which are forms of writing as they involve representation.  Other kinds of writing involve Egyptian and other kinds of hieroglyphics, cuneiform and modern scripts.  Cuneiform has been dated to 5 500 years ago.  Scribes wrote it using a reed stylus cut to make a wedge-shaped mark on a clay tablet. This is where the modern hand-held computer tablet naming derives. In using cuneiform, the Sumerians enclosed letters, and literature such as the Epic of Gilgamesh in clay envelopes. This logo-syllabic writing system was common to several languages of the Ancient Near East, from the early Bronze Age until the beginning of the Common Era.

Writing enables one to think abstractly, to look for conceptual connections, and to document, imagine and predict. Even earlier than cuneiform, back to 40 000 years ago, was cave painting; thus, indicative of the first major conceptual leap of human intellect and religious thinking.  Writing on rocks and clay was the second leap as was writing on papyrus and then paper. The invention of the printing press in the mid-1400s was the third leap, as literature, like The Bible, could now be mass produced and disseminated much more widely, breaking the power of political and religious elites.  The printing press heralded the early onset of the later era that drove the mechanical analogue age from the 19th century. The recent entry of the digital era from the late 1980s was an outgrowth of computers, and like Guttenberg’s printing press, changed all that went previously.  Everyone now is a writer, on their phones, their tablets and laptops, paper, anywhere, anytime, all the time. The carbon cost is incalculable.  

Some suggest that the Internet enabled cacophony of blogs, posts and podcasts democratises information flow and connects everyone to everyone else.  My question, as a largely academic writer, is how does a reader/browser/consumer identify what is actually useful?  As Sunday Times columnist Yolia Mkele laments: “If only there was a filter … Maybe that criteria is a degree of some kind of verifiable qualification that tells the world that your words mean more than a dung beetle rolling a ball of Twitter pins down the hill”. The great Italian philosopher of language, a novelist also, Umberto Eco talked about the need for silence, for less publication, but more selective selection. 

As an academic writer, my aim is to shape my field of research, to address my students, peers and policy makers, to improve the world.  But academics often just write for themselves, for career purposes. They rarely write for readers, in fact, some even fear them. Readers sometimes write back in letters to the editor, questioning what has been written. As a columnist, my aim is to tilt mischievously at windmills in asking pertinent questions of politicians, bureaucrats and administrators.  That’s the strength of the Daily Maverick, though sometimes its columnists do go off the rails.  As a graduate student I had to write narrowly for my examiners. Many ordinary people, as do some academics wanting freedom from instrumentalism and methodological restrictions, write self-published books.  Like the Super 8 home movies studied by visual anthropologists during the 1970s, such books contain a wealth of social data useful for study in examining cultures, ways of making sense, and forms of representation. For example, my neighbour in a retirement complex published a lavishly illustrated coffee table book on his family’s history and himself – The Traders.  The story of the Robinson Family (2022).  This from a hard-headed businessman whose story I could not possibly have anticipated.  During the apartheid years Colin Robinson had worked voluntarily with the SA Council of Churches, cleaning up its appalling bookkeeping. In the process the author got to know and work with some icons of the struggle, Frank Chikane, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Beyers Naude, amongst others.   A second strand of this family narrative is what happened to the pioneering Solly Kramer liquor chain, at which he had worked also. I had always wondered where old Solly had gone. Solly did for liquor retailing what Raymond Ackerman did for supermarkets and Dion Friedland for electronic goods.   Robinson now heads up Ultra Liquors that morphed out of Solly. 

When I visit Kalahari communities they tend to write in the sand, paint on small rocks and paper.  They read the sand also.  It reveals all sorts of useful information, like the whereabouts of that pesky snake, who passed by last night and what food might be within reach, whether moving above ground or concealed under it.  We are all literate, often in different ways, and we are always reading and writing, whether or not we can actually write.

How we read or write is the issue.  Do writers get beyond the superficial Tik Tok celebrations, and into the deeper issues?  The Egyptians did.  The Sumerians did. The bait that hunters might use for survival has now become the button pushing clickbait that ensnares us instead. Our Internet writings are captured and commoditized by advertisers, algorithms and analytic firms, all extracting their pounds of flesh.  Our work is sold on down the line whether we like it or not.

Where once some forms of writing and reading freed us from superstition, now we have perhaps returned to such a diminished state of consciousness, seeing conspiracies everywhere, and not being able to tell the difference between real and fake news.  Donald Trump and Elon Musk have turned social media into right wing fantasies, You Tube is a visual smorgasbord of confusing, contradictory de-contextualised garbage, while Tik Tok replaces the tame home movies made during the 8mm era, when families were the audiences.  Now everyone is a voyeuristic spectator, captured by salacious images, tempting captions and ephemeral promises of the shocking, the taboo and the previously censored.  Behind the avatars, the fake identities and the predators are writers looking to ensnare, to harm and to exploit. 

Previous writers of The Bible, the Koran, the Gita, of science and philosophy Cicero, Aristotle, Plato, and of great literature like Shakespeare, Milton and TS Eliot, Camoes, and Sol Plaatje, wrote to enlighten, not to hurt.  Science fiction writers like Arthur C Clarke, Jules Verne, HG Wells and Isaac Asimov fed us glimpses of the future, some of which have since come to pass. Yet Zuckerberg’s metaverse, a name (mis)-appropriated from a novelist, Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash (1992), ensnares writers, users and bloggers into a commercialized framework from which one cannot escape, having once posted something.   

Which writers will prevail once the human species makes itself extinct?  It will be the ancient societies that wrote on, painted and engraved rocks and clay, as modern-day writing is now mainly virtual. It does not exist except as electrons, stored on hard drives and the cloud, which will disappear in an instant when the end of days comes.   All that the archaeologists of the future will find will be the ever-enduring glyphs of the ancient civilizations that built everlasting monuments in stone.   Civilizations come and go. Early stone writing might endure.  The contemporary record will be gone forever.

Why the pessimism?  Well, good writers write about big issues.  Bad writers write about the inconsequential.  Mkele laments that the information superhighway is “now riddled with potholes, unexploded ordinance and inane arguments” – untrustworthy nonsense.