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| Too much talk for one planet: why I'm reducing my word emissions | Too much talk for one planet: why I'm reducing my word emissions |
| (about 17 hours later) | |
| Eagle-eyed readers may have spotted I haven't been writing this column for a while. Roughly two people noticed its absence, until the other day when a paragraph in Private Eye claimed I'd asked Alan Rusbridger, editor of the Guardian, to switch off the reader comments underneath my articles (not true), and that he'd refused to do so (also not true), so I'd quit (not entirely true). This led to an intense flurry of activity, by which I mean four people asked me about it. | Eagle-eyed readers may have spotted I haven't been writing this column for a while. Roughly two people noticed its absence, until the other day when a paragraph in Private Eye claimed I'd asked Alan Rusbridger, editor of the Guardian, to switch off the reader comments underneath my articles (not true), and that he'd refused to do so (also not true), so I'd quit (not entirely true). This led to an intense flurry of activity, by which I mean four people asked me about it. |
| Although the Private Eye story wasn't completely wrong – I have stopped doing this particular column for a while, for reasons I'll explain in a moment – I was all set to write to their letters page to whine in the most pompous manner imaginable, something I've always secretly wanted to do, when I figured I might as well respond here instead, for money. | Although the Private Eye story wasn't completely wrong – I have stopped doing this particular column for a while, for reasons I'll explain in a moment – I was all set to write to their letters page to whine in the most pompous manner imaginable, something I've always secretly wanted to do, when I figured I might as well respond here instead, for money. |
| Incidentally, I'm aware this is Olympic-level navel gazing, but you're a human being with free will who can stop reading any time. Here, have a full stop. And another. And another. There are exits all over this building. | Incidentally, I'm aware this is Olympic-level navel gazing, but you're a human being with free will who can stop reading any time. Here, have a full stop. And another. And another. There are exits all over this building. |
| Anyway, I haven't quit the newspaper, but I have, for the meantime, stopped writing weekly, partly because my overall workload was making that kind of timetable impossible, and partly because I've recently been overwhelmed by the sheer amount of jabber in the world: a vast cloud of blah I felt I was contributing to every seven days. | Anyway, I haven't quit the newspaper, but I have, for the meantime, stopped writing weekly, partly because my overall workload was making that kind of timetable impossible, and partly because I've recently been overwhelmed by the sheer amount of jabber in the world: a vast cloud of blah I felt I was contributing to every seven days. |
| If a weatherman misreads the national mood and cheerfully sieg-heils on BBC Breakfast at 8.45am, there'll be 86 outraged columns, 95 despairing blogs, half a million wry tweets and a rib-tickling pass-the-parcel Photoshop meme about it circulating by lunchtime. It happens every day. Every day, a billion instantly conjured words on any contemporaneous subject you can think of. Events and noise, events and noise; everything was starting to resemble nothing but events and noise. Firing more words into the middle of all that began to strike me as futile and unnecessary. I started to view myself as yet another factory mindlessly pumping carbon dioxide into a toxic sky. | If a weatherman misreads the national mood and cheerfully sieg-heils on BBC Breakfast at 8.45am, there'll be 86 outraged columns, 95 despairing blogs, half a million wry tweets and a rib-tickling pass-the-parcel Photoshop meme about it circulating by lunchtime. It happens every day. Every day, a billion instantly conjured words on any contemporaneous subject you can think of. Events and noise, events and noise; everything was starting to resemble nothing but events and noise. Firing more words into the middle of all that began to strike me as futile and unnecessary. I started to view myself as yet another factory mindlessly pumping carbon dioxide into a toxic sky. |
| This is perhaps not the ideal state of mind for someone writing a weekly column in a newspaper. Clearly it was time for a short break. | This is perhaps not the ideal state of mind for someone writing a weekly column in a newspaper. Clearly it was time for a short break. |
| Reader comments form part of the overall wordstorm described above, and it's true I'm not a huge fan of them, but that's chiefly because I'm an elderly man from the age of steam who clings irrationally to the outmoded belief that articles and letters pages should be kept separate, just like church and state. I guess conceptually I still think I'm writing in a "newspaper", even though the reality of what that means has changed beyond measure since I started doing it. So now I'm sitting grumpily in a spaceship with my arms folded, wearing a stovepipe hat. Ridiculous. | Reader comments form part of the overall wordstorm described above, and it's true I'm not a huge fan of them, but that's chiefly because I'm an elderly man from the age of steam who clings irrationally to the outmoded belief that articles and letters pages should be kept separate, just like church and state. I guess conceptually I still think I'm writing in a "newspaper", even though the reality of what that means has changed beyond measure since I started doing it. So now I'm sitting grumpily in a spaceship with my arms folded, wearing a stovepipe hat. Ridiculous. |
| These days most newspaper sites are geared towards encouraging interaction with the minuscule fraction of readers who bother to interact back, which is a pity because I'm selfishly uninterested in conducting any kind of meaningful dialogue with humankind in general. I'd say Twitter's better for back-and-forth discussion anyway, if you could be arsed with it. Yelling out the window at passersby is another option. | |
| When it comes to comments, despite not being as funny as I never was in the first place, I get an incredibly easy ride from passing wellwishers compared with any woman who dares write anything on the internet anywhere about anything at all, the ugly bitch, boo, go home bitch go home. Getting slagged off online is par for the course, and absorbing the odd bit of constructive criticism is character-building. The positive comments are more unsettling. Who needs to see typed applause accompanying an article? It's just weird. I don't get it. | When it comes to comments, despite not being as funny as I never was in the first place, I get an incredibly easy ride from passing wellwishers compared with any woman who dares write anything on the internet anywhere about anything at all, the ugly bitch, boo, go home bitch go home. Getting slagged off online is par for the course, and absorbing the odd bit of constructive criticism is character-building. The positive comments are more unsettling. Who needs to see typed applause accompanying an article? It's just weird. I don't get it. |
| But then right now I don't "get" most forms of communication. There's just so much of it. Everybody talking at once and all over each other; everyone on the planet typing words into their computers, for ever, like I'm doing now. I fail to see the point of roughly 98% of human communication at the moment, which indicates I need to stroll around somewhere quiet for a bit. | But then right now I don't "get" most forms of communication. There's just so much of it. Everybody talking at once and all over each other; everyone on the planet typing words into their computers, for ever, like I'm doing now. I fail to see the point of roughly 98% of human communication at the moment, which indicates I need to stroll around somewhere quiet for a bit. |
| After my break, and a rethink, I'll quietly return later in the year, to write something slightly different, slightly less regularly (probably fortnightly). In other words, I'm reducing my carbon emissions. And whatever the new thing I'm writing turns out to be, it'll appear both online, still accompanied by the requisite string of comments, and in the newspaper, which is a foldable thing made of paper, containing words and pictures, which catches fire easily and is sometimes left on trains. | After my break, and a rethink, I'll quietly return later in the year, to write something slightly different, slightly less regularly (probably fortnightly). In other words, I'm reducing my carbon emissions. And whatever the new thing I'm writing turns out to be, it'll appear both online, still accompanied by the requisite string of comments, and in the newspaper, which is a foldable thing made of paper, containing words and pictures, which catches fire easily and is sometimes left on trains. |
| Now get out. | Now get out. |