Date: Fri, 9 Sep 1994 01:07:01 PDT
From: CuD Moderators <cudigest@mindvox.phantom.com>
Subject: File 4--The Process of Writing a Cybercolumn (Robert Rossney Reprint)

((MODERATORS' NOTE:  In CuD 6.79, we wrote of a cyber-death watch (in
The Well's News conference, topic 1581), which included summaries of
two media stories of the event.  We suggested that the media missed
the real story. One media piece, a column by Robert Rossney, which
appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, also drew some criticism on
The Well.  In response, Rossney wrote a description of the genesis of
his column, explaining the process by which an event is framed and how
editorial and other constraints shape the final product.

As critics of much of the media depiction of cyberspace, we often
comment unfavorably on much that appears in the media.  Som
commentators are hopelessly uninformed, others opt for shameless
sensationalism, and a few are competent writers who usually do a
decent job in spite of the requisites of their medium that influence
what ultimately appears in print. Rossney's commentary reminds us that
even experienced writers are not always able to frame stories as the
wish, and that the writing process requires a number of personal
choices and confrontation of a variety of administrative obstacles (as
his summary of the rejection of a proposed story on CuD archivis
Brendan Kehoe illustrates). The following reminds us that writing is
damned hard work, especially for conveying the complexities of
cyberspace to a general audience. The post originally appeared
on The Well in Media/833))
                              ==========

 Let me tell you all how this column came about.  If you're already bored
 with this topic, don't read this response; you'll be REALLY bored by the
 time you get to the end.

                                   * * *

 One of the things that I am trying to do in my column is to cover what
 goes on online as though the online world were an actual society with
 an actual culture.  A society full of real people having real experiences,
 even if they share those experiences through the written word.

 In particular, I want to illuminate something for those readers who are NOT
 online:  however technogeeky and insubstantial and weird the world they
 might have heard about from less brilliant and informed sources than little
 me, it is, nonetheless, vital and human.

 I thought this story fit in to these broader objectives pretty well.  Here
 we have a pivotal life event -- the leaving of it -- and it's causing
 ripples to travel through this new and strange context.  What happened
 in news 1581 struck me then, and strikes me still, as a perfect example
 of the making-it-up-as-we-go-along quality, the dreaded "co-creation,"
 that has made the online world such an exciting and fascinating place
 to hang over the last dozen or so years.

 The keyword here is ONLINE.  It may have escaped notice in all the hooraw
 here, but that's the name of the column.  I write about stuff that happens
 ONLINE.  That's my mandate.  Keep this in mind; it will be important
 later on.

                                   * * *

 Now, I had a political problem to struggle with.  About six months ago,
 I wrote a piece about Brendan Kehoe.  I thought it was remarkable and
 touching that you could find the story of his catastrophic accident
 everywhere on the net, and that his coworkers had set up a .plan for
 people to finger so that they could track changes in his condition.

 My editor killed it.  Said it was "too depressing."

 Well, here I had another story that I really wanted to cover, only it was
about something even more depressing, something that ended with an actual
 dead person at the end.  Plus it happened on the WELL.  I try very hard to
 avoid writing about the WELL too much; it would be easy to slip into
 omphaloskepsis and end up being boring and parochial
 All of that was true, but the story I was watching happen was, from the
 perspective that I described above, too good to pass up.
 Fortunately, the WELL is famous at the moment.  A piece in the Washington
 Post, a blurb in Time magazine, and now I had something that outweighed
 the depression quotient, as far as the people standing between me an
 the newspaper were concerned:  a breaking story that had been covered by
 someone else.  It was this that gave me the handle to get it into the
 paper.

                                   * * *

 At this point, I had two other problems to deal with.  The first was that
 the obvious way to write this piece was dead wrong.  The obvious way i
 the inspirational and uplifting story of the good people that all pulled
 together and supported kj, each in his or her way, in her final days.
 A COMMUNITY RALLIES IN THE FACE OF DEATH.
 There were at least four things wrong with this angle.

 First, it wasn't the whole story.  There were MANY other currents going
 on besides that one:  there was the flaming, and the blank postings, and
 the poetry, and all the other things that people were doing that ha
 nothing at all to do with bringing aid and comfort to a dying woman.

 Second, it wasn't what was happening online.  What people that followed
 this story online saw was how the direct, physical, offline community
 response, the one that actually meant something to kj, was described
 after the fact by tigereye and ralf and others.  The act of going t
 someone's deathbed and offering aid and comfort is one thing; the act
 of coming back from someone's deathbed and bearing witness is another.
 It was the latter act that was occurring online.  This is a troublesome
 distinction, and I'll revisit it in a bit
 The third problem with writing that story is that it could not help but
 sentimentalize kj.  Now, kj and I loathed one another.  I thought she was
 unprincipled on her good days and batshit crazy on her bad ones.  I don'
 know exactly what she thought of me, but I'd bet folding money it wasn't
 good.
 Nonetheless, however much I disliked kj, I didn't dislike her enough to
 write a warm piece about the glowing positive energy that coalesced about
 her in her final days.  I found the idea distasteful, and I bet she would
 have too.  Whatever else I can say about her, she was about the most
 fundamentally unsentimental person I ever met.  I wasn't going to dishono
 that
 The fourth problem is that such a piece would be predictable and boring.

                                   * * *

 The approach I adopted instead was doomed from the start:  ethnography.
 Take a complex society and pull apart one of its rituals, examining ho
 the different consituents of the society participate in it and respond to
 one another.  The traditional ethnographic essay, like, say, Clifford
 Geertz's "Deep Play:  Notes on the Balinese Cockfight" or "Thick Descrip-
 tion," is about forty pages long.  I had eight hundred words.  Also, I
 am not Clifford Geertz
 Nonetheless, it's a way of thinking that I'm comfortable with, and so I
 set to work.  I discarded obvious aberrations, like <xxxxx>'s appalling
response.  (If you're looking for something in that topic that I actually
 disapproved of, that's it.)

 I read through the topic three or four times, cataloguing the major
 divisions that the responses seemed to fall into.  I came up with ways
 to characterize these divisions that I thought would make sense to the
 readers.  (Remember them?)  And I decided that, in accordance with th
 kind of analysis that I was trying to do, I needed to adopt a detached
 tone.
 When I was done with this, I sat back to figure out what I thought about
 the whole thing.  There were a couple of ideas that I explored and then
 abandoned.
 One was the idea that kj was, essentially, a placeholder for the
 proceedings.

 This wasn't at all true for what was going on offline, and it wasn'
 completely true for what was going on online either, but there was
 substance to the idea nonetheless:  it was very clear to me that many
 of the people who were responding -- and, I guessed, the vast majority of
 those who were reading -- had only the vaguest idea who kj was.
 It could have been me, or you, who was dying, and while the topic would
 be completely different it would still have a lot of people in it who
 posted "I didn't know rbr, but I find this incredibly moving.
 I didn't like this idea because there were many, many counterexamples, and
 the counterexamples were some of the most interesting and affecting stuf
 that was happening in the topic.  So I dropped it.

 Another idea that I rejected was the notion that there was a lot o
 grandstanding going on.  This had been my impression the first time through
 the topic.  I felt that here was a place where people came to talk about
 their feelings, and that the will to attention that drives most of us to
 post led people to rage against the dying of the light a little too loudly
 and too long.  It seemed to me that people were preening their sensitivity.

 But on rereading the topic the three or four times I did, I found that
 this idea just didn't hold up.  Read carefully, the topic looked much
 less facile than it had when I was skimming over the new postings every
 day.  Even the strange sunflower thread, which I had thought was pretty
 ridiculous the first time through, proved to have a great deal more integ-
 rity than I had originally thought.

                                   * * *

 The only idea that I came up with that seemed to be solid came out of
 the fact that there were so many different kinds of responses to kj's
 dying.
 Some, like the blank postings, were all but totally opaque.  There was
 selflessness to be found, and self-centeredness.  There was a certai
 amount of shock and despair.  There were people who were inarticulate and
 people who were glib.

 This was, essentially, much like any other topic online:  full of the chaos
 that attends a group of independent minds who are far from unanimity.  And
 it was a topic that didn't have the we've-all-done-this-before character
 that many topics that we see tend to develop
 Because we HAVEN'T all done this before.  Only three WELL users have made
 their deaths known to the WELL over the last ten years.  This is a ne
 world for us here.  We haven't yet developed the language that we'll be
 using when it happens for the tenth or twentieth time.  We're stil
 figuring out what to say.  No clear picture of the right way to respond
 emerged from this topic.

 So that was my handle for the column:  bewilderment
 And at this point, I think you can see how it goes together and why.
 Graf 1:  the note that convinces my editor not to kill it.  Grafs 2-4:
 Americans aren't good at dealing with death.  Everything up to th
 conclusion:  here's the story, emphasis on the contradictory ways
 that people online are learning to deal with death.  Conclusion:  this
 kind of response is new right now, but ten years from now as people
 develop more familiarity with it we will see traditions emerge.

 There was some careless stuff in there that I regret.  I wish I'd gotte
 the numbers right; that was just dumb.  The bit about "stammering inco-
 herently in the face of the void" is cute, but it was dumb too.  I coul
 have avoided using "peculiar" twice.  But really, I've done lots worse,
 and I don't know any columnist who hasn't
                                   * * *

 Now, for the last week I've had to listen to a lot of remarkable stuff.
(Not all of it came from people who disagreed with me, either.  A number
 of comments, like chuck's and humdog's, were, while supportive, utterly
 baffling to me.  I still can't see how someone can read this column and
 come away from it with a sense of who kj was, except insofar as th
 column is unsentimental and so was she.  It wasn't *about* kj.)
 Mostly, the negative response here just makes me uncomfortable.  Not that
 people would disagree with Lofty Me, but that people could find something
 to disagree with in a column so utterly flensed of actual opinion.  By the
 time I was done with this column, about the only opinion that I still had
 about news 1581 was that xxxxx's response was really creepy.  (And it
 really is.  "I'm so sorry you're dying, you're one of the few people that
 backs me up."  There's a fucking comfort to the afflicted for you.)

 Most of tigereye's ire, I think, comes from a fundamental difference of
 perspective.  Her interest lies, as it ought to, with the dozens of people
 who provided aid and comfort to kj, and she's concerned that their story
 not be shortchanged.  I don't disagree with that.

 But I was telling a different story.  My story was about what happene
 online.  That's my *job*.

The grim truth is that the only reason kj's death appeared in the paper
 at all is the online developments that accompanied it.  I think that'
 pretty stark, and if kj had been my friend it would make me bitter,
 but it's true.  The REAL story, the one that was happening in real life
 24 hours a day and not just when the reporters were logged in, that story
 never saw print, and probably never will
 From my perspective as a cog in the media machine, I'm standing pretty
 firm.  I had good reasons for choosing this story in the first place,
 good reasons for taking the approach to it that I did, I described what I
 saw accurately and fairly, and I drew my audience towards an overall
 sensibility that I think is good for us all.  Apart from one factua
 inaccuracy, and a certain walking-on-eggshells tone that I couldn't get
 rid of, I'm not unhappy with it.

 I sure am tired of hearing about it, though.