PressEthic

Last year, an American print-on-demand books supplier called Lulu(www.lulu.com) released a rather startling report about a recent trend in the publishing industry; the number of Americans who publish a book will outnumber those who read one (per year) in 2052. The company dubbed it an “authorgeddon.”

I don’t like numbers, so I’m not going to bore you with the company’s statistics here. After all, it might as well be just another press info that’s more akin to an ad than to a proper “statistical” figure.

I don’t think it’s a very clever coinage, either, and there are few things as annoying as dumb coinages in the world.

However, it suggests something dismal about the malaise of our times, which is an obsessive and excessive impulse to express oneself. Thanks to the internet and the technological advance which has made self-publishing quite affordable for everyone who’s willing, we have come to dwell on a planet full of big talkers.

Is it democracy? If so, is democracy always a progress? We can’t talk while we listen, and can’t listen while we talk. We can’t write while we read, and can’t read while we write. A planet full of talkers means a planet with few, or fewer, listeners. A planet full of writers means a planet with few, or fewer, readers. Mass as a passice audience in a traditional sense is extinct.

Now, let's broaden our topic a little bit here.

Blogging, I believe, is a new form of self-publishing of our era.

I love and hate blogging. I run a personal blog which everyday draws about 40 to 60 people, all of whom are my pals and kin. I’m addicted to it, partly because it allows me a psychological breathing room where I don’t have to think and speak in a foreign tongue but in my own at the end of each day and more importantly (and frankly) because I simply love to chat.

Yet there’s another me watching me chatting over the internet, with grave discontent.

My impulse to tell my story scares me somehow. I’m actively forming the faceless, nameless, shameless mass. I’m making the earth noisier than it should be. I’m adding nonsense.

Forget it. It’s perhaps because I was raised in a Confucian society where talking much about oneself is almost considered as an ill manner, if not a sign of immaturity. (Talking TOO much is a sin worse than being fat.)

Where am I leading you? Nowhere, as always. (See? I just added nonsense, by blogging, once again right here, seriously.)