Writing Boots

My dog Eddie is more curious than I am. —David Murray

When my sister and I stayed with them in the 1970s, my grandparents had a rule: No one was allowed turn on the TV without intention—without a show, whose time was known by memory or ascertained by flipping through the weekly published TV Guide, intentionally in mind. The nightly news, or “Barney Miller,” for instance. But no channel surfing, which they sensed, even before they had a remote control, was a bad impulse. My mother, their daughter, always called them “rigid.” So what? they might have wondered.

About 10 years later, in 1989, began a show on Sunday nights called “America’s Funniest Home Videos,” that showed a series of hilarious human slip-ups. Something like 25 million Americans watched it every Sunday night, for years on end. That show always felt like a guilty pleasure to me—and at least as much guilt as pleasure. Didn’t God make us for bigger things than watching one another walk into screen doors, and laughing? (Now who’s sounding rigid?)

A whole generation after all that, it’s “reels” through which we scroll, while high-tech algorithms—I shouldn’t even be allowed to type that word, having flunked out of high school Algebra II twice—let us waste our lives in agreeable ways.

My first boss, a wise philosopher of human communication named Larry Ragan, wrote half a century ago that people aren’t really very curious, but generally seek out more information on things they already know. The Irish want to know more about the Irish. Sports fans, sports. “Politics junkies”—as some people were called then (that’s all of us now)—politics. Our curiosity is limited in that way. We aren’t curious, we are curious adjacent.

That was a good thing for an editor and a writer to know. To get people to read about a new thing, we have to make that thing feel a little like their favorite old thing first. Fishing nuts will read about hunting, but not about ballet—unless maybe it’s a ballet dancer who also hunts. Or a ballet, set in an an enchanted forest …

The discovery of Larry’s principle by social media platform bosses has been a catastrophic thing. Because unlike writers, these creeps aren’t trying to share new things and stretch people’s minds. They’re trying to shrink them even more.

And they’re doing a hell of a good job, if you ask me.

And it’s a hell of a bad thing, for us.

Three years after we all learned about ChatGPT, two since most writers began to accept that it would become a part of our lives and one since many of us started using it in our work, one of my closest advisors from the speechwriting community calls bullshit on a pro-AI whitepaper my organization put out.

“Good writing depends on good thinking,” writes Jim Reische, special advisor for executive communication at Williams College. “And good thinking comes from doing work that the AI advocates claim is unstrategic: unworthy of our talents and limited, precious time.”

I and the Professional Speechwriters Association’s resident AI guru Brent Kerrigan join the fray—today, at ProRhetoric.com.