Writing and Money

Research Question: How does the constant evolution of technology and the growing importance of the attention economy affect the way copy-editors are doing their work? 

Rest of the Proposal: I’m mostly interested in how copy-editing software will affect the way copy editors work, or even affect the usefulness of having a copy editor? Software like grammarly, Autocrit, After the Deadline are probably not as efficient as a pair of human eyes looking at a piece of writing. However, technology is always changing, so is it possible that editing software will become more efficient over time, to the point where copy editors are no longer needed. Aside from that, editing software offers a much quicker result than a copy editor. Could you feed a computer a bunch of current reading material and have them adjust a new piece of writing based on the current state of English?

We’ve talked a lot about the changes technology has brought about in the economy. Copy editors are an important part of the information economy, as they make sure that the writing that passes through them is put out in the most comprehensible manner possible. There’s also the fact that in a world where new information is constantly being put out into the world, publishers have to keep up with each other in their attempt to monopolize someone’s attention for even a second. In that case, how is technology helpful to them? 

As for methods, an interview will be helpful in understanding how copy-editors feel about their work. Meanwhile, getting a copy of their edited manuscripts might be helpful in seeing how their work operates? Observations might be more difficult because it requires me watching them edit and that’s a bit too close for comfort, as well as probably unhelpful. I know what copyediting looks like, I’m more concerned about their opinions really. Copy-editing is very personal to a person as well, so I’m also interested in seeing how one manuscript might differ from another. Now all I need to do is ask one to be my interviewee. Great fun for a person with social anxiety.  

Questions: 

What kind of work does a copy-writer do?

What does a typical work day look like for you?

How has your work changed over the years?

How much work do you do in a day (hourly work)?

How many pieces of writing would you get through in a day or a week or a month? How has that changed over the years?

Has technology played any role in how you do your work?

Are there specific technologies that might’ve made a difference?

How does seniority/experience affect what you write about?

I don’t know how to feel. Very conflicted, currently. Nakamura tackles the plight of “volunteer community managers” (1), who deal with some intense backlash in addition to unpaid labor. The author doesn’t really offer a solution, but that’s understandable considering it’s a rather short article. The volunteers fight back against misogyny, racism, and other forms of prejudice, and are often comprised of marginalized peoples fighting for their own rights. However, they often come under fire for trying to dictate what other people say, and have been accused of being sexist, “pc”, and in favor of censorship (6). As Nakamura states, this is a form of “unwanted labor” to many people (6), or a labor that is trivialized and hated by many others in the community. I don’t know the ins and outs of social media economies, but I was certain that at least some platforms do offer an income through ad revenue. Even with places like Tumblr, which I have experienced and can confirm ad revenue isn’t really a thing, you can link to a Ko-fi or a Patreon, which allow your fans to give you money directly. It’s actually reminiscent of a job of an artist or creative writer. That being said, that income is incredibly unstable, but then, so is the income of many creative people. I think I’d have to do more research to fully understand the issue here. Is it the abuse? The hours spent? The fact that the platforms are profiting off of them? Are these the reasons they should be acknowledged as a work force? Nakamura seems more focused on the way these workers are affecting the economy right now rather than a call to action. The article seems to intend to inform. One thing that had initially confused me was the concept of reproductive labor, simply because it hadn’t been defined. I looked it up and apparently reproductive labor just refers to “unpaid activities that reproduce the workforce” (Exploring Economics). I suppose the thing reproductive labor and the these feminists have in common is the idea of the labor being unpaid and feminized (3). On top of that, both are also undervalued. Perhaps that’s Nakamura’s goal: To have people value this workforce more? I am of the opinion that call out culture can get pretty toxic itself, and a lot of people tend to spread misinformation to further their cause, but it’s also held a lot of horrible people accountable for their actions. I’m not sure if posting a twitter thread is such hard work, but I do think a lot of youtubers and certain bloggers put a lot of effort and research into their contributions. I also think it’s a lot easier for them to be compensated with the rise of platforms like Patreon and Ko-fi. I’m not sure when this article was written, but I’m guessing by the use of certain hashtags, it was around 2013-15. Patreon and Ko-fi would’ve been founded by then but I’m not sure if they were very popular at the time. In any case, it’s been 5-7 years and a lot of things have changed in that time. I’m rambling now so I’ll stop. The purpose was a bit confusing but the ideas were well realized. I just don’t know many people who are volunteer community managers full-time? At least not in the case of Tumblr or Twitter. Youtube, Instagram, etc. are a bit different.

“Reproductive Labour and Care.” Exploring Economics, http://www.exploring-economics.org/en/discover/reproductive-labour-and-care/.

1. Fake news is starting to become a potential topic to look into. There’s always a person behind a fake article, and there must be a reason that they’re willing to compromise their integrity for their job. I keep coming back to Mc Millan Cottom’s “Education Gospel”, because I think it can be applied to a lot of other industries as well. A lot of people hate the idea of being attached to money. At the same time, “a good job” is the goal for most people. And with writing becoming more of a high stakes industry, this is forcing many journalists to write for the sake of the company rather than some lofty idea of truth. I remember a twitter thread from a long time ago that spoke on the corruption within the news industry, and how certain individuals would be forced to write things in order to keep their jobs (it was something about supporting due process).
2. To what extent, are reporters forced to sacrifice their integrity for the sake of surviving within the news industry? Are there differences between a local news outlet vs a national one?
3. I’d probably do two interviews, one with a local news reporter, the other hopefully with a national news reporter. I’d also like to look into their articles and compare the two. I have no idea what an observation would look like, but that might be pretty insightful.

I already do a lot of writing for other people, be it friends or family members. They’re often emails or academic papers, and I usually have to take into account the other person’s audience, as well as their own personality and writing style, particularly if their audience is already somewhat acquainted with their style. It can be difficult to successfully translate their thoughts onto paper, especially when those thoughts are very personal to them. Resumes can be especially challenging, because the audience is so important, but I also need to remember to represent the person I’m writing as. Mediation is a part of communication, and being able to transfer ideas to understandable texts is one of the most important parts of writing.

In “Writing for a Living” Brandt examines the effects of the knowledge economy upon writing. Specifically, she looks at how having texts be commercialized raises the stakes for writers. The concept of a knowledge economy was interesting, if only because it reminded me of Lanham’s attention economy. From what I gathered, a knowledge economy arises when knowledge surpasses the value of other common assets (land, money, etc.). Since knowledge-intensive companies have accounted for about “40% of new economical growth” (166), Brandt makes the claim that we have recently crossed the threshold from whatever our previous economy was. I would’ve liked to know more about how our current economy compared to the economy of the past, but I suppose it wasn’t really the focus of this article.

As a writer myself, I definitely identified with the idea of the high stakes environment that follows writing. I’m not sure if it’s such a new conflict, however, since writers would often come under scrutiny in the past for writing something controversial. Perhaps I missed something there. I’m sure that, since I’ve never engaged in company writing, I might have some gaps in my own knowledge. The comparison of writers to tools was another thing that caught my attention. On page 176, Brandt writes that, “workplace writers can be likened to complex pieces of machinery that turn raw materials.” I think, traditionally, writing (and any art form really) has been seen as a very human profession, as it requires a lot of emotional and mental input, but there is certainly something mechanical in the texts that companies may put out. Especially within the process of having the text be published. As Brandt says, a single press release might have to go through a multitude of other people before it can even reach a news outlet. All around, this was an interesting reading, even if it was a bit dense in places. I liked the diagrams. It certainly put into perspective my possible career choices.

At my old college, we used to get messages from random faculty members telling us to make use of tutoring resources, or to not park in the street, that sort of thing. However, since we’re all encouraged to be as professional as possible, they had to be polite about it as well. I think what really made these emails come off as passive-aggressive was the punctuation. So many exclamation points, but the phrasing itself was very polite.

A more specific example would be when a professor asked as to refer to them as professor within emails and within the classroom. I don’t mind professors wanting to be called by their title, because they earned it. However, there’s something passive-aggressive about class-wide or campus-wide emails in response to a few isolated incidents. They also made it out into a behaviorist thing, where they were saving us from this awful habit.

Artifacts: Jessie J “Price Tag”, Tori Kelly “”Unbreakable Smile”

For my first project, I’m planning on creating a CD pamphlet/literary magazine hybrid through Canva (not to be confused with Canvas. I currently have around 500 words of it written and 3 pages of my CD pamphlet/literary magazine hybrid completed. And in case you’re wondering, the hybrid is due to the fact that I’m dealing with several music artifacts and added a bit of an anecdote about my own experiences in the beginning as a sort of Editor’s letter. Below, I will attach a link to the hybrid, and then the actual words in more of an essay format so it’s easier to read. This is mostly just word vomit so bare with me.

https://www.canva.com/design/DAD0NiGc3cY/FCy-9hlMxtz-rCiAAOgifw/view?utm_content=DAD0NiGc3cY&utm_campaign=designshare&utm_medium=link&utm_source=publishsharelink

Money likes to pop up and start trouble with human creativity every now and then. As a writer, I’ve taken a lot of advice in my career. Technical advice consisted of  “show, don’t tell” and “don’t have the character look into a mirror and describe themselves for half an hour because that’s boring and no one wants to read that.” Business advice went something along the lines of “don’t do it for the money.” Eight-year-old me thought that was alright. I wasn’t doing it for the money, so there’s nothing to be worried about. Unfortunately, adult life brings with it a host of monetary issues, including bills, student loans, and insurance costs. The idea of a starving artist becomes clearer and clearer the longer a person seeks out their creative endeavors. As Lanham states in “Stuff and Fluff”, we are living in an attention economy, where sellers must cater to their audience’s limited attention span. The attention economy has started to leak into other sectors for a long time now, but one might consider that it’s always played a role in our society. Art, after all, needs an audience, more so than other industries. We can write without ever intending for anyone to read it, but even then, one might say the writer is their own audience, and it depends on whether they’re willing to explore and push their art further that leads to something becoming successful. Perhaps it’s our reliance on an audience that leads so many artists to poverty. Art has become associated with a mandatory suffering, bringing to mind images of Edgar Allen Poe, Emily Dickenson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, authors who were mentally or financially troubled for much of their life. This is because attention is an unstable income. It fluctuates regularly, and with it, so does our actual monetary income. So, it makes sense that we’re told not to do it for the money, because neither money nor stability is guaranteed. 

Beyond that implication, there’s also the notion of money cheapening the quality of the work. We all hear of artists “selling out”. Recently, this has been a trend against many song artists and content creators. Let’s start with Jessie J’s song, “Price Tag”, which debuted in 2011 and had played on the radio when I was going to school at age 12. On the surface, “Price Tag” is a relatively straightforward song about the importance of writing songs for one’s own happiness rather than for money and sales. Ironic considering it eventually went on to be one of her greatest commercial successes. People seem to have romanticized the idea of a creator or an artist being so engrossed in their work that they do not care about the business side of their industry, and the only reason they share their vision is to help others. In a way, this relationship between creativity (music, in this case) and the economy is similar to what Cottom had described the Education Gospel to be: An industry where many people are working to pay the bills, but are often criticized for being money-driven. Even Jessie J comments on this, criticizing her fellow artists with lines such as, “Seems like everybody’s got a price/I wonder how they sleep at night/When the sale comes first and the truth comes second” (3-5). 

Note: I’ve yet to put in citations, but never fear, the final version will have a full list of resources and in-text citations.

One of the things that I’m most curious about in regard to the economy is marketing. More specifically, the ethics of marketing. We all want to put our best selves forward, whether we’re a company or just a job applicant. I’ve had two interviews in the past two weeks and I realized that I definitely sugarcoat a lot of things in order to paint myself as a more fitting employee. Never to the point of outright lying, more in the lines of face-tuning on the scale of changing people’s perception of me. But is this an acceptable part of marketing, or is it more problematic than that? Would we be successful if we were completely honest with our audience? I’m not sure, but today’s reading definitely got me thinking about this. Furthermore, marketing is so reliant on the words we use, a slight change in diction can change the whole meaning. It’s also an easy way to get around claims of false advertising. “It’s not the company’s fault people took their ad the wrong way”. So where do we draw the line in how people present themselves for the sake of economic prosperity? As an aspiring novelist, this also has me thinking about my own future, considering that marketing is such a large part of getting people to read your book. Novels can be a significant time commitment, after all. In terms of marketing, I think I draw the line at bribing people for positive reviews.

Well, that was a verbose article. I wonder how it reads in its original French. Does it also read as so long-winded, or is it because the translation took out some of its conciseness. In any case, what I gathered from this is that Bourdieu, much like our other authors, is frustrated with everyone’s insistence that something traditionally viewed as purely economical is still viewed as such. This time we have the idea of capital taking center stage. Bourdieu identifies three different types of capital: The usual economic type, cultural capital, and social capital. He defines economic capital as that which is “immediately and directly convertible into money and may be institutionalized in the forms of property rights” (243). It’s the sort of capital that most people envision, one that is tied to money. This reminded me of one of our past readings regarding money as a way to create social relationships (or something along those lines). I do wonder how that would feed into Bourdieu’s theory. He doesn’t focus on economic capital quite as much as on the other two, but I think his approach to money is a bit more neutral. And I would’ve also liked to know more about the relationship between different types of capital, such as economic and social capital, or economic and cultural, and how the three work against or with each other. He touched on it, but most of this article was just definitions. Are there other types of capital out there he didn’t touch on?

Moving on, we have cultural capital, described as “convertible, on certain conditions, into economic capital and may be institutionalized in the forms of educational qualifications” (243). Here we see the relationship between cultural and economic capital. There’s some commentary on the nature vs nurture argument, as Bourdieu stresses the idea of family and the transmission of cultural capital. There are three categories beneath this type of capital: Embodied, Objectified, and Institutionalized. Embodied cultural capital is “in the form of long-lasting dispositions of the mind and body” (243). Objectified cultural capital involves material things (243). While institutionalized cultural capital is “a form of objectification which must be set apart because . . . it confers entirely original properties on the cultural capital which it is presumed to guarantee” (243). Education was also an important part of this segment, because the way someone gains cultural capital is through self-improvement by learning. However, you have to already have a certain amount of cultural capital, passed down to you from your parents, to be able to succeed in education.

Finally, there’s social capital, and I’ll admit it, I skimmed over this one. It is said to be “made up of social obligations (‘connections’), which is convertible, in certain conditions, into economic capital and may be institutionalized in the forms of a title of nobility” (243). It sounds a lot like social networking. You maintain and foster your relationships, and then you can use them when the need arises. We’ve all heard of it.

Beyond that, there was also the explanation on conversions in the end, and how economic capital can be converted into the other types of capital. Overall, this was a very dense read about a topic I’d never considered. I’m still wondering about the original French. So much can be lost in translation. There was no way I was going to read all those notes at the end though.

In conclusion, I do think this article feeds into the trend of finding social and cultural trends within economics. I think these articles are demonstrating the intersection between writing and money, since a large part of writing is discovering the connections that most people don’t think about. As we’ve read in previous works, a lot of authors write about what they believe is being misrepresented. In this case, it’s economics. Plus, writing can come with a lot of social and cultural capital, since people build connections through literature and literature itself is considered a material good of culture (or, more specifically, objectified cultural capital.

I’m sorry if I misspelled your name, Bourdieu.