In "The Running Novelist," a 2008-dated short autobiography in The New Yorker, Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami says: "I was about to turn thirty. I was reaching the age at which I wouldn’t be considered young anymore. And, pretty much out of the blue, it occurred to me to write a novel." Today, I share his feelings.
Life as an editor at a newspaper is not easy. If you work in a politically and sociologically atypical country where words are interpreted beyond their literal or figurative meanings, it's even more complicated. In such an environment, an editor is expected to consider all social dilemmas, whataboutism deadlocks, trolls (real ones included), uncivilized discussion cultures, historical intellectual fronts and other tedious factors. The alternative would be to simply surrender to political correctness, the villain of our age. Unfortunately, Türkiye, my beloved country, is not an exception.
Contrary to the difficulties, however, the joy of editing and writing is priceless. Playing with words, discovering their (un)real interpretations and creating a consistent and logical argument in a strategic and diplomatic piece, for example, is truly satisfying. To some extent, it mirrors activism. For respective causes, you can communicate with the audience, generate concrete material for mobilization or a sustainable future, or become a voice for those living under oppression and in inhumane conditions. With its roots dating back centuries and considering the power it holds, content creation still stands out as an ethical profession.
However, it is true that there is another side to the medallion. Recently, editorship, publishing and all other relevant fields have faced tremendous transformation in a movement that we can say is not for the sake of the greater good or ethics but is instead morphing into a platform we can no longer control. We may be quick to blame digitalization, rapid consumption or even wild capitalism in the bigger picture for such a chaotic changing-face but the issue is much more complex.
In the midst of the ongoing mass exodus from the traditional methods toward the technological realm, change has flooded content creation and publishing. Genres, headlines, presentation of stories and other major aspects of the sector have all evolved. For example, rather than humans, the algorithms of the giant digital apps, search engines or websites rule the sector. You need to first communicate with software to communicate with a reader.
In this new era, or whatever you call it, content is generally lost in the shuffle. In fact, it doesn’t even rank second in the priority list as, before that, you are also required to have sufficient numbers of followers – regardless of whether most of them are fake accounts. If you followed the recent debates over Elon Musk's Twitter bid, you will see the issues raised at the time prove my point. Speaking of Twitter and its copycats, people from all walks of life, including publishers and media members, in particular, are required to have massive exposure to be "visible" in order to establish a "reputation" and "success." You need a storm of likes, comments and significant engagement. Otherwise, you are nothing. The rule of “publish or perish” has now turned to “obey social media or perish.”
Change is an absolute thing, an undeniable principle of nature; therefore, only a fool would expect the media not to evolve in the rapidly changing world. "The snake which cannot cast its skin has to die," as Friedrich Nietzsche says. It is quite normal that the media has shed its skin too, but the problem is that "modernization" has made it much less effective than it was in the past. Along these lines, I disagree with the categorization of “new media,” as media must be always new, up to date and catch the zeitgeist. That is its gusto. Media is always new, therefore media is.
However, the evolution of the publishing sector where the core standards of ethics are gradually losing significance against numbers is an inevitably apparent fact we must accept. The war declared on tools of communication to turn them into a disinformation and manipulation machine shall fail. The whole sector is desperate for a savior and that is possible with a return to ethics.
