The Paradox of Choice
Filed Under: Speculative Fiction, Writing Process
This New York Times article hits on something that I’ve been worrying about for some time, which is that it seems that there are more and more people taking up writing, while at the same time, fewer are reading. I thought this was a problem specific to the SF short fiction world, but it sounds like a greater issue in publishing in general.
I’m not gloomy about the possibilities though. For a determined reader, there is more out there to find than there ever has been before (of course, you can say that in any given moment, as old books don’t go away, at least not immediately). What we need are better ways of fitting the content to the consumers. I do think that before the information revolution that came with the rise of the Internet, finding content you would like to consume was easier. There was less to choose from, and you could evaluate your choices more quickly. Now, I suspect many are paralyzed by choice.
Barry Schwartz, writer and researcher, believes that infinite choice is exhausting. He makes a very interesting case for this in a talk that he gave at TED recently. He also published a book in 2004 called The Paradox of Choice (amazon). I haven’t read this book, but I think it’s going to go on my stack of things to read.
One aspect of the article that struck home with me was this:
On the whole, Zaid is unworried about the proliferation of books, though he doesn’t think everyone should set pen to paper. “About would-be writers, André Gide used to say: ‘Découragez! Découragez!’”(discourage!), Zaid said in an e-mail message. “The implication was that real writers would not be discouraged, and the rest would save a lot of time. Of course, some mediocrities are never discouraged, and some potential real writers would be lost. But there is so much talent around that we can afford it.”
I was discouraged, along with many other 8th grade writers, by James Gunn just as I was starting to be interested in writing. He gave a depressing and detailed talk to us about how difficult that it is to become published, and how little money there was to be made. Even before the Internet, things weren’t all sunshine and roses around here. He was never asked back to our conferences, which was a shame, because I think he brought up some very good points. But I think he shared the same opinion that Gide did. However, his discouragement didn’t stick, and I hope to meet him again sometime in the future to thank him. In some ways, his discouragement spurred me to push on with my writing. At the end of his talk, despite being so negative, he encouraged those of us in attendance to mail our manuscripts to him and he would provide us feedback. I don’t know if anyone else did, but I sent a story I had written recently, a kind of paranormal SF piece. He sent back the most carefully written, wonderfully helpful comments. His generosity has not been forgotten, and along with Ann Tonsor Zeddies, I consider him one of the first to mentor me in the craft.
I want to write more about this paralysis and paradox of choice, and some possible solutions. I think we can find ways to artificially and helpfully limit our choices without stifling new creative work. We already have some services, such as Amazon Suggests and some features on Netflix that help to do this. I’d love to see a system built that tracks as much of the short story market as possible, having database entries for each story. As readers, we would open accounts and flag the stories that we liked. And then, the site would make recommendations based on what we have liked in the past, suggesting new authors, new publications, and new stories that me might not come across otherwise. The system would learn and be trained over time, and soon, it could be a very effective means of limiting choice without burning down markets or running of writers. It’s a long tail tactic and it isn’t going to make anyone rich, but I think it has some merit. I’d look into building something like this, but I think the matching algorithms are way beyond my programming skills, and the data entry part would be difficult to maintain without the help of the individual editors and publishers. No one person could keep the content up-to-date, although I suppose you could offload that responsibility to the readers as well–but then, that sounds like work, and might reduce the potential user base for the site. Also, you introduce the possibility of typos, introducing duplicate data that would make matches much harder.
I will write more on this subject when I’ve read more on the paradox of choice, which has implications in web design as well—something I was thinking about as I designed the layout of my new site, and is the reason you don’t find a full-fledged archive anywhere. I attempt to limit the choice of new readers to my best entries and the latest content, and I put many choices in the footer, kind of pushing them out of the way so that only the determined would find them, and they wouldn’t interfere with the more casual reader. I can’t say how well this has worked yet.
How do you handle the glut of choice available to you in your reading today? Does it result in you reading more, or less? What are your strategies?
