No Book Writing E-Book

Vera Ansén

• Herausgeber: BoD - Books on Demand
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 99

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

Writing? ... This painstakingly acquired skill - not for you, you say? But reading, well, that's fine? Let's rethink this. Writing has shaped how we share knowledge, challenge ideas, and build the world we live in. Let's not leave the narratives to others - especially those who seek to control them. It's not just what we experience, everything we read shapes our awareness, our ability to listen, and the decisions we make. Writing is how we pass on knowledge, question authority, and imagine new possibilities. What we write today influences not just AI models but also future writers and thinkers, helping them discover new solutions. Human feedback has always been and remains the key to a future where we can thrive together. Think along. Speak up. Get involved. And WRITE! That's how we keep stories alive. That's how we shape the future.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

First Words Writing

Chapter 1 Speaking Images

Chapter 2 Poets and Philosophers

Chapter 3 There was No Internet

Chapter 4 ... by Reason!

Chapter 5 W like Writing?

Chapter 6 A Fistful of Words

Chapter 7 Magic

Chapter 8 Everything Flows

Appendix

OFFICER (OFF) (cutting tone) See this piece of evidence? What is it?

AUTHOR Some thoughts?

OFFICER (angrily) Two languages, in print and digital! Are you claiming this wasn’t you?

AUTHOR (quietly) I did it...

OFFICER (lowering voice) Do you think we wouldn’t notice? “No Book Writing”? How stupid do you think we are?

AUTHOR (with more emphasis) I confess, I did it. (softer) More than once...

OFFICER (knowingly) ...and you’re going to do it again

AUTHOR (silently nods)

>No Book

... Writing?<

I confess, I’m a repeat offender ... When I was young, I was certain that by the time I turned 50, I would be writing books. Deliberately, I set out to gather life experiences, determined never to bore anyone. Of course, boredom isn’t as bad as its reputation, but boring books? They waste time, burden the environment, and at best, offer an escape from reality. The fact remains: we use language — for all sorts of purposes.

Because that’s just the way we are! Unlike artificial language models, no one programmed us to always be "helpful" or "innovative." Over time, however, we’ve become quite good at deciding what is worth preserving, as I explained in "WIE WIR ERZÄHLEN ...“. I also reminded you in "ERKENNBAR, VERSTÄNDLICH, WÄHLBAR ...“ that you are already part of the greater whole! You never speak solely for yourself but always for a part of humanity that feels just as you do. Furthermore, what does all of this have to do with democracy.

So why a Volume III?

I must admit, even I was surprised at first. I thought I was done. But no. The more I observed people’s joy and reluctance in engaging with AI models, the more I looked at my leftover notes and realized: Writing... there’s still something there. We need to talk about it!

Sure, I could have turned this into a podcast or a TikTok video, giving you the flexibility to access it anytime, anywhere. But that wouldn’t change the fact that I control the arrangement of the information, and you follow the presentation. Changing the medium doesn’t alter much about the production process — as vividly illustrated in "T2" — released two decades after Trainspotting. One thing is clear: everything starts with scribbled notes.

Some things have changed in the last decades. People have been grouped into “Generation X, Y, Z...” and so on, leaving old white men and their female counterparts scratching their chins in confusion. Meanwhile, the younger, work-life-balancing generations are learning some grim truths: the planet is on the brink, democracy is struggling to hold its ground, and human rights?

Human rights were written down in 1948 by some well-meaning minds who decided for the whole world, and yet the whole world doesn’t seem to care much.

Was Socrates right all along? That writing weakens memory and replaces true knowledge with mere recollection? That shallow knowledge blocks true wisdom and clouds our awareness? Today, we don’t need to remember much — our countless digital assistants do it far better. So why not let them handle the writing as well?

AUTHOR

There is an organization in Germany, the German armed forces Bundeswehr, that considers writing to be a form of corrective discipline. Tragic, isn’t it? And if this (If you haven't served?) reminds you of your own school days, you probably know where the damage might have started.

How is it that the very same institution that taught us the cultural technique of reading and writing often managed to bullshit the joy of it at the same time?

Yes, you read that correctly. I used the verb 'bullshit' in a discussion on language. Which makes it clear that what you’re holding in your hands is unmistakably human work, even though the book market offers you thousands of polished reading options lovingly patched together by some crafty ChatGPT user.* Language models are not supposed to use inappropriate language — probably for the better!

AI enthusiasts warn us boldly: "Shit in, shit out." If you do not understand how to use language with nuance, you will get plenty of unsatisfying results spilling out of the digital interface. Frustration seems to be a built-in feature, but this time, the users are debugging. “Writing is so yesterday; today it’s TikTok,” teenagers protest as they push back against the drudgery of school. Well, in that case, >yesterday< must have been one long day!

Experts studying the opportunities and risks of artificial intelligence warn us: the ignorant will grow even more ignorant, while the clever will become even cleverer. Education creates elites? Is that a groundbreaking revelation? News of the world? No, just the same old story. Again? All quiet on the Western front.

“Democracy is the oligarchy of those who have time,” wrote Paul Nolte in 2003, criticizing a system that relies heavily on voluntary engagement. By 2024, no one doubts anymore that unequal access to participation distorts democratic ideals. The "less-informed segment of the population" is seen as part of the problem by politically active individuals. Every day, we all struggle to interpret the flood of information available to us.

Writing a book that urges readers not to write a book might seem paradoxical. Maybe I just wanted to confuse the algorithms a little, who knows? Neuroscientists remind us that confusion is good for our synapses. It activates those tiny cells we carry around in our heads and kick-starts learning processes. And learning is always a good thing, isn’t it? Whether for humans or machines.

Neuroplasticity proves that our brains are shaped by learning throughout our lives. Isn’t lifelong learning and education for all less of a burden and more of an opportunity?

So, let’s take a closer look at the process of writing and why this cultural technique is so essential for how we live together.

>Speaking Images<

A picture is worth a thousand words — so why do we write? The images we like to praise with such a phrase are, after all, man-made. Do they differ so fundamentally from the letters we invented?

Images affect us as a whole, offering multiple interpretations, captivating us, and making themselves easy to remember. Why? Because they find countless points of connection in our minds, always already emotional, as it were. Otherwise, wouldn’t they just be a quarter of an ink bottle spilled on a piece of paper?

But at some point, it was not enough for humanity to paint a picture on a cave wall. Faced with mortality, people sought to pass on their knowledge — the ever-expanding knowledge of humankind. So far, so familiar, you might think. The invention of writing hardly needs to be glorified, after all. Initially, as far as we can tell, it mainly served to record taxes and levies. And what does that have to do with democracy? Oh, everything!

Humans are storytellers. It is our unique ability to encode knowledge into stories and thereby pass on the capacity for survival from one generation to the next. Even today, one can observe how oral societies among indigenous tribes preserve their knowledge, often closely tied to the natural authority of elders. Spiritual leaders frequently held an advantage in knowledge and controlled what they passed on, safeguarding it through the power of hierarchy. Hardly democratic, right? Knowledge was not equally accessible — it was shared orally and only entrusted to select individuals.

It wasn’t until the invention of writing that these dependencies began to change. For the system of writing, scribes have always been required, as mastering this craft — then and now — has been labor-intensive and time-consuming. This led to the emergence of an entirely new category of citizens: documentators and tax collectors, who were responsible for handling the writing and administrative tasks of their rulers.

"It is a sad chapter in the long history that began when some of us learned to read, while others among us continued to build structures and create wondrous things, thinking differently from the rest.“

Maryanne Wolf,

"Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain,“

Chapter 'Conclusion': From the Reading Brain to 'What Comes Next'

The 'rest' — those illiterate or only partially capable of reading and writing — actually made up more than 90 percent of the population for thousands of years. They had to rely on orally transmitted knowledge to get by. After all, collective survival never really lost its appeal.

Today, one can detect that learning to write, and particularly the act of reading, has fundamentally changed the way our brains process thoughts, perhaps even permanently altering how our brains function altogether.

Humans, as multidimensional beings, sometimes display a notable tendency toward murder and mayhem. So, what’s the big deal about the fact that the earliest written records in human history are tax documents? Figuring out, "How much does that guy owe me for keeping him safe?" is, after all, just another way of ensuring survival. Managing taxes, contributions, and supplies reflects a basic human need: order and control.

It was a first step toward creating mutual respect among humans. After all, it’s hard to organize a fair trade when no one can remember who harvested how much. Humans are gifted with the ability to direct their thinking toward the future, the past, and the imaginary, and writing seems to be an excellent medium for this.

When things went well, humans were no longer entirely at the mercy of their rulers’ whims. Rules and laws aided impulse control and provided a framework for reliability — one that allowed large groups of people to live together. When things didn’t go so well... well, we can read all about that in our history books. Today, that is. Because there were people before us who made the effort to write their experiences down for us.

As early as 399 BCE, the Greek philosopher Plato recounted the skepticism of his teacher Socrates toward writing down knowledge. Socrates feared the superficiality of written words, which he regarded as mute. In his view, writing could not answer questions or spark genuine discussion. He also believed that writing weakened the memory. Knowledge not carried in the mind, he argued, was nothing more than an illusion. The idea that writing would allow more people to communicate across space and time was, for him — living in an age when few could write but nearly everyone could speak — utterly inconceivable. Plato’s engagement with Socrates, however, went viral, as we might say today.

His writings, and other early texts like them, paved the way for something far greater. Suddenly, ideas could be preserved. Philosophy, science, religion — everything that had previously been passed down solely through spoken words was not just transmitted but conserved. With just two dozen symbols, the knowledge of the world was written down and made accessible to others.

The discourse around symbols might lead us to believe it shaped a community of intellectually free and equal individuals. But such a community did not exist. As long as learning to read and write remained a privilege reserved for those who needed it to make a living, there was no such thing as education for all.

Perhaps this was also because the literate were regarded with a certain suspicion by those who were not. Engaging with taxes, inventory management, and the rules of coexistence — essentially the life-to-be — the intermediate space where learning happens, fundamentally changes how people approach the realities of daily life.