By Aliyu Jalal
When Romeo Oriogun, the Nigerian poet who has recently won the heatedly competed 2017 Brunel African International Poetry Prize said all the poems he submitted were written on Facebook and inspired by his Facebook friends, I wanted to curse the literary magazine’s editor who rejected my work two months ago by saying their magazine would not publish works of “Facebook writers.”
For the weeks that had followed, I suffered rigorous internal reconsiderations, among which was the emotional persuasion to stop sharing my literary contents on social media and dedicate myself to becoming a “reality writer.” But all the reality I wanted to align myself with, refused to prove realistic as I failed to find a better platform of accumulating the required audience to savour my works and inhale the expected artistic motivation a budding writer needs, than social media.
The truth is that we have fatefully reached an age where the entirety of our lives is irresistibly tightened to social media platforms.
From our relationships to hobbies, and even official engagements, social media sites like Twitter and Facebook have infiltrated parts of our existence that used to be private and sacred. Social media has also given us the opportunity to do ingenious things, stand out from the crowd and achieve viral status online. It has also created ways for us to fight injustice and crude values, build better communities, dispense vital information and discuss ideas and contemporary issues about society and politics. Consequently, it has also managed to influence the world of literature in some surprisingly amazing ways.
Literature is part of our most sacred cultural heritage as well as one of the most decent arts in human history that aesthetically recreates language to enrich our lives in all kinds of ways. Once the barriers that make understanding literature seem daunting are broken, we will find that literary works can be entertaining, beautiful, funny, educating, enlightening, or even tragic. They can convey profundity of thought, richness of emotion, and insight into human character. They take us beyond our limited experience of life to another world in a philosophically or beautifully intriguing ways. It also shows us the lives of other people, real or imagined, and how it relates to us and our circumstances. They stir us intellectually and emotionally, and deepen our understanding of our history, our society, our beliefs, our environment, and our own individual lives.
Consequently, the concept of literature is rapidly changing. Originally, any form of literature was in print, now literature can be found all over the internet. Recently, people have started to share creative and original works online via social media sites. Both recognized authors and regular unpublished writers as well as budding poets and storytellers are taking advantage of the rise of social media to transform the traditional view of literature.
Therefore, as social media funtions advance, the digital age continues to grow and flourish. It is slowly moving away from just the “friendship” industry and is inching its way into the field of literature. As we all know, it is now very common to find countless of Facebook pages and WhatsApp groups about poetry where online presentations of poems, critiques and appreciations are done.
Those groups capture membership from different spheres of the world and regions of a country based. It also serves as a strong tool for restoring and inspiring literary jingoism among people across the globe.
Another effective impact of social media on literature is how it serves as an easier avenue for upcoming writers to publish their works online without going through the formal processes of doing so. This has motivated so many people with hidden literary ingenuity and unveiled artistic prowesses to discover their talents and began utilising them in magically unimagined ways.
But despite all these seemingly appreciable roles played by social media in adding colours to literary engagements and enhancing the utilization of the world of literature, some issues and observations do not fail to serve as hindrances to achieving a perfect interaction between the two.
First of all, social media is forcing us to judge a piece of writing based on illusive powers of Facebook judgement— superficial “Likes” and clever “Comments.” This obviously suggests that judging of works of literature on social media has become dependently on the number of likes and comments a particular piece catches.
It dominantly becomes a facebook tradition that “Likes and Comments” are what make a piece worthy, masterpiece and relevant. People often follow the breeze commenting “nice work!” when the previous comments go the same line. This tarnishes the quality of good works and rates the relatively bad ones above the crowd. Many social media users are yet to realize that the level of an individual’s popularity and followership on social media are what (in most cases) determine the level of “likes” and “comments” a piece of writing accrues and not necessarily how good the writing, in itself, is.
Another unfavourable side of the interaction between these duo is that social media (such as Facebook) is extrovert while literature is fundamentally introvert. This then suggests that social media can often be loud and noisy; an endless cycle of irrelevant updates and unnecessary comments can be too much for some people, and it is certainly not a perfect place for meditative reflection, particularly for a creative writer who needs a calm atmosphere for deep imagination.
Nevertheless, poetry that is succeeding in this era of social media is not the poetry of “Solitude and Ennui.” Poems like bio, lyric, rhyme, idyl, etc for example, have become extremely popular for a generation of social media users expecting simple skills and digestible meanings. It is not that those types of poetry are wrong by any means, but that they are too simplistic, and do not appropriate the form of poetry that dispense unambiguous rhetoric and deeper literary creativity. And also, as much as I’m not against these types poetry and I love how they have managed to maintain literary scenes all over the world, it becomes just so difficult to discover the next Emily Dickinson or Williams Shakespeare on major social media platforms such as Facebook because they lack some key ingredients: powerful imageries and depth of meanings.
Tightly related to the above also, it now brings us to the observation that social media is drastically leading to a great decline in reading culture among young aspiring writers. The writers that succeeded during non-facebook era were those that had no option but getting books of great reputable authors to read and digest, and then physically met other writers to discuss and present their works. Most young aspiring writers today only depend on what is posted on social media walls of other friends. This practice seriously harms the versatility required of a budding writer and therefore projects a dark unimpressive future for those infantile babblers who are dreaming to survive in the highly competitive space of literature.
Social media is therefore allowing non-artists and uncreative people to become orators of literary contents such as poetry, by making those whose main interest is to get online popularity, attention and acknowledgment to parade themselves as “writers”. This tarnishes the reputation of the sacred art. Although I agree that with the inescapable influence of social media in every human strata today, it’s difficult to forecast a bright future for an unpopular writer, joined by the fact that every writer needs an audience to read and attest to their works, but prioritising public attention above the actual substance of the art is a great disservice to literature and oneself as publishers will never succumb to using one’s Facebook or Twitter acknowlegement and followership in accepting the person’s work.
Moreover, social media sites often have words-limit for posts and updates. In this regard, not any volume of work can be uploaded on social media sites. For instance, a fellow short-story writer states in an interview that there was the need to shorten her works to fit the word count limitations for social media posts, ultimately changing her original plans for the work’s volume. This implies that the reading of this story will be different from the initial plan. It also limits the creative liberties it may have had if it was not meant to be posted on social media sites such as Facebook.
Again, one of the most disheartening and most well-known offshoots of the relationship between social media and literature is the issue of plagiarism and the integrity of a work itself. It’s just very easy for one to copy another’s work and present it somewhere as their own. It is hard to monitor individual facebook spaces because there are billions of users across the globe. This case seriously demoralizes serious writers and make many observe that social media is never a safe place for flaunting one’s patented creative assets.
In conclusion, as we have seen, social media may be the next step in the world of literature in which people can share faster and to a broader audience, however, there are still consequences such as the integrity of the piece, and how it makes writers lazy readers and name-seekers. This rationally points that not every experiment with social media and literature can be succcessful. Though there are people who experiment and experience good outcomes, there are so many who can become victims of the power that social media holds in literature.
Jalal is an ABU graduate. (This is to celebrate one year anniversary of a Facebook poetry movement, #PoeticWednesday)
