Some quickies: Phaedrus, craft vs. inspiration, free content

I've been in a play and am going away this weekend and haven't had time to do much of anything for a while. I managed to find the best part of an hour to finally write something, but I wound up spending the best part of the best part of that hour reading your last four posts. Sadly, your reward for your diligence is that I end up richer for having read some wonderful entries and you end up poorer for my not having time to respond in a way that's at all appropriate.

In particular, I haven't had a chance to even digest, let alone think about, what you said about Phaedrus. I'm not entirely sure I follow your point, but that could be because I don't entirely remember my own point, which you're responding to. Though I agree that it's a lot more subtle in the Phaedrus than simply a condemnation of writing in favour of speech. Surely you've read Derrida's essay on Phaedrus? I've only read the first twenty pages or so, but already there I can see the threads coming apart. One thing I've never been sure what to make of in Plato is how the suggestion that written texts are second rate is supposed to be read. Given that what we're doing is reading a written text. A soft case of the Liar Paradox?

One other little thing before I try to squeeze in a thought of my own. You defend some appeal to a distinction between craft and inspiration by comparing it to the distinction between nature and nurture, which you take to be almost analytic. I think that's a singularly bad analogy--at least to support your case--since most psychologists and biologists think the nature/nurture distinction is bogus these days. As Matt Ridley puts it in the title of a book on the topic, we're better off thinking of "nature via nurture": our environment shapes the way our genes express themselves. So there's no neat way even in principle of saying it's part nature or part nurture. And I think the same could be said for craft and inspiration: inspiration comes via craft. What kind of inspiration we have, how we express, that we're inspired at all, is shaped by the way in which we've prepared ourselves to channel our creativity. To look at inspiration and craft as two distinct entities confuses matters more than it clarifies them, I think, and that's the sense in which I called the dichotomy bogus.

I was supposed to leave the house five minutes ago, which doesn't leave me time to say what I wanted to say in a way that's all personal and spontaneous. Instead I'll do the crass thing and simply copy and paste from an e-mail I sent a friend on the same topic. Shortly after sending it, I found Leon Wieseltier had written something along similar lines in The New Republic:

It occurs to me that increasingly, it's become difficult to make a living as a producer of content. Already with music and movies, it's so easy to package into data that there's a lot of piracy and the industries have to make concessions in order to make piracy less appealing. Newspapers and magazines are suffering as people now expect their content to be available free online, and to survive as a journalist you have to do a lot of free-of-charge blogging and twittering in addition to the content you produce for money. Now that things like the Kindle and google books are taking off, books too are becoming increasingly susceptible to packaging as data and free viewing, and when people get used to that, they'll want to pay less for books too.

And I think the repercussions go beyond that. I'm keenly aware of how much worse the market is for academics than it used to be. I think part of it is a mentality that academics, as purveyors of content, should be doing more for less money, since in the age of easy access to reams of data, we expect to get more content at less cost.

What worries me is that it seems like knowledge and culture are being devalued, not just in terms of it being harder to make a living at them, but that people estimate their relative worth lower. Does any of this ring true to you or am I just talking nonsense? I worry a bit that increased access to information also risks making us crasser.