I’m particularly interested in the extracurricular writing groups. I read Mints post on this where the question posed was “Do writing groups exist?”. I myself have not had much exposure to writing groups per say. Maybe it is due to my ignorance, but I don’t recall even hearing about writing groups at the University of Pittsburgh that focus on writing for fun. The Gere article as initially written in 1992 and then revised and re-released in 1994 if I am correct. I am interested anyone is or has participated in a writing group? If not, has there been a disappearance of writing groups that Gere discussed?
In response to the disappearance of writing groups, I have my own hypothesis. I wonder if the rise of the internet and social media could be a cause for the disappearance of these organized extracurricular writing groups. We live in a society were it is very easy to go online and write anything you want on any number of forums. Social media is on of those forums, although the writing on social media is usually much less constructive. Also on the internet anyone can critique anyone else regardless of their background or qualifications. So in some ways there might not be so much of a disappearance of extracurricular writing such as a shift to less formalized groups. I think this can be seen as both a good thing and a bad thing. A good thing because more people can participate in easier ways but also a bad thing because writing on the internet usually receives less constructive criticism from qualified peers.
Do you think that extracurricular writing groups have disappeared and if so why?
It’s actually somewhat funny, I was thinking about the internet before I even made it to the second paragraph. I think it has had a huge impact on some of these extracurricular groups. Forums, blogging sites (such as WordPress…), and even social media sites like Facebook, that offer spaces for creation and feedback.
Personally, I know a few people who still belong to real life book groups, although most of them are significantly older. I think for younger generations, many of these interactions have just switched to the internet. Now that a single piece of writing can be viewed by hundreds of people within hours of posting, it’s more convenient to do so, with the added bonus of being able to reach significantly farther than one would among a club.
However, I do see a few drawbacks. First, without doing this among a group of peers, it removes the personal aspect, which we’ve talked about multiple times throughout this class. Because no one personally knows the author, there’s a lot of room to misunderstand them. Additionally, a lot of the criticism and praise are coming from mostly anonymous sources. There could be four-year-old children saying your essay is doody and you wouldn’t have any idea who they are (although hopefully that would tell you all you need to know).
I think both offer their own pros and cons, but it seems to me the internet is winning out of pure efficiency. I do agree with your one point, however, that criticism from certain internet sources isn’t as helpful. Posting an essay on Facebook won’t get me a lot of great feedback. There’s a pretty heavy social stigma against posting unsolicited negative advice on social media, and even if the original poster asks for it, not being specifically named raises the issue of legitimacy, and whether certain people weren’t intended in this open invitation.
At first glance, I think it is obvious to think the traditional forms of writing groups and groups like book club have disappeared, however, I think they have just transitioned or have become modernized in our time that we live in.
I think it is fair to say that traditional forms of writing clubs and book clubs are disappearing. I know my mother used to be in a book club with the local church and they would meet every Wednesday to discuss what they have read in the past week. I remember just from going a few times with her that the population of people who went there were older than sixty years of age (other than my mother who was about 35 at the time). The rise of the internet and the age of social media has changed this drastically, but not necessarily as much as you would think.
Social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and even Instagram all provide a type of extracurriculum writing, or that is at least what I think. You can go on any of those sites and post anything you would like for other people to see. I think the transition from normal writing groups to social media has changed the way that we look at critiquing our compositions. On these sites, perhaps the most obvious form of positive feedback will be in the form of likes or favorites. While it may only be a number, it still will correlate to whether people like what you are saying or not. On the other hand, negative feedback can be much worse on these sites. Negative feedback is most often associated with furious comments from people hiding behind their computer screen, typing away at their will. I find this to be most problematic because of how mean people tend to be on the Internet. Feelings are hurt everyday because of what people say to one another.
Overall, I do not think that outside the classroom writing groups have disappeared but rather they have moved to the virtual world. I find it to be less efficient however than person to person criticism because of how people can be on the Internet. Also I find the nature of social media to not be directed towards writing and improving writing, but it still provides a platform for people to share ideas and thoughts to the outside world.
Personally, I don’t think I’m old enough or well-informed enough about writing group culture to hypothesize about whether writing groups have disappeared or not. Writing groups seem like an activity that might be more relevant among older adults who are not in school, or people who are fiction/essay/poetry/creative writers, or song/music makers. I’ve never personally been involved in a formal extracurricular writing group, but I actually think that I have been involved in some version of this that happens to be more relevant to my life–grantwriting. Although the doesn’t specifically mention grantwriting as a type of writing in a writers group, I was reminded of the group of people I work with on planning a summer camp. We have to secure funding for the camp, so we have to write grants together and critique each other’s writing constantly, because we are all very invested in getting the grant money to be able to run our program. This example might be a stretch, but I think it goes to show that we are really participating in similar extracurricular writing activities very frequently, even if we don’t define them in that way.
I think your point about social media is also very relevant, because that creates communities of writers in other ways, but I think there is less frequent critique of writing on internet spaces that are writing-heavy such as tumblr and reddit. However, other social media sites probably focus specifically on writing critique and improvement–fanfiction sites might be a good example of this (although I also don’t know much about those sites either)
So, I guess my answer to the question is no, I don’t believe that writers’ groups are disappearing–I just think they are visible in ways that we might not expect.