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December 2005

Avoiding the Fate of the Blacksmiths

By Jack El-Hai

I was hypnotized as a child. It occurred when I was ten years old and sitting in my dentist's chair. Dr. Levitt, a kindly man near retirement, brought his face close to mine and asked me if I would be willing to undergo a new anesthetic technique that he had just learned. Hypnosis, he explained, would help me relax and would enable me to feel no pain as he drilled into one of my innumerable cavities. My dad, who was standing at my side, appeared startled, but said nothing. It was clear that the choice was mine to make.

I hadn't experienced apprehension during previous visits to the dentist, but I did not like the pain that accompanied the shots of Novocain that numbed my mouth. So, without much thought, I agreed to Dr. Levitt's proposal. Unfortunately, Dr. Levitt was no Svengali. He was not even Bela Lugosi. Earnestly and clumsily, he used guided imagery to make me imagine I was in a meadow, a forest, a baseball stadium or a movie theater -- anywhere other than in his chair with cruel mechanical devices entering my mouth, their blades spinning. Thus began one of the great traumatic events of my childhood.

I was a good boy. I got through it. Dr. Levitt and my dad had no idea that as I sat there, my eyes closed and my face untroubled, I was experiencing the kind of pain that only the enemies of Superman felt in the glare of his heat-vision. I took it for twenty minutes and when at last I opened my eyes, I saw pride and amazement on the faces of my dentist and father. Dr. Levitt congratulated me on my aptitude for hypnosis, and I went home, where I sat quietly and trembled for the rest of the day. I had fooled the adults around me into believing I had achieved such a powerful hypnotic focus that I succeeded in blocking out intense pain.

My point in relating this distressing anecdote is to use it to introduce another example of mental focus that I've displayed, and to wonder whether it, too, is a sham. Ever since I began freelance writing in 1984, I have focused on writing magazine articles and books that are printed on paper. Over the years, I have occasionally strayed into writing in other formats -- I've done speeches, video scripts, Web pages and Web articles, and even an opera libretto -- but writing for print has always been my focus and my primary goal. And I know that many of you, my colleagues in this organization that celebrates nonfiction writers of articles and books, focus on the same thing.

What if our focus is an illusion, one that will do us actual harm in the future? What if we are the blacksmiths of the Henry Ford era, the icemen of the age of refrigeration, the slide-rule manufacturers of the century of electronics? What if printed publishing is gradually slipping away and we are ignoring it?

I do not doubt that the written word will remain important in our world's future. The big questions in my mind, though, are who will do the professional writing, and for which media? We all know the signs of the deterioration of the eminence of print: declining newspaper circulation, sinking book readership and sales (especially among men), the near extinction of general-interest magazines, and the strong prospects of other media formats like digital audio. People now use their iPods to read, listen and watch. We recognize all these signs, but do we respond to them?

I do not want ASJA to be like the American Society of Blacksmiths of 100 years ago. I don't want us to leave our members unprepared for the technological changes brewing that could take away our livelihoods -- changes that might yank the paper out from beneath our feet. I don't have answers, but I'm forming some ideas of how we can piece together a clearer picture of what is to come. If you have some answers or suggestions, please let me know and discuss them with your ASJA colleagues. If other writers -- more prescient ones -- take our place in the future, it will be a terrible shame.

Jack El-Hai of Minneapolis, Minnesota, is president of ASJA. E-mail the president through www.asja.org/contact.php.