When You Push "Publish", You Can't Change Anything Anymore
Writers can get trapped in a self-made fatal destiny of typos and copy-paste errors
Words are not sparrows; once they have flown they cannot be recaptured
Or what about:
Once a word leaves your mouth, you cannot chase it back even with the swiftest horse
There are many such proverbs and colloquials, indicating that you’ll never have a chance to correct anything you happened to say in wrong.
And there is a lot of truth hidden in that – probably the reason for so many people during times finding it necessary to speak grandiosely about it.
When the Internet was invented, and we shortly after got websites, blogs, and then also social media, some of the experienced writers of the time, with experience from printed media such as newspapers, were keen to instruct all of us new writers in a way of thinking similar to what those provers say: When first you have pushed publish, you cannot change the text anymore.
And while that was true for some of these old writers, in their old world, it really isn’t true in the same way of the new, digital world. Because, why wouldn’t you change an error if you noticed one in your text? If you have the technical access to do it, you will only help all future readers understand things as they were meant.
The old way of thinking was actually some kind of spell cast over the writer, that if they ever made a mistake, they should be haunted by it forever. And, indeed, some newspaper articles with errors did cost a lot of trouble for the journalist or editor who let that slip through. And, at times, it wasn’t even errors but “just” some kind of political adjustment, something that “we aren’t allowed to say”.
A printed newspaper, sent on the street and sold in hundreds of thousands of copies, would forever keep that error or thoughtlessness alive and remembered.
On the internet, however, the conditions are different. We were all struggling, in the beginning, to define a reasonable way of using the Internet. Which rules should we subscribe to in order to be considered “ethical”, “trustworthy”, and other desirable things?
But that thing about the text living forever, seems to have gone away. A newspaper would survive in its entirety. It was one unit of text, split into separate smaller texts, but all of it would often be stored in libraries or desk drawers, and the whole newspaper would be brought to court, in cases where that would be relevant. So, your small article that nobody liked and nobody read, would live forever, along with the front page story.
On the internet, people don’t read the whole thing. In fact, they often don’t see a text as being part of “a whole thing”. They see that individual text standing alone, and perhaps they see only a fraction of it.
In such an environment, your small, never-read article, may be changed and nobody will ever notice it.
If you are not writing in the newspaper, you may instead write social media posts or articles of some kind, often with very few readers, often with long period where nobody reads anything at all. You may look through your post after posting it and find a spelling mistake, or a wrong comma. Even after many times proofreading, that happens, and you may wonder if it will be “allowed” to change that.
Of course! Even if there have been people reading the post already, the next ones shouldn’t need to stumble and fall over a technical error in the text. They can just as well be given the best possible reading experience. That will not hurt those who already saw the error. Unless they are now preparing a big feature article about your error, for which they now may lack the proof.
However, if you allow for people to comment and like, you could potentially change the text into something that the commenters and likers, who already did so, wouldn’t have put their name under, had they known about it.
So it does take some discipline to change only such things that would not bother any commenter who already has commented.
And speaking about ethics and trustworthiness: Of course you’ll add a footnote or similar to the text, explaining the change, if there could be any doubt in your mind that the commenters would agree to your change.
We live in a world of fast.
When things are written and published in a moment, compared to the old times with several days, weeks, months, or even years from writing to publishing, there will be more error in what is published, because we spend less time on looking for them. And that calls for a different kind of behavior.
Factoids
It's not about right or wrong, it's about thinking – capturing typical thoughts and turning them around, inside out, to see what they're made of