Writing: Show and Tell - Example - Pro

From the Los Angeles Review of Books' A Tech Critic Embraces Dave Eggers’s “The Every” by Evan Selinger" these paragraphs I thought gave a positive view of "show, don't tell":

Even when I tried to publish an accessible account of normalization in a newspaper opinion piece that addressed Facebook’s approach to designing and marketing smart glasses, a technology society previously rejected as only fit for Glassholes, I could only vaguely gesture to what life might be like in the future. When you’re writing nonfiction, perhaps the closest you can come to offering a window into tomorrow is by constructing thought experiments. Frischmann and I invent some in Re-Engineering Humanity. But, per genre convention, they’re brief, and they require readers to fill in many blanks with their own imaginations.

 By contrast, Eggers highlights iterative strategies for normalizing disturbing technologies in a way that captures the errant reader. Even with his satirical distortions, he can give real flesh to psychological, social, and economic dynamics — “showing rather than telling” how these influences set people up, step by step, to accept situations that earlier versions of themselves would have rejected, whether it’s informing someone about the death of a close family member over an emoji-infused text message or embracing AI-infused devices that monitor our conversations at home for signs of hostility and notify the police if we use the wrong words or speak in the wrong tones. In other words, Eggers reveals something most of us can’t perceive in real time when we start using a new gadget promoted by a Big Tech company: the big picture and the likely endgame.

I have written on this subject before, including problems with the technique. Here is a contrast - between a formal non-fiction piece and fiction - is not one I think was considered in the criticisms. This also may give a clue to the technique's genesis. Fiction can, must, dramatize ideas - that is the telling - where non-fiction persuades by presenting the facts; call it the difference between Aristotle's Poetics and his Rhetoric. Well, that is what comes off the top of my head.

That some points need told rather than shown still follows me. This could be that I am on the final laps with John Dos Passos' U. S. A. Trilogy with its juxtaposition of the subjective and objective.

sch

12/21/21