Collaboration and Isolation

At a Bookworks discussion yesterday on art writing and magazines one of the audience asked about the way in which the opportunity to blog might have changed the nature of publication from a collaborative activity to an isolated one. I hadn't thought about this much before, since I have been exercised more about different questions of quality (quality as a minimum thresholds rather than quality as a characteristic of something) and most writers and authors I have worked with seem to have composed in isolation anyway.

Although I have been thanked often enough for my input it seems to be stretching it a bit to call the editorial role collaborative in the sense of joint production or authorship. Unless I've really had to hold the author's hand.

But here I am, writing away with no feedback before publication (and probably not much afterwards either). Of course feedback (or criticism) comes afterwards and is not intended, on the whole, to change what is written, only to comment on it.

Debate and discussion before publication is quite a different matter, and I wonder if that is in danger of becoming a more precious and rarer activity.