I – Internet

I think I would like to make the claim that few things have changed the craft of writing as much as the Internet has.

I mean, there are some things. The printing press. The invention of the novel. But really, even something like computers just let us write in a different way: but it was still just writing. Spell check is nice, but in the end, that’s what the editing process was for: now that process is just a background process.

But the Internet lets anyone publish. It lets you talk about obscure things, and be able to point people to information about those obscure things. From another angle, it lets you write about obscure things and be found by people wanting to read those things.

It gets everybody writing. The Internet lets your audience talk back to you, in unprecedented ways and to unprecedented extents. There’s more comments coming back in than can be read for anything that gets big or viral. There’s no way to read this much fan mail!

The Internet also helps break down major language barriers, with translation services. It opens up the world so much.

Unfortunately, what all of this means in a lot of ways is that it has also become infinitely harder to find the good stuff. I’m a librarian. We see this problem coming. At some point, we will have generations who have to deal with the fact that anything they search for is going to come back with millions of hits. How do we find what’s good? The point of this post is not to answer this. The point is to say that now, all of a sudden, everyone can write, and so very many of us are writing, and the world has gotten smaller, and yet also bigger, and more full of things.

It’s a brave new world out there. Write on!