Writing With Grit Against the Digital Tide
Find the silver lining of writing’s futility
Centuries ago, when parchment and literacy were rare, and creative writing was reserved for administrators and intellectual elites, all written stories and opinions may have seemed biblically important. Certainly, the scraps of ancient writing that have survived are precious to us because of their rarity and their closeness to some foundational historical events.
But after the digitization of content and the rise of the personal computer, the internet, and social media, writing has become commonplace and even a triviality. Writing now is as disposable as pop music; there’s an oversupply of texts, and even as books and articles are pirated, and millions of curt emails and text messages are sent on an hourly basis, this deluge competes with the oversupply of videos which have a broader appeal.
In this late-modern context, writers may wonder why they bother to write. Most writers in the postindustrial world who have the least inclination to type out their thoughts or their stories, poems, or scripts evidently still do so, and the reasons why are clear and familiar. Writers write for the same reasons anyone takes up a hobby. We write and we put our writing out there because technology gives us the opportunity and because we want to, and we think we…
