The Ease of Modern Writing

There is this idea stated in the book in chapter 2 Thoreau’s Pencil that particularly gets at me. It is the idea that the computer makes it too easy for people to write. I find this particularly interesting myself in being a writer. It is an idea that I have thought over because of music these days and how easy it is becoming to get into music because of the internet and websites like SoundCloud.

            This idea of the technology evolving from things like quills to pencils, allowing people to write and copy faster with the latter and write for pages instead of paragraphs is interesting. On one hand I agree that technology lets people do things like writing with ease and that is a great asset to our society. Anyone can nowadays pick up a pencil, open a laptop, and write. This allows many brilliant writers to do what they would not have been able to do before and that makes the industry grow by leaps and bounds.

            Then again growth is not exactly the best thing. The transfer from the typewriter to computer was a huge jump because it allowed people to write in type with ease. This let the amount of people able to write skyrocket but polluted the market with writers who were not up to snuff.

            In the current day there is even less of a professional gap between the daily writer and the professionals writers who devoted their lives to the craft. With self publishing someone can write a book and put it on a site like Amazon with ease. No agent, no investment, barely any actual struggle to become a writer has to be participated in to become one of these famed scholars. This again is hard to completely shut down because this allows would be writers who could be great without this large professional gap to reach the masses without the funds of the classical writers. And then again, this lowers the quality of work.