Am I wrong, or has technology ? specifically, the Internet, desktop pubishing, and printing on demand ? reduced two of my favorite things in the world, books and writing, to mere commodities?<\/p>\n
When I started out as a writer at Westinghouse in the late 1970s, managers who wanted to demean the craft of writing called it ?word-smithing.?<\/p>\n
But I think that the true demise of the craft was signaled when people began referring to writing as ?content? ? which, like pork or butter, sounds like something that should be sold by the pound.<\/p>\n
Certainly, with 150,000 books published every year, we?re suffering from a new kind of pollution ? ?content pollution.? There?s simply too much to read, and not enough time to read it.<\/p>\n
I worry that, every time I write in my blog, or write an article or a book, I am contributing to this content pollution. <\/p>\n
After all, aren?t there already a million others already writing on the same topics and saying the same things? And isn?t that true for virtually every author ? and every topic ? on the planet?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Am I wrong, or has technology ? specifically, the Internet, desktop pubishing, and printing on demand ? reduced two of my favorite things in the world, books and writing, to mere commodities? When I started out as a writer at Westinghouse in the late 1970s, managers who wanted to demean the craft of writing called […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1848,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-83","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-writing-and-the-internet"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bly.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bly.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bly.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bly.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1848"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bly.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=83"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.bly.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bly.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=83"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bly.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=83"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bly.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=83"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}