Gadgetopia

do bloggers dream of electrifying text?: This is an interesting little story about how someone wanted to become a Writer!, but found the Internet and became a writer instead.

And then came the Internet. All of a sudden, writing is infinitely reproducible. Anyone who wants to write can self-publish. There are tools for real-time collaborative writing. And yet the popular conception of who or what an Author is still very much alive, in the popular mind at least. The publishing industry, meanwhile, has responded to the threat posed by the Net by consolidating, automating, and producing only books guaranteed to sell millions.

So I found myself, a few years out of university, considering the highly-industrialised modern print industry, in the context of the literary theories and social contexts that have created it. And comparing it to the seemingly boundless possibilities — and attendant threats to intellectual property as an economic model — offered by the Internet. And once I’d thought it through, I stopped wanting to author books.