There are fewer postcards and hand-written notes today, but I don’t think anyone would argue against the idea that more people in the world are writing more in the Internet Age than at any moment in history. What we’re writing is largely bullshit, sure, but not all of it is. It’s really the full flowering of democracy, like it or not. From Walter Isaacson’s New York Times review of Clive Thompson’s glass-half-full tech book, Smarter Than You Think:
“Thompson also celebrates the fact that digital tools and networks are allowing us to share ideas with others as never before. It’s easy (and not altogether incorrect) to denigrate much of the blathering that occurs each day in blogs and tweets. But that misses a more significant phenomenon: the type of people who 50 years ago were likely to be sitting immobile in front of television sets all evening are now expressing their ideas, tailoring them for public consumption and getting feedback. This change is a cause for derision among intellectual sophisticates partly because they (we) have not noticed what a social transformation it represents. ‘Before the Internet came along, most people rarely wrote anything at all for pleasure or intellectual satisfaction after graduating from high school or college,’ Thompson notes. ‘This is something that’s particularly hard to grasp for professionals whose jobs require incessant writing, like academics, journalists, lawyers or marketers. For them, the act of writing and hashing out your ideas seems commonplace. But until the late 1990s, this simply wasn’t true of the average nonliterary person.'”
