Being a Writer in the Digital Age

Today's post is by our intern Ben Kostyack, a senior at Woodrow Wilson High School in Washington D. C.

Believe it or not, being a writer in a time of rapidly-evolving technology is not easy. Even though we have unlimited information at our fingertips, the information can be useless in the long run and even a distraction at some times.

Image courtesy of PixabayAs I finish high school, I realize that the writing world I will be entering is not the same one as the one people entered twenty years ago. With Facebook, twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and countless other forms of social media at the ready at any time of day, we are becoming more connected than ever. In some ways, this is beneficial to our writing. We can find new information in an instant, and we can check all of our work for accuracy when we feel necessary.

In other ways, the accessibility has hurt our creativity and originality. Just by hitting a few buttons, we can take someone else’s work and claim it as ours. Not only is this plagiarism a problem, we are also losing our opinions and trust in our own knowledge. Instead of trusting ourselves when trying to prove a point, we instantly turn to Google to check if we are correct or not.

Now that we have fully entered the digital age, our writing style will change. There will be less risks taken, and writing will become bland and boring. Or maybe not.

Hopefully people aren’t satisfied with what we have learned so far about this world. Hopefully there are writers in the future who are constantly looking for new information and ideas, and forming their own opinions.

But most of all, I hope writers in the future challenge the current beliefs that we are so attached to. This way, we have something to argue about, something to get our emotions to run high. Because, in the end, strong emotions is what got us to write in the first place.