Week 14 Journal

Considering both Lessig and Jenkins, what does it mean to be a writer in the 21st century? Does the emergence of digital technologies and Web 2.0 allows for new ways of composing?

Lessig writes, "The RW internet is an ecosystem," in the writing that we read for this week. Within the essay he argues that writing in the 21st century is completely different from writing in the 20th century. With the aid of digital technology and the invention of the internet new ways of writing emerged. Today we have access to a world of knowledge at our fingertips allowing us, as writers, to gather information and use that information to create "texts". In our current society, a text is much more than a credible piece of writing; texts today are pictures, videos, music, Facebook, Twitter, blogs, vlogs, etc. We can, as writers, take from all of these sources and compile bits and pieces of that writing to create something new, much like our past generations did in a library with books and newspapers. What's different now is that we can gather information about a picture taken in 1975 in a moment's notice while students and writers in say, 1980, had to wait until a newspaper was released or an encyclopedia was published.

Composing texts is different now in many ways. The internet allows us, as humans who have their own opinions, to speak out and talk about things as insignificant as what we ate for breakfast that day to blasting the President about his views on environmental protection in a public forum or a blog or a post on some sort of social media. This writing is different than traditional writing such as essays and mandatory assignments. This sort of composing is fueled by our emotions, by the things we find interesting or the things that we are attached to in some sort of way. What is most different between twenty years ago and now, is that most everyone has access to this way of writing. It is public, created for use by everyone.

Before the computer and the creation of the World Wide Web, the masses (meaning populations of people) had to rely on getting information from their televisions and radios. As technology got more and more advanced these dinosaurs of media forms became less needed. As internet became more increasingly available, the average TV reporter and radio broadcaster were no longer needed as the information that they were reporting on had become available hours before the show aired. Information and text were now at our finger tips, allowing us to see the future of the internet, and ultimately changing how generations to come would be able to write.

Blogs, forums, and social media as Lessig says, "are becoming an increasingly dominant form of “writing.” The Internet didn’t make these other forms of “writing” (what I will call simply “media”) significant. But the Internet and digital technologies opened these media to the masses. Using the tools of digital technology— even the simplest tools, bundled into the most innovative modern operating systems— anyone can begin to “write” using images, or music, or video." Digital technologies (computers, smart phones, the internet, etc.) are precisely why writing has evolved to include blogs and such because they aid us in our understanding of our lives and what's happening around us.