The Future of Writing and How to Stop It
Posted on Thu, Dec 01, 2011
By Katie
In our office, there are cheers and hoots and hollers when we come across an article that makes a great point, shows honest intelligence and is not afraid to expose controversy. Technology and online editing tools make it easy to skip the hard work that goes into quality writing. It’s happening online, it’s happening in business, and it’s happening in academia. When we stop focusing on the quality of writing, we remove thinking from the process altogether. We must demand high-quality content and knowledge that will take us to the next level as students, entrepreneurs, professionals and, well, humans.
I attended a Harvard writing series lecture recently, and the general premise was the slow demise of writing in academia and how university professors can help prevent the upcoming generation from becoming increasingly lazy cheaters. Jonathan Zittrain, Harvard professor and author of The Future of the Internet -- And How to Stop It, discussed a time when there was no spell check, the rise of Mechanical Turks (where kids use outsourced writers to complete their papers for them), and the scary predictions for our future (think Soylent Green, mmk?). From where Zittrain sits, it seems the future of writing is no writing at all, but instead, copying, outsourcing or outright plagiarizing.
I got to thinking about how closely this relates to PR and journalism. Zittrain talked about the slow decline of peer review in academia. Some professions have hundreds of thousands of journals, so the editors are hungry for content and most anyone can be published (a once highly coveted accomplishment). Beyond academia, Wikipedia has become the common man’s peer review, while blogging and Internet commentary rival traditional journalism.
Professors don’t want their students to regurgitate their lectures. They want them to take what was taught, turn it upside down, shake it up and add their own research and thought. It’s every professional’s responsibility to view the Internet in the same way. It’s what gives an engineer from a small business in Silicon Valley a voice, a place to share his own knowledge on a topic that might otherwise be spoon-fed to the market.
As consumers and influencers of the media, we can choose to read what is spoon-fed to us and complain about it, or search out content that shakes things up and spurs thought.