Dakota Helbig J6

To say that the modern era of writing is the only era with an aspect of mobile writing would be grossly incorrect. As the Molz excerpt explains many cultures had elements of mobility in their writing be it quills and ink or stone tablets that could be passed around and transported easily. However, the modern era may be the first era to have an active focus on mobility in an overall sense as more and more businesses work on keeping their customers lives as uninterrupted as possible. This shift to the active encouragement of mobile lifestyles has affected writing as well, as many people write daily for social media, blogs, or direct communication with each other through technology. The massive movement towards a more mobile and personal writing style reveals an interesting trend in the general population as well as an interesting revelation for writing: more people are willing to write for connectivity than almost any other reason.

Obviously, people have been writing for connectivity’s sake for almost as long as formal writing has existed. Letters and journals are two of the most popular written texts over the course of history. But this new mobile lifestyle has encouraged the documentation of every individual’s daily activities and feelings like a public journal. One of Facebook’s original templates for writing on your own page was “User is…” encouraging users of Facebook to communicate what they were currently feeling or doing. This immediacy translates to a more mobile form of connectivity as users begin to post their activities and feelings as they occur. Facebook has grown to support over 1.4 billion users worldwide, over 20% of the global population. In less than 12 years since its initial founding Facebook managed to gain almost a fifth of the entire world as a user base. How did they do it? They gave people a subject they were more than willing to write about, themselves. The success of social media leads to the interesting notion that people are more than willing to both write and communicate to each other about daily activities. In an age where things like the death of the book and the decaying state of literature are sometimes discussed as if they were facts, over a billion people write daily to communicate their thoughts and feelings to each other because it’s the topic they have the most interest and knowledge in.