Personal technology has come a long way over the past 25 years. Computers aren't just for nerds and gamers anymore. Put-near everyone has a smartphone of some kind, which means they also have access to everything from a camera (for still photography and video) to a music player to hundreds of thousands of apps.
Here's the irony: the tech boom of the past quarter century has turned the nation -- nay, the Western World -- into a bunch of writers. And that's hella impressive, when you think about it.
Let's harken back to a quarter century ago. Bill Clinton was running for president. Nirvana was poised to usher in the alternative rock era. A new show called Seinfeld was facing cancellation due to low ratings. Oh, and nobody wrote anything, ever.
Okay, maybe not nobody. But let's take the following special interest groups out of the equation: journalists, published authors, Ted 'The Unibomber' Kaczynski, and diary-loving tweens. Now who's left? Pretty much nada.
If you knew how to type more than 20 words a minute back then, chances are you were a software developer, a court stenographer, or a receptionist. (Or maybe all three: who were we to hold back your dreams?) Did you write letters to people? You know, where you'd apply pen to paper, paper to envelope, stamp to envelope, and envelope to mailbox? If so, chances are you were some kind of teetotaling fancypants.
Simply put, unless you were writing a check or scrawling angry missives to the idiot who nabbed your condo's parking spot, you never wrote squat.
Until recently, that is. In 2015, over 200 billion emails were sent each day. That translates to 28 emails per person. Prior to the advent of our modern technical age, when was the last time someone mailed 28 letters out each and every day? Or even ten letters for that matter. Heck, even one. This is where we've found ourselves now, and it's a vastly different cultural landscape.
Of course, it doesn't end there. Emails are just one component of our 21st century tech-fueled writing-based lives. There are an estimated 190 million active blogs online. Eight trillion texts are sent each year. To boot, literally all social media platforms require users to engage in some form of writing. Heck, even the knuckle-dragging ignoramuses trolling YouTube comments sections are, in the most charitable definition of the term, 'writers.'
When you add everything together, pretty much everyone is doing a whole lotta writing. Every single day. A small percentage of their work is brilliant. Some is good. And a whole lot is utter crap. But it's writing nonetheless, and we have technology, of all things, to thank. This is a definitive sea change, and an exciting one at that. If you're looking to contribute -- or even peripherally follow -- society in any slight-to-meaningful way, there's no choice but to hunker down and type out sentences like some kind of newfangled Mark Twain or Hunter S. Thompson.
Is everyone with a laptop, tablet, or smartphone adhering to the agreed-upon tenets of grammar, spelling, conjugation, syntax, punctuation, and overall clarity? Perhaps not. (Read: definitely not.) But it's a start. And a compelling start at that. So maybe technology isn't making us as stupid as we initially thought. (Sure, it's a small victory, but shut up and take it, okay?)