Is Everyone an Author?

It’s interesting the distinction they make between authorship and writing, from the early 18th century, to today’s modern world. Back then, writing and authorship was restricted to a small group of people. The ones who could afford, in all senses, the time, money and energy to write and further, get published. Today, anyone has the potential to be a writer and anyone with a twitter account has authorship. The lines have been blurred between what defines a writer and author is today’s world. Writing, especially in today’s increasingly digitalized world, takes on various forms. A facebook post, a tweet, a blog post, and old-school snail mail letter… all examples of modern-day writing, and furthermore, authorship. These forms of writing/authorship are often a new-age form of conversation. Except the conversation isn’t between two, three people; it’s between thousands, millions and billions of people. Writing/authorship today is much more collaborative. It’s “authoring for the digital age” (xxx). Another interesting point they bring up is how wary we need to be when publishing words to the Internet. I take a quote from our book, as it was very powerful to me: “We now live not only in a city a state, and a country, but in a global community as well-and we write, intentionally or not, to speakers of many languages, to members of many cultures, to believers of many creeds.” We must be mindful of what we post to the Internet, because our audience is bigger than we can imagine.