The Commodification of Writing: Your Amazing Title Here

With the function and style of writing constantly changing, many are asking where exactly where writing will end up in the near future. Will it continue to evolve in medium? Will it even be used at all? To answer questions like these, it is impossible to know for sure, so to make the most educated prediction possible, it would make sense to analyze the trends of similar situations. Put frankly, we live in a capitalist society full of consumers. There are statistics to show what kinds of items sell the most, but leisure is among the biggest reasons people spend money. This being said, writing has made a rather noticeable transformation from a cultural form of communication, to product. Perhaps this is an inevitable circumstance, as much of what originates or finds it's way to America eventually becomes mass produced and simplified to better suit the daily lives of american citizens. If this is the case, then it is safe to assume that writing, - more specifically electronic writing- will evolve based on how it is forced by consumers and advertisers to adapt to the trends of a typical modern life, essentially leading to a decrease in the popular access of conventional writing. 

To examine this theory further, one must consider the economy from the perspective of a branding advertiser. In this case, advertisers will want to market products that are easy to use, because consumers will buy what can make their lives easier. Although this may come across as somewhat of a paradox – the idea of people working to earn money in order to buy products of leisure – it is a commonly practiced lifestyle, and there is actually a term to define this way of life. Hedonism (dictionary) is defined as “devotion to pleasure as a way of life,” which is related closely with that of consumerism. If the fate of writing is to be what is the most easy or pleasurable for people to use, than why would anyone refrain from making writing related products that ease the way in which writing is conducted? 

In actuality this has already been done to a certain degree. The evidence is the program in which this essay is being typed on, and the variety of applications made available by software companies; every product advertises with the release of each new version, a convenient way to make writing less of a hassle. Anyone who can spell can write sentences out by hand. But with the creation of the typewriter, and then computers, modes of writing have been been improved by means of speed, efficiency, and ease of use. Electronic writing is physically and mentally less demanding than handwritten work, but it comes at a price that people are none the less willing to pay. Therefore, the destiny of writing has observably begun follow a hedonistic trend, as well as one that exists as a commodity. 

Aside from writing itself, one large piece of evidence that points to writing morphing into a commodity, is the form that art and music has taken on a commercial level. Originally, art and music was only able to be created by those who put in the time and effort to learn about each respective craft. However, with the rise of electronics and technology, art and music as been made accessible to even those who artistically and musically ignorant. This stems from the formation of “templates,” or pre-made compositions made by professional artists specifically for the average consumer. With templates, the consumer of the product needs no form of training what so ever in music, art, or whatever their they're looking to suit their needs. Instead, they simply buy a pre-made design from a trained artist, (or musician or designer etc.) and modify a minimum amount of information to “personalize” their copy. If the user wants a well designed flier for their event, they choose a template an modify the text. 

If this sounds like a good idea so far, that's no surprise. Initially it does sound like a great idea, because that's what will draw people in to buying it. For example, take this website template. It looks professional, and is virtually ready to be used, albeit a few adjustments to the text. The church using the template will only have to shell out $58 to own the design, which is considerably less than hiring a personal designer. The problem here is that these are only immediately satisfying. Using a template, no matter how good it looks is always going to lack when it comes to the continuity and branding identity of a company. Eventually, the same company will need someone to make them a unique logo, and chances are it won't match aesthetically with the style of their website. This like these need to be taken into consideration. 

This kind of problem, (having an inconsistent company identity) is one that is unique specifically to design templates. But this goes to show that all kinds of templates will have their own individual discrepancies as well as the major overarching problem: sameness. The reason templates can be so cheaply purchase is because multiple people and or companies can use the same one. In other words, the designer doesn't have to spend their time working on only one project per client. They can make a generic, unspecific template, and then a limitless amount of people can buy it and appropriate to their usage. However, because of this companies using templates may have a nice looking image, but it's identical to numerous other companies, now distinguishable only by their difference of text. Had the company paid more money to hire a personal designer from the beginning, their entire persona would be consistent, and completely original; originality being the key concept that is lost. This issue of sameness and lacking originality certainly doesn't only apply to aspects of design templates, but to every genre of templatery.

More recently in terms of music, programs like Apple Inc.'s Garageband give users the option to create an entire song based solely on the choosing of instruments desired in the creation of the tune by the user. From there, the program generates everything else needed to make a perfectly comprehensible semi-original piece of music. Of course, just like with artistic templates, musical templates are based off of real riffs created by professional musicians, and then arranged electronically by the program, to the users liking. The user literally contributes nothing to the song besides the choice of instrumentation and money to purchase the product, yet they are still given credit for it's creation. The distribution and popular use of these templates greatly reduces the amount of creativity involved to a large extent, because the original artist is the only one creating the piece. The user only buys it and alters it slightly, which completely erases the need to learn how to create their own ideas. This begs the question, why wouldn't electronic writing follow this same course? 

It seems to make perfect sense that in the near future writing programs will be enhanced so far as to virtually write essays for people. In theory, these writing templates would follow the same guidelines as those created for art and music. A group of educated writers collaborate to produce a system that essentially takes snippets of their writings, and arranges them into a sort of cohesive Mad-Lib. They create a collection of their own phrases, sayings, sentences, and transitions, along with the coding of language fundamentals. Then, the user fills in a brief summary of variable questions related to their topic, i.e. topic, sources, main idea, and length, plus any additional sentences the user feels like adding. Then from there the computer devises for the most part an essay based off of the imputed information. Lastly, the user fills in any blanks (such as any missing nouns, verbs or adjectives left out by the computer) with their own. And in 15 minutes the user has a three page, literary scholar-quality essay. 

If this seems like an implausible idea, consider that just because a template like this could exist doesn't necessarily mean that it is the only option people would use. Certainly some people could and would type their own essays entirely by themselves, just as people in current day still major in art and music. But the majority of society consists of consumers, and they're the ones that are willing to buy template programs to do their work for them, meaning a smaller and smaller margin of people actually concerned or interested in continuing the art of original writing. Which leads to writing's biggest threat.

With a boom of templates could create a new social system of how art is viewed. This means that if in the future the majority of people's writing skills are only as good as what they can buy in template and smart essay form, then literacy as we know it today will shrink to be known only by the few writers who are making the templates for everyone else. 

Essentially, because people are so concerned with the technology of computer aided/pre-written template essays, that the meaning and significance of writing will be diminished on a large scale. Writing will be somewhat of a meaningless scholarly tradition, practiced in vain, and because the transition to template driven essays will be do drawn out, the teachers assigning the essays won't have a problem with their students “mad-libbing” essays, and may even promote it since they will have been raised with the technology themselves. 

Instead, teenagers; and presumably most adults' writing skills will by then have been converted into an even more condensed version of the 'online chat' style used today. It could perhaps be an "advanced slang dialect," if that's possible; a typed language that is only used in conversation across electronic platforms based on phonetic spellings of english spoken word even, similar to, but not exactly like "AIM lingo."Grammar will probably still be taught vocally, and consequently will still be in effect in the new phonetic language, but will not be anywhere near as strict as it is with written language today. Again, spelling and punctuation will be whatever is easiest and quickest to type while still making the message clear, and may never be fully developed into a concrete form. 

Aside from this emerging adaptive language, written language will still exist, but will only be practiced on a serious graduate-study type of level. The few who take the study of literacy seriously will be the ones who make a living working for the companies that produce the templates, perhaps future forms of current computer companies such as Apple or Microsoft, or possibly a new company all together who's focus is specifically on designing and improving the template system. 

The consequences of this kind of shift in society could vary, but it differs from art and music in the sense that writing is used as a direct means of communication rather than an explicitly expressive state. When people can no longer write their words down with any sense of properness or diction and only rely on their aural skills, ideas will be less organized and the possibility of general chaos rising begins to seem plausible. 

Another obvious consequence is the dangerous issue of complete dependancy on professional writers by the majority of the population. When people are willing to sacrifice education and individual ideas for leisure, the open themselves to all kinds of deceit and are forced to rely on leaders that shouldn't be in control. When the only essays being written all stem from a small number of ideas of a few people, no matter how much the technology varies the user's outcome, the amount of ideas being exchanged can only be so much. Therefore, the originality and creativity is minimized to a great extent. 

Also not to be overlook, essays are not the only writing form that would be template generated (Oh wait, has this been done already?). Certainly once the technology for smart essays to be written, designing templates for thousands of poems will be at everyone's disposal.  Exactly. Deceivingly, this may seem like a good thing – as if offering writing aids to so many people could possibly lead to an outburst of sudden creativity. But as is the true case with templates, the point of them is not to induce a state of originality, or to stimulate one's creativity. It's the very opposite, which is to create something useful in the shortest amount of time, and the least amount of effort, while still looking, sounding, or reading decent. 

As current trends of templates in art and music are steadily rising and increasing in their capabilities to seem diverse and efficient, reaching the conclusion that electronic writing may end up the same way does not require a great deal of imagination.