'Words, words, words!' rings Hamlet's timeless answer to the insipid question, 'what are you reading.' But in this day and age, perhaps the better question is 'what are you writing?' In the age of blogs, social media, and the ebook (letting anyone easily publish a book), we are truly drowning in a sea of things to read. This was an interesting read, and I agree with the author to a point, in that your writing may in fact be dehumanizing you, if you are doing it solely to gain followers or make money or otherwise profit by it or if it is taking over your life and soul and identity, it is certainly a problem. But writing can also be a cathartic, a way of knowing yourself and your reactions more, which is probably why journaling is so highly recommended to suffers of all sorts of mental, emotional, or spiritual malaises, but it is when you take that journal and make it public, living and dying by the responses thereto, that it becomes problematic.
Which is why you should write for a blog with no followers, it is just like private journaling, right? Probably not, but I think it is a actually a good thing to have a variety of reading material and viewpoints available, if only we know how to winnow the wheat from the chaff. For all the dross out there, every so often you stumble across something precious that might not otherwise have seen the light of day in a former era when only a limited number of editors and publishing houses and news outlets controlled our literary fare. Obviously, it requires a bit more discernment and taste, and we must browse through endless gibberish to find it, but if you are a writer, now, more than ever, your work is accessible to others; each and every reader is now an editor, personally selecting what they will consume. May each of us do our best to produce nourishing and tasty fare, whatever our genre or platform!
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