With the invasion of the digital age, writers have fled into a panic as to how their art form will change along with it. Many expect that such a transition will devalue writing until its ultimate disappearance, at the very least in the job market. Lisa Dush’s journal article “When Writing Becomes Content” attempts to calm this panic by opening writers to the possibilities of content that they may not have considered before. Despite the benefits of preparing for a future in the digital age, I believe Dush undermines the significance of writing in society by labeling it as a dying art form.
content according to Dush
In short, Dush’s article encourages writers to embrace the incoming “content writer” adaptation because it does not limit writers like they may believe. Instead, it grants them new ways to share their work with wider audiences through more opportunities for employment. This is why Dush teaches her writing students to learn technical skills to expand their career opportunities from content creation to content as a whole. The article ultimately carries into the more specific argument that content should be taught at the college level to prepare young writers for a future in the digital age.
As the target audience of her college course, I can admit that it is certainly positive to adapt to the changes in our world. The undeniable prominence of content has created new purposes for writing that, if ignored, could certainly “[risk] marginalization and missed opportunities for growth” as Dush claims (183). This refusal to adapt could lead to the art of writing becoming yet another victim of the digital age, and, for that reason, I am an advocate of teaching content skills to young writers and preparing them for a more diverse field.
However, I believe writing is a uniquely human skill that computers are unable to eliminate the need for; computers are simply a tool to spread human stories faster and are not the source of the stories themselves. That being said, it is important to hold onto the aspects of storytelling that have not changed as the medium has: creativity, emotion, entertainment, and connectivity. Labeling writers as content creators limits the very nature of writing from a tool to relate with an audience to something that is, as Dush put it, “too vast, too dispersed, and too diverse to presume to know (its audience)” (177). While reaching wide has its uses, especially in marketing scenarios, writing is a staple to human nature because it prioritizes reaching audiences deeply. Even in personal digital content, like emails or text messages, Sylvia Wanjiru notes that physical writing, like letters, allow us to more easily recognize that there is a person behind it. Although Dush claims that converting to content writing is the only way to preserve writing as an art, devaluing this reader-writer relationship makes the surviving aspects of writing irrelevant, which speeds its demise rather than stopping it.
Dush seems to imply that this shift is necessary for monetary reasons due to the increased demand for content. As an English student constantly asked “what I plan to do with that degree,” I can certainly see the importance of diversifying writers’ skillsets and opening them to more opportunity. However, Dush’s plan to shift to content writing seems to be a complete shift for every writer, almost to the point of eradication for the artform. In the future Dush prepares her students for, “The endgame for aspiring writers may be that writing is not a feasible profession, that writing becomes something one does for free” (191). While it is true that no one should write with the sole intention of making money, a steady income encourages writers to dedicate their time to their valuable craft. In the event of a world where writing is “not a feasible profession,” humanity would lose the very foundation it was built on: stories. Even with the new digital age, I believe this silencing of our very nature is not possible. As Julia Stoll’s studies on the frequency of movie streaming suggests, writing has just as strong a grip on the modern world as content does, just in a different way. That being said, I would like to argue that writing should not and cannot be replaced completely in our natural shift towards content writing due to its innate tie to human connectivity.
Writing as an artform has molded history since the very beginning. It acts as a way to document the present for those in the future, to inspire technological advancements like Facetime and Google Translate, and even to change lives and civilizations. Some of the most influential figures in history were known for their storytelling, from Martin Luther King Jr. to Jesus. It is because these figures empathized with their fellow man that they understood the importance of telling stories to emphasize similarities over differences. While this same effect may be present in content writing, prioritizing the ability to adapt for the times stunts the growth writing has always promoted in our species.
Let me reiterate: I certainly agree that it is important to teach writers to master and even apply content creation in the real world as it evolves. However, we should not discount the significance of writing in the process. While digital mediums do require adaptations for writers, they do not require the migration to a different profession entirely. So long as we keep that in mind, I think content creation is a great skill for writers to learn in the digital world.
Works Cited
Dush, Lisa. “When Writing Becomes Content.” College Composition and Communication, vol. 67, no. 2, National Council of Teachers of English, 2015, pp. 173–96, http://www.jstor.org/stable/24633854.
