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║    Social Costs of Writing     ║
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Posted: 2025-02-15
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My necessarily distinguishing writing costs me a litany of time, space, and resources that could instead be invested in social and communal activities that would align me more with people, communities, and a culture that I've formatively internalized as convention. But social activity is massively shifting. The internet gives voice to that ideal for a shift toward the expectation that writing breeds a greater connection that talking merely in person fails to produce. This expectation is underpinned by a longing that connection be multifaceted, and that social behavior can only truly be reasonably managed if it is negotiated and wrestled across variously modes of communication, with the metatextual instance of webpage text passages. In other words, I am suggesting that while writing delays, impinges upon, or disrupts traditional social modes, the internet reconfigures the role of writing as one among chief means of fostering connection (multiplicity of modes). No longer just an individual pursuit, writing becomes an unassailable mechanism of modern communal life, a form different from its history as one of humanity's oldest and most persistent social technologies.

To give an example, if I write 2.2 million words and refine my writing skills to the point that I can write 7,000 words a day—being only now realistically accomplishable in contemporary day—then it will be easier to facilitate conversations. Conversations will be pre-had rather than troublesomely clumsily coursed through. Similar to the function of anticipating counterarguments, the integration and internalization of which methodological rigor stipulates, writing hereon becomes a preparatory, premeditative act.

While it is worth looking at them individually now given that I've conflated writing and the internet, the latter is nevertheless impossibly variable. Even if one intends to confirm pre-existing biases about the internet, attempting to divorce writing from the internet might instead substantiate the difficulties of examining the latter merely through other lenses, such as the controversialisms of consumption, the dark web, and social media, all of which still hinge upon writing for differentiation, in which case divorcement becomes a tool of subcategories, not an invalidation of the cyber primacy of writing.

Simply put, the interplay of writing and the internet is based upon the role of the former. 

Ultimately, the active role writing continues to play in social life is reflected in three outcomes: challenging the restriction of the "internet question" to its superfluous confounding with controversialisms, encouraging a bidirectional awareness of how real-world issues map onto internet interactions and expression and how writing and the internet go hand in hand in influencing social realities in this modern day, and dismissing any pre-built notions of writing as a mere technological artifact.

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