Technology: a Double-Edged Sword for Writing
The development and accessibility of the internet has become a thing of great importance to our society as a whole. I'm someone in the age group of people that, growing up, it wasn't quite as common for someone to have unrestricted access to the World Wide Web. Technology as a whole was a different beast when I was young.
For reference, I didn't have a cell phone until I was 14. In fact, I only was given one because my brother was 18 and getting his first phone at the same time, so getting both was a better deal with our provider. The phone plan didn't even have 200 texts or less for the whole family to share, we got on that plan a few years later. While we did have free call time past 9:00 PM, it was stifling to have every ounce of phone usage tracked by not only the phone company, but also by my parents.
The internet was no different. Phones didn't have access, only your family computer did. No personal laptops, tablets, or easy means to access the vast wealth of information. And no getting online when anyone had to make a phone call. Our family PC was in the living room with the screen clearly visible from the couch, ensuring no one and nothing snuck by into my impressionable mind on my parents' watch.
While a lot of kids my age figured out how to clear the browser history and get around parental locks, I was only ever subjected to those early online shock factor sites like lemon party and the pain olympics thanks to my friends at the time. The internet was wild in its infancy, and running across unhinged content felt like all but an inevitability. But finding the information I needed? That was the real challenge.
Technology has come leaps and bounds since then, and the access it provides to the endless stream of information shared on the web is unparalleled. For better or for worse.
I'm not an author who has been at this long enough to tell you the big differences in how technology affects the writing process. While I'm sure digging through library archives for research or traveling to new places in order to get real life experiences made for results with more integrity, anyone and anything can now be published (with consequences in some cases, sure, but that usually doesn't stop the ability to get the info out there).
It's so strange how having access to the vast majority of knowledge cultivated over centuries of study can open so many doors that it makes consistent progression feel impossible. With the entire world at my fingertips, how am I supposed to stop myself from falling down a rabbit hole? Did you know how horrible human atrocities most schools don't teach about? Or how many types of frogs there are? How about the sheer amount of shades of brown that exist?
Each simple inquiry I type into the search bar to get more information for a book or story can drop the floor out from under me, trapping me in a wormhole of relevant or adjacent information that overtakes my thought process. Even just now, I have seven different groups of pages that each have between two and ten tabs open, and that's after doing some light organization. And that's only on my computer! You don't want to see what my phone's browser looks like, I promise you that.
While I do write fiction so I can make up about as much of the story as I want, I feel like that can also become a bit of a trap. I don't need to look up common rat names or fantasy races, but, as much as I love the invention of how things work, I love having a foundation of realism. I think most stories can benefit from a basic, easy to understand level of common references that aren't so deeply entrenched in their own world building that they're only funny, interesting, or understandable to the author.
I think a lot of this comes down to each person and their unique focus and writing style. I may find myself with a bad case of the losing my attention span mid-activity or stare at the page without making any effort to further the writing fairly frequently, but I also can't imagine losing the ability to search for relevant blurb examples from books in my current genre without hunting down another device. I live my life moving between sit pits, and the less obstacles I have to getting the info I need at my fingertips is the best chance of not losing focus. In theory.
This subject doesn't get some nice, neat clean up where we all learn a moral and move forward better people. The internet and constant evolution of technology is a blessing and curse; it's both the angel and the devil on my shoulders. All we can do to stay focused each day is our best, and that is Kenough.