Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Minds for the Better. Clive Thompson
written anything for an audience. But she was game, so she set up a blog and faced the keyboard.
“I had zero ideas about what to say,” she recalls.
This turned out to be wrong. Over the next seven years, some of which she spent back in Kenya, Okolloh revealed a witty, passionate voice, keyed perfectly to online conversation. She wrote a steady stream of posts on politics and economics, including the “Anglo-leasing scandal,” in which the government paid hundreds of millions for services—like producing a new passport system for the country—that were never delivered. She posted snapshots like the bathtub-sized muddy potholes on the road to the airport. (“And our economy is supposed to be growing how exactly?”) Okolloh also wrote about daily life, posting pictures of her baby and discussing the joys of living in Nairobi, including cabdrivers so friendly they’d run errands for her. She gloated nakedly when the Pittsburgh Steelers, her favorite football team, won a game.
After a few years, she’d built a devoted readership, including many Kenyans living in and out of the country. In the comments, they’d joke about childhood memories like the “packed lunch trauma” of low-income kids being sent to school with ghastly leftovers. Then in 2007, the ruling party rigged the national election and the country exploded in violence. Okolloh wrote anguished posts, incorporating as much hard information as she could get. The president imposed a media blackout, so the country’s patchy Internet service was now a crucial route for news. Her blog quickly became a clearinghouse for information on the crisis, as Okolloh posted into the evening hours after coming home from work.
“I became very disciplined,” she tells me. “Knowing I had these people reading me, I was very self-conscious to build my arguments, back up what I wanted to say. It was very interesting; I got this sense of obligation.”
Publishers took notice of her work and approached Okolloh to write a book about her life. She turned them down. The idea terrified her. A whole book? “I have a very introverted real personality,” she adds.
Then one day a documentary team showed up to interview Okolloh for a film they were producing about female bloggers. They’d printed up all her blog posts on paper. When they handed her the stack of posts, it was the size of two telephone books.
“It was huge! Humongous!” She laughs. “And I was like, oh my. That was the first time I had a sense of the volume of it.” Okolloh didn’t want to write a book, but in a sense, she already had.
The Internet has produced a foaming Niagara of writing. Consider these current rough estimates:1 Each day, we compose 154 billion e-mails, more than 500 million tweets on Twitter, and over 1 million blog posts and 1.3 million blog comments on WordPress alone. On Facebook, we write about 16 billion words per day. That’s just in the United States: in China, it’s 100 million updates each day on Sina Weibo, the country’s most popular microblogging tool, and millions more on social networks in other languages worldwide, including Russia’s VK. Text messages are terse, but globally they’re our most frequent piece of writing: 12 billion per day.
How much writing is that, precisely? Well, doing an extraordinarily crude back-of-the-napkin calculation, and sticking only to e-mail and utterances in social media, I calculate that we’re composing at least 3.6 trillion words daily, or the equivalent of 36 million books every day. The entire U.S. Library of Congress, by comparison, holds around about 35 million books.
I’m not including dozens of other genres of online composition, each of which comprises entire subgalaxies of writing, because I’ve never been able to find a good estimate of their size. But the numbers are equally massive. There’s the world of fan fiction, the subculture in which fans write stories based on their favorite TV shows, novels, manga comics, or just about anything with a good story world and cast of characters. When I recently visited Fanfiction.net, a large repository of such writing, I calculated—again, using some equally crude napkin estimates—that there were about 325 million words’ worth of stories written about the popular young-adult novel The Hunger Games, with each story averaging around fourteen thousand words. That’s just for one book: there are thousands of other forums crammed full of writing, ranging from twenty-six thousand Star Wars stories to more than seventeen hundred pieces riffing off Shakespeare’s works. And on top of fan fiction, there are also all the discussion boards, talmudically winding comment threads on blogs and newspapers, sprawling wikis, meticulously reported recaps of TV shows, or blow-by-blow walk-through dissections of video games; some of the ones I’ve used weigh in at around forty thousand words. I would hazard we’re into the trillions now.
Is any of this writing good? Well, that depends on your standards, of course. I personally enjoyed Okolloh’s blog and am regularly astonished by the quality and length of expression I find online, the majority of which is done by amateurs in their spare time. But certainly, measured against the prose of an Austen, Orwell, or Tolstoy, the majority of online publishing pales. This isn’t surprising. The science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon famously said something like, “Ninety percent of everything is crap,”2 a formulation that geeks now refer to as Sturgeon’s Law. Anyone who’s spent time slogging through the swamp of books, journalism, TV, and movies knows that Sturgeon’s Law holds pretty well even for edited and curated culture. So a global eruption of unedited, everyday self-expression is probably even more likely to produce this 90-10 split—an ocean of dreck, dotted sporadically by islands of genius. Nor is the volume of production uniform. Surveys of commenting and posting generally find that a minority of people are doing most of the creation we see online.3 They’re ferociously overproductive, while the rest of the online crowd is quieter. Still, even given those parameters and limitations, the sheer profusion of thoughtful material that is produced every day online is enormous.
And what makes this explosion truly remarkable is what came before: comparatively little. For many people, almost nothing.
Before the Internet came along, most people rarely wrote anything at all for pleasure or intellectual satisfaction after graduating from high school or college. This is something that’s particularly hard to grasp for professionals whose jobs require incessant writing, like academics, journalists, lawyers, or marketers. For them, the act of writing and hashing out your ideas seems commonplace. But until the late 1990s, this simply wasn’t true of the average nonliterary person. The one exception was the white-collar workplace, where jobs in the twentieth century increasingly required more memo and report writing. But personal expression outside the workplace—in the curious genres and epic volume we now see routinely online—was exceedingly rare. For the average person there were few vehicles for publication.
What about the glorious age of letter writing? The reality doesn’t match our fond nostalgia for it. Research suggests that even in the United Kingdom’s peak letter-writing years4—the late nineteenth century, before the telephone became common—the average citizen received barely one letter every two weeks, and that’s even if we generously include a lot of distinctly unliterary business missives of the “hey, you owe us money” type. (Even the ultraliterate elites weren’t pouring out epistles. They received on average two letters per week.) In the United States, the writing of letters greatly expanded after 1845, when the postal service began slashing its rates on personal letters and an increasingly mobile population needed to communicate across distances. Cheap mail was a powerful new mode of expression—though as with online writing, it was unevenly distributed, with probably only a minority of the public taking part fully, including some city dwellers who’d write and receive mail every day. But taken in aggregate, the amount of writing was remarkably small by today’s standards. As the historian David Henkin notes in The Postal Age, the per capita volume of letters in the United States in 1860 was only 5.15 per year.5 “That was a huge change at the time—it was important,” Henkin tells me. “But today it’s the exceptional person who doesn’t write five messages a day. I think a hundred years from now scholars will be swimming in a bewildering excess of life writing.”
As an example of the pre-Internet age, consider my mother. She’s seventy-seven years old and extremely well read—she received a terrific education in the Canadian high school system and voraciously reads novels and magazines. But she doesn’t use the Internet to express herself;