What the Future Holds for Electronic Writing

As with everything in this world writing is evolving, relatively recently this thing called the internet came about and did all these crazy things to writing. This, internet has caused writing to have accelerated change most notably in way it is produced, how it is targeted and how it generates revenue. The future holds great things for electronic writing, it will become completely user based and as a result the internet will hold more valuable information than society has ever had access to before.
Right now there are sites for scholarly research papers that are completely user based. Anyone can submit a paper they have created that has value to the site. That does not mean that your submission will go through to become part of the online journal though. For most of these online journals, the paper must go through a vigorous peer review process that will deem if it is of high enough quality to become a part of the journal. The journal of musical research online covers a wide range of topics that have to do with music. They are user based and take papers from anyone that joins the site, the sites policy is that “Papers submitted for publication will be reviewed by two peers and only those papers of the highest international scholarly standards will be accepted for publication”
What the future holds for scholarly papers is a little different. There will be a main site, like Wikipedia, for almost all of the scholarly papers. It will have a very effective peer review system, in this peer review system the paper will have to pass higher and higher quality standards increasing in expectation as the peers that review it become more experienced and qualified. The peers will not only sort the papers by quality they will also sort the papers by readability, significance, interest and other things that could be important. Then the papers will be divided into tiers and categories on the site, the quality standards test will only decide what tier it goes on, while the readability and interest tests will determine if the paper goes to a more generally public accessible part of the site or a part that mostly scientists read. The importance will have to do with how much the article is displayed on the site and possibly if it goes on the front page. This system will effectively sort the papers that people create to share information or theories with others. It can be modified to sort most anything and similar systems will sort the electronic writing on other user based sites on the web.
Right now revenue has become somewhat of a problem for most newspapers that have converted into websites. They have had trouble making money off of online ads because they are not targeted well enough and they don’t make enough money off of clicks. Online visitors are not as valuable as print ones because they tend not to read everything in depth on the page according to Paul Farhi . Another reason that newspapers aren’t making as much as they used to is because of the loss of classified advertisers. With the advent of Craigslist, where people can post their items for free and to a bigger audience, newspapers have been losing more classified advertisers every year.
In the future of electronic writing, advertisements will be targeted better so that they can generate more revenue for the companies that buy them, then they will pay the sites with the advertisements more. The ways in which ads will be made more effective is that they advertisements will be targeted more to the readers needs. If an article is about cooking the advertisements will usually have something to do with that. The cookies that are installed on your browser will also keep track at what you look at and what you like and advertise to you based on that. They already do that now on certain sites to a small degree, but in the future the extent to which they are targeted will be extremely advanced. Say you’re a good online shopper and you know where to find the best prices and you buy the parts to make a subwoofer off a site like parts-express.com. Other sites may see that you know what you are doing and that you are trying to get the best prices and they will be able to create deals that will be tailored to take your business away from parts-express.com they won’t just drop the price below the competition to take away your business from the other site because that would easily be exploited. They would show you a price on the parts for some tweeters or some midrange speakers with a plan already created on how to create them that would make it so that you wouldn’t have to calculate the volume needed in the housing for the speaker. This is an extremely specific example but you could see how it would work in other cases.
Another trend that has been happening on the internet and that has started with photos, is the automatic combination of information to create a larger more detailed picture. There is a site and program called photosynth created by Microsoft that takes pictures from users of the same place or object and combines them to create a more detailed picture that can be almost 3-d if there are enough pictures. In the not so distant future, the earth will be almost entirely recorded in pictures and on a service like Google Earth you will be able to zoom in on ANY permanent or semi-permanent object or place and be able to see it in detail from ANY angle. Why stop at pictures, if you are looking at an object that is usually moving you will be able to pull up a video on it on the spot if you feel like watching it in motion. Tourism will probably be affected but that’s for another essay. This sounds freakishly amazing but photosynth/ is a great proof of concept, I recommend that you check it out to see what I am talking about.
In the future of writing this same concept will be applied. Programs will be made that will gather the writing on the internet and link it all together. If you are reading an article and don’t know the word, right click and find the definition, if you are reading a fictional story that parodies a certain event, there’s the summary of the event , if you are reading about Kanye West and want to say what’s up, there’s his phone number. Another thing that will happen is that the people who are linked to can pay to be linked more often and the sites that are linked from can charge a small amount of money for every reader they send the sites way as another small form of revenue. In the very distant future it’s possible that the programs will aggregate all the info on the web and turn it into articles on different things. Actually you would be able to choose any subject you are interested in and any length for the article and the page would synthesize an article for you to read based on that information.
If user based sites want to be used by many people and have lots of quality content then they must find a way to motivate the users to create the traffic and the content. Sure user based sites work great now but they can usually have parts that are unreliable. One thing that must be done is that the users must have a system like the one I described above to regulate the power and make sure that the best users gain the most power in the system. But the best way to motivate someone to do a good job is to pay them. There are many ways that sites could pay their users in the future but the best way would be by number of page visits or even better by paying them a percentage of the income they generate to the site from the money generating methods I described above. It wouldn’t be shocking if many sites didn’t just make the content creating jobs user based but the entire site, including programmers and people who coordinate the advertising. There would have to be a few head people who could strip the power from any user if they got out of control or abused the system. But if they were paid they would most likely know the consequences of their actions and not want to lose a source of revenue.
With the advancement of technology it seems like privacy will get violated very badly all the time. Anyone will be able to look up information on you whenever, sure you could make a system to keep peoples information safe but there are ways around that. If people want to find your information badly enough they probably will be able to. Celebrities will probably be affected the most, and will have a very hard time keeping their personal information private. People will have to become more comfortable about their information being out and outlooks will have to change.
In the future the community will reign. They will create the greatest source information that history has ever seen and they will do it because technology is making it easier to combine our efforts than ever. With this easy access of all this information the world will start to change but in what way is anyone’s guess.