We are in the throes of what is being called the 'fourth industrial revolution'. The ability to move between different types of writing, often at speed, is increasingly essential for writers. From blogs and Wikipedia entries to Twitter and Instagram, from smartphones to tablets, e-books and online multiplayer games, genres are morphing and new technologies are emerging apace. These are exciting times. Changes in new media technologies bring new opportunities. However, the pace of change is so fast it can feel hard to keep up. It is estimated that 65 per cent of children entering primary school will go on to work in jobs that do not exist. We must prepare for technologies that have yet to be invented. To be 'deeply literate' in the digital world means being at home in a shifting mix of words, images and sounds.
How do you come to feel at home in such a shifting mix? Even a seemingly comprehensive set of new technological skills could soon be obsolete.
Creative flexibility is key. The aim here is to enable development of such creative flexibility. This book presents a model of creativity that is designed to provide a writer with the means of building writerly resilience and embracing the wealth of new and emerging writing and publishing opportunities.
The fourth industrial revolution, featuring as it does the emergence of, for example, artificial intelligence and smart systems, is arguably a more comprehensive and all-encompassing revolution than anything we have ever seen. We take its impact for granted. Even a very basic website might feature text and sound and visuals and space for users' comments. Via a few clicks on a smartphone we can access maps and podcasts and archives all over the world. Such multimodality is now an everyday reality, it is the 'experience of living'. In a digital age, the need to work with different technologies and genres is par for the course for everyone. Just take the UK, the government's 2017 policy paper, Digital Strategy puts digitality at the centre of the country's future. Within 20 years, it says, 90 per cent of all jobs will require some digital skill, and, an estimated 1.2 million new technical and digitally skilled people will be needed by 2022 to 'satisfy future skills needs'. There is pressure on us all in today's workplace to be proficient and resourceful communicators using a range of software and platforms, able to pick up fresh technological skills near-instantaneously. Users of new media technologies must be able to, 'assimilate messages from multiple sources; manage such inputs resourcefully and swiftly; turn such inputs into one meaningful, persuasive, relevant output; and remain adaptable as new technologies emerge'. This kind of speedy, savvy weaving between screens and applications and inputs and outputs is at odds with the (strangely persistent) cliché of what it is to be a writer.
According to the cliché, a writer is someone who works alone, perhaps with a chewed favourite pen or a battered second-hand typewriter, most likely in a cold and icy garret, periodically hurling screwed up pages into a waste paper bin, removed and isolated. Such a state of isolation may be useful for targeted sections of time but it is not, as we move deeper into the twenty-first century, a realistic long-term aim for writers, or even necessarily desirable. To remove ourselves like that is to remove ourselves from possibilities.
