Editorial. All the World’s a Page: Towards a Definition of ‘Writer’ in an Age of Opportunity

in an Age of OpportunityHuman endeavour is usually understood to be 'professional' when it attracts payment.The butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker, for instance, must surely have sold their wares once they arrived at the fair.Otherwise, rub-a-dub-dub, they would merely have been 'three men' in a tub.But as the nursery rhyme makes clear, they were tradesmen.They had careers.They brought to market meat, muffins, wicks and wax.For this, their produce, they received whatever that market would bear.But art is a different matter.Proportionally little art has ever made it to market, with painters, singers, and dancers typically allowing the pleasure of creation to be its own reward.And, of course, the world has known (and, sadly, not known) untold numbers of unpaid writers too.Rather paradoxically, then, 'the artist' has always been famous for toiling in obscurity.But the obvious difference between 'always' and today is that, in modern times, singers, dancers, writers, and artists of all cast and character have, via the Internet, readily available public outlets for their work.While many of those outlets are unpaid -most, actually, are unpaid -they offer unprecedented opportunity for self-promotion along with infinite possibility for readership and audience.YouTube, Vimeo, and innumerable other online platforms host the prodigiously uploaded recordings of performance artists, some of which 'go viral.' Writers, in the main, have little need for visual content and many host their own blogs.Or they submit work to both paying and non-paying online publications that vary widely in calibre, editorial oversight, and 'traffic'what would once have been called 'circulation.'

Abstract licence: CC BY-NC-ND

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