An audience will see everything I write and post online. For some reason, I have never fully thought of how a large a group of readers might be reading what I write, but now that it’s been brought to my attention, this realization has gotten me thinking. Who is in this audience? How does this strange mass of online personas specifically enhance or change my writing? It’s surreal to think that somewhere out there is a giant conglomerate of peers, friends, family, and random strangers I will never meet reading my every post, viewing every picture, and potentially responding to or forming a judgment on my writing. This effect of an online group of readers, the “audience effect” has, on further reflection, definitely made the writing process and my eventual product something that I deem suitable for the mass of possible online readership. As Clive Thompson argues in his book, Smarter Than You Think, the online audience effect and it’s subsequent broadened thinking is making my writing stronger. 

As an online writer, my work seems to be limited to Facebook comments, tweets, and messages or emails to my friends and teammates. But, according to Angela Lunsford, students today, including myself, are “writing so much more than students before them ever did…it’s stunning” (Thompson 67). In reality, all of the online writing I do adds up. For Facebook in particular, I joined in 2008, and have been actively posting and sharing on the site since. The recent addition to the site, celebrating the social network’s 10^th anniversary, the Facebook movie, showcased to me the extent and reach that my work on the site has had. Every major post and status update I have ever done were showed to me in a cute two minute long montage. Watching the video, it is possible to see the first ever post put onto your social media page, and see all of the most responded too and well-received posts following. It is here that I noticed the way in which I was writing changed. In an effort to get more “likes” or comments from friends and friends of friends, my writing and posts became increasingly punchy, vibrant, and attempted for wit in the fewest amount of characters. Facebook updates taught me to change my writing for the audience I was sharing it with, a group of my peers, as opposed to the thousands of writings I had previously done directed towards my teachers. As my writing shifted from a limited focus to one person, to a crowd of people, the writing became stronger.    

1. The Twitter Effect