Deborah Brandt writes in her 2014 book:
* Writing has always been used for work, production, output, earning, profit, publicity, practicality, record-keeping, buying, and selling. Increasingly, writing itself is the product that is bought and sold, as it embodies knowledge, information, invention, service, social relations, news – that is, the products of the new economy. At the turn of the twentieth century, knowledge workers represented 10 percent of all employees. By 1959 this proportion had increased to more than 30 percent of the workforce, and by 1970 it was 50 percent. In 2000, knowledge workers were estimated to account for 75 percent of the employed population, with the biggest gains found among highly educated professional
and technical workers in government and service-producing industries (Wyatt and Hecker 2006). If, as Thomas Stewart (1998) asserts, “Knowledge has become the primary ingredient in what we make, do, buy, and sell” (p. 12), then writing has become a dominant form of labor as it transforms knowledge and news into useable, shareable form.* The status of writing as a dominant form of labor in the US economy puts an unusual degree of pressure on people’s scribal skills, as their writing literacy is pulled deeply into manufacturing, processing, mining, and distributing information and knowledge. Writing is a time-intensive form of labor that tends to follow people home.
* So rapacious are the production pressures on writing, in fact, that they are redefining reading, as people increasingly read from the posture of the writer, from inside acts of writing, as they respond to others, research, edit, or review other people’s writing or search for styles or approaches to borrow and use in their own writing. Reading is being subordinated to the needs of writing…
* the idea that a text belongs to the person who writes it is not the only concept of authorship that can be found in current US copyright law. When it comes to writing undertaken within the scope of employment – in other words, the writing done by most people in society – copyright turns inside out: under a provision called “Work Made for Hire,” the law is careful to sever writers from ownership claims over the texts that they write at work.
* In the eyes of the law, the employer is the author of their texts. As individuals, workplace writers are not allowed to profit individually from the writing they do. Even the knowledge they may produce in their heads as a result of the writing they do at work is technically not theirs to benefit from. Further, workaday writers are not legally entitled to express their own views through their workplace writing. They can be fired for doing it, and they won’t get much support from the courts if they appeal. According to the Supreme Court, people do not really write at work as citizens or free beings but rather as willingly enlisted corporate voices. At least in their official capacities, workaday writers don’t write as themselves at work, according to the Court. They are not individually responsible for what they are paid to say. Consequently, they don’t really mean what they say. In fact, according to the Court, people who write for pay can’t really mean what they say. Their speech rights are corrupted and, hence, inoperable. From this perspective, writing starts to look a lot less romantic and a lot more feudal.
* copyright is reserved for texts that are considered creative or artistic, or that otherwise promote learning, or have some other enduring social utility…
* teachers and academics still enjoy this privileged exemption and, by dint of long-standing tradition, retain rights to their own writing and other intellectual property even when done on an employer’s premises.
* Constitutional scholar C. Edwin Baker (1989) has written most compellingly of what happens to a citizen’s voice once it is put into paid service – when it becomes (someone else’s) rented property. Such coerced speech necessarily loses its free-speech protections because it is no longer self-directed: “Once a person is employed to say what she does, the speech usually represents not her own self-expression but, at best, the expression of the employer” (p. 54 ). Baker elaborates:
“The First Amendment protects a person’s use of speech to order and create the world in a desired way and as a tool for understanding and communicating about the world in ways
he or she finds important. These uses are fundamental aspects of individual liberty and choice. However, in our present historical setting, commercial speech reflects market
forces that require enterprises to be profit-oriented. This forced profit orientation is not a manifestation of individual freedom or choice. Unlike the broad categories of protected speech, commercial speech does not represent an attempt to create or affect the world in a way that has any logical or intrinsic connection to anyone’s substantive values or personal wishes.”* speech made pursuant to official duties receives no First Amendment protection. Like private employers, government may control its employees’ speech in order to protect and promulgate its own interests.
* workaday writers are legally severed – economically, ethically, and politically – from the words they write on the job.
* writing – particularly literary writing but not exclusively so – enjoys its own prestige. Through the sometimes convoluted history of literacy in this culture and the ideologies it produces, writing is associated with creativity, talent, intellect, sensibility, knowledge – in a word, authority. In general, writing is a desirable skill, a somewhat scarce skill, respected for its difficulty and the achievement it represents, particularly when it results in publication. Writing benefits most of all from the cultural prestige of reading. Because many forms of reading over time have been marked with high cultural value, this value has come to extend to those who can write in those forms. In this climate, then, writing may bequeath its high status to an individual who engages in it. One can “make a name” through writing. Writing is also its own verifiable record of a powerful engagement with literacy and all of its goodness – including the human growth that is presumed to be entailed in an artistic or intellectual experience. This achievement of the writing per se certifies the writer and warrants the reading. Writing, then, can be an independent source of social value and power and, with some exceptions, it enhances the stature of anyone who claims authorship.
* Legal ghostwriting also collides with the custom of the court to be lenient with self-represented litigants.
* the Internet seems to be favoring a less original form of writing: creation by citation, sampling, cutting and pasting, the blurring of the roles of writers and readers.
* writing is wrapped in yearning and sometimes titanic ambition, tantamount to chasing a dream…
* Just as these young people were well aware of the high prestige afforded the successful artist or published author, they were also well aware of the precariousness of the occupation and the difficulty or unlikelihood of making a viable living as an independent writer…
* a writing orientation can create wariness toward reading, particularly toward its association with passivity and conformity.
* Another predicament of authorship… had to do with managing relations between one’s life and one’s work. …authorship could bring a heightened sense of confusion
and vulnerability, especially in the vicinity of friends and family. …misattribution, parody, estrangement, charges of libel, self exposure, the need for a pseudonym – these are all uncomfortable experiences that can attach to people who write yet rarely enter writing instruction as a focus for exploration and learning.* reading is largely an internalizing process… writing per se is action in the world. It is an externalizing experience, and so its effects, as we have seen, can come back at writers from the outside. Thoughts can stay private during reading, but they are relentlessly externalized during writing. …bring more wear and tear, more trouble, more risk. Writing risks social exposure, political retaliation, legal blame.
* in the twenty-first century, citizens are more likely to run afoul of the courts not because they are able to read too little but because they choose to write too much. Prosecutors and defense attorneys scour the online writing of prospective jurors, including blogs, Facebook entries, and tweets, to look for predispositions and biases. Several criminal convictions have been overturned in recent years after jurors were discovered writing online about their jury experiences (Grow 2010). Freewheeling personal expression associated with social media is in friction with the court’s traditional ways of protecting the rights of defendants by controlling the speech of jurors.
