This piece by Nicholas Carr made me realise something - nowadays, I'm not really sure where my writing will be read.
For most of my writing life it's been very clear. I've written on this blog, and, most of the time it'll have been read on a computer screen. Maybe rendered slightly differently by different browsers but mostly the same sort of experience. That's the experience I tended to write for anyway.
And when I write for Campaign and Wired I tend to think of the print version when I'm writing. Though both end up online and possibly get more readers there than they do in the magazine. I dunno.
Thinking about it though, nowadays and increasingly, any of those things, and I guess my blog, could end up read on a phone, a tablet, or a kindle. It could be read via RSS or instapaper or something else. Some of it might end-up re-purposed via POD.
I know this is terribly obvious and not terribly new. But it's never fully struck me before. I'm used to thinking the design of things has been atomised, fragmented - that poor old designers for the web could never be sure how something was eventually going to look. But I hadn't thought about it as something for writers to worry about. It's just text, how different could it be? But it is different, if you wrote a book you used to have a reasonable idea what the reading experience would look like - no longer. That seems like a thing. That might change writing. A bit. Not a lot. But some.
