What Happens When Everyone Can Be a Writer? Aarthi Vadde’s New Book Asks Just That

Aarthi Vadde, E. Blake Byrne Associate Professor of English, spends a lot of time thinking about what happens to literature when anyone can write whatever they want, whenever they want, in public.

Her new book, “We the Platform: How the Internet Changed Twenty-First-Century Literature”, out this June with Columbia University Press, examines how digital platforms reshaped not only the publishing industry but the very idea of what literature is.

“I’ve always been interested in experimental writing and how experimental writing comes to occupy the category of literature,” says Vadde. But with the rise of the internet and social media, that question has been pushed into new territory.   

“The way that I came to this book was probably as much from being a regular person who had a life before social media and saw how social media changed life,” she says.  

What struck her was how little the literary world seemed to examine a medium that was increasingly shaping public writing.  

“People were talking on social media, but not about social media,” she says, “and about the way social media was changing the contemporary literary industries and even the way it was changing how people write what they considered good writing.” 

The result, the book argues, is what Vadde calls an era of “mass writing,” a cultural moment in which millions of people can publish text instantly to a public audience. 

“We’re in this era of mass writing, where if you want to, you can make a free account and start expressing yourself in the world,” Vadde says. “That possibility is the result of a business model called Web 2.0, which is the foundation of the internet as we know it now.”

“People were talking on social media, but not about social media, and about the way social media was changing the contemporary literary industries and even the way it was changing how people write what they considered good writing.”

“We the Platform” traces how the infrastructure built by tech companies in the early 2000s transformed literary culture. Vadde begins with the ideological roots of Web 2.0, including the influential 2004 essay by tech publisher Tim O’Reilly that declared “the web is a platform.” 

“There was a technical meaning, which was that it’s a platform for other developers to build upon,” she explains. “But then there was also a social vision — that it was an opportunity for passive consumers to become active participants.”

The idea was powerful. Platforms promised to eliminate gatekeepers and give ordinary users a voice. While the promise contained  truth, Vadde says, it downplayed the economic structures that would later extract value from users’ content.

“At the foundation of this was the idea of the platform as democratic and restoring freedoms that had been taken away from people when they were turned into consumers,” she says. “Plenty of people couldn’t get published before, and plenty of people did find their voice.”

Vadde’s book moves through key phases of Web 2.0, from early social media experiments to contemporary debates about artificial intelligence, arguing that literature has adapted to these changing conditions.

“Through the negotiation of a Web 2.0 world, literature reimagined itself through its conversation with mass writing,” she says.

Rather than dismiss online and crowd-based writing, Vadde focuses on authors like Jennifer Egan and Teju Cole who engaged directly with this new environment. Margaret Atwood and Naomi Alderman explored serialized stories on Wattpad, a social storytelling platform.

“Some writers defined themselves as being against the internet and defined literature as that which was not online,” she says. “But other writers, like Egan and Atwood, went online and engaged with the world they found there, and actually wrote interesting things as a result.”

One chapter examines Wattpad, where Atwood experimented with publishing fiction for younger readers. Atwood described the platform as a way to reach audiences who were already gathering around digital storytelling.

“When you’re trying to recruit new people into the reading class, where are you going to go?” Vadde says. “These platforms have become the spaces where people congregate, where they enjoy stories, where they actually read.”

“Some writers defined themselves as being against the internet and defined literature as that which was not online. But other writers went online and engaged with the world they found there, and actually wrote interesting things as a result.”

At the same time, Vadde argues that the internet’s influence on literature is often misunderstood through narratives of cultural decline. Critics frequently claim that digital platforms are destroying reading and literary culture.  

She sees it as something more complicated.  

“There’s this larger conversation around literature right now, saying that there’s a decline in reading,” she says. “But I push against the narrative of the end of literature by saying that literature is living on in an environment we don’t want to look at.” 

Fan fiction communities, online writing platforms and digital storytelling all establish intense engagement with narrative, even if they exist outside of what we think of as traditional literary institutions.

“When we say, ‘the decline of reading,’ the decline of what kind of reading?” she asks. “There are deeply, seriously enthralled fans who are reading all kinds of fiction online.”

For Vadde, the point is not that platforms have improved literature. In many ways, she argues, they have intensified competition, commodified expression and created new pressures on writers.

But they have also transformed the conditions under which literature evolves.

“The story of literature is much bigger than books; it’s the story of new writing technologies, interpretative communities and power dynamics,” she says. “My book finds literary value in spaces where writing, reading and public conversation are all unfolding together.”