It’s been eleven years since I completed my undergraduate education. The Internet had upended the music industry during that time, but not writing and publishing. The information economy was dwarfed by fears of Y2K, when airports would shutdown, power plants would go offline, and we’d all be waking up with a killer hangover. The term, web 2.0, did not yet exist.

I double majored in English with an emphasis on writing and Japanese Studies. My interest lay in writing and in that hallway of the humanities writing seemed more marketable than literature. Moreover, I viewed speaking Japanese as a key to a job either teaching or translating. There was no talk of online identities, social media, or content creation. Writing fell into the realm of fiction, poetry, essays, thought and research papers. The term content could easily be confused with the feeling I had reading fiction and writing short stories. (more…)