Thanks for taking the time to reply. You're right, I didn't know how to interpret the technological and economic conditions statement.

However, it is still unclear to me. jdietrich and yourself suggest, then, that profiting from writing and publishing was due to only a handful of organisations holding a monopoly on the the 'writing market'. If we had X number of writers applying to fill writing positions at these few organisations, before these writers were profiting from it because fewer organisations meant bigger profits for themselves (they didn't have to share the 'wealth' with as many competitors) and their 'employees'. I hope I'm getting it right so far. Fast forward to the present, and now they are not. You are saying this is because writers can basically post their texts to be read for free on the Web and competition in the publishing world has increased. Please let me know if I misinterpreted anything.

What I say to this is, if I have interpreted what you're saying correctly, how do you get that these same people wanted to write for free? I get that when you do something you love, it doesn't feel like work, but everyone wants to get paid for their services rendered. I mean, let's not kid ourselves here. People need to pay bills and feed families. This is how our society is set up. I offer a service, you pay me for it. Similar to bartering practised in the past. Why is writing the exception? This I do not understand and I will not even start to guess, though I do have some ideas (information should be free, knowledge has no sole owner, etc.).

Writing as a leisure activity, as you have defined it, has existed ever since the Greeks. There is no "might primarily become a leisure activity"; it already has. Euripedes wrote about things that went in direct contrast to what most, if not all, Greek playwrights were writing and were supposed to write about. The equivalent of "being published" back then was winning literary contests to gain recognition. Euripedes (~400 BC) only won a few times while many out-won him by a lot (Sophocles by five times, winning 20 times or so, I believe). This isn't some new phenomenon. Writers's desire to write without getting paid or publishing has had very little to do with only oligopolies or semi-monopolies being in existence at a certain point in time. Another example: Don Quixote (1605 AD) by Cervantes. Jorge Luis Borges (early 20th century) spoke at length about his embarrassment for wanting to publish, because his father never wanted to be published and they speak of a long history of writers who publish as losing a sense of integrity.

And yes, all this meant, little to no pay.

The fact that most online writing isn't very good doesn't matter. As Paul Graham pointed out a couple of years back:
> Those in the print media who dismiss the writing online because of its low average quality are missing an important point: no one reads the average blog. In the old world of channels, it meant something to talk about average quality, because that's what you were getting whether you liked it or not. But now you can read any writer you want. So the average quality of writing online isn't what the print media are competing against. They're competing against the best writing online. [0]

Actually, I wasn't referring to only bad online writing. In fact, bad writing in print is more dangerous and can cause more harm, because the average person still puts more weight and confidence on the printed word, because people think it is harder to publish a book.

Just to be clear, I never said that there is no or little or lower quality writing than before, be it on or offline.

With regard to photography, I think there is a creative side to photography that is hard to measure. But I'm not referring to that. At my workplace, we have an in-house photographer. We don't use artistic photographers. There is very little creativity involved (my photographer colleague tells me this himself). I don't know much about photography, but he tells me they should know about lighting, shutter speed, aperture, and take the photo so they can easily edit the white space out of the photo to be published online. They take product photos. If a product looks dark or distorted, we re-shoot it. Colour-matching only barely matters. Unless it is totally off, we don't re-shoot because the colours are slightly off.

In writing, even scientific and technical writing can be good or bad, depending on who reads it. What's interesting is that a lot of technical writing is not written for technical people or those well-versed on the topic at hand, so these people make the worst critics of it. It is harder to get someone not well-versed in it, who actually is your audience, to get to tell you what needs to be improved or what they don't understand about the technical writing, because they don't understand what they don't understand to begin with.