Giving your words more weight through joint digital authorship

It is a fantastic thing that literally anyone with an internet connection can bypass the traditional guardians of the printed word and put their research or opinions into the public sphere. In theory, it is great for democracy, but predictably, there are some downsides, which we will explore in this blog.

With information on the internet increasing exponentially, it is more important than ever for authorship in the digital age to be of the best possible quality, otherwise the text someone has worked hard on can be easily lost amidst all the noise.

This is where the phrase “two brains are better than one” comes into play. Digital authorship brings new opportunities for the simple co-creation of documents. With the right text annotation tool, people on opposite sides of the world can collaborate, creating something fresh, engaging, and up-to-the-minute, with much greater speed and ease than before.

Internet users becoming authors

The internet has not only given a way for people to express themselves in many different forms, it has positively encouraged it. Social media would cease to exist without user-generated content. If you recently booked a holiday, you may be offered an inducement by the booking website to leave a review. Encouraging people to regularly post and contribute is essential for marketing purposes and driving engagement. Due to this, over the last 30 or so years it has become completely natural for us to put our words into the public domain, often without much thought. While we might feel stressed about the impact of our opinions recorded in a newspaper, dashing off a comment on Twitter for the world to see is often not given nearly as much consideration.

Problems with the new digital authoring economy

More content everyday

WordPress sees 2 billion blogs a year, while 6,000 Tweets are authored every second! Having more information is not necessarily a bad thing; but how do we categorize it or truly engage with it? Conducting slow thoughtful analysis of a text is difficult when we are constantly bombarded with new information.

Lack of quality content - The ability to easily create and disseminate information, as mentioned in the introduction, can be a double-edged sword. While giving a voice to those that may not traditionally get a say, it also gives free reign to conspiracy theorists, neo-nazis, and climate deniers to more easily spread poorly researched and biased information. What’s worse, due to the aforementioned bombardment of information, the time we devote to critically analyzing texts is becoming shorter, impairing our judgement.

“Optimization” over quality - Stemming again from the amount of content available on pretty much any conceivable subject, there is a need to try harder to make your text seen. For this reason, texts are routinely optimized to include keywords, edited to take out “boring bits”, or revised to include greater shock value. In the effort to get noticed, quality can be compromised.

Why good writing still matters

Despite the obstacles mentioned above, quality does win out in the end. Especially when disinformation is rife, it is definitely worth pursuing a text you believe will have a positive impact on society.

How co-authorship can help

Everyone who produces text has some blind spots, it’s why there are editors and supervisors to check anything that has been created. Even if you’re a freelance writer, having a trusted person who can give your text a quick look can be extremely valuable. By utilizing the best co-authoring apps, this can be a really easy process. A writer can send a document to their co-worker or editor, see changes in real time, and receive comments that can be used to make the document text that much better.

Work on PDF documents collaboratively with Lumin

PDFs are the document of choice for online magazines, journals, and any business or education-related documentation. While PDFs were originally quite hard to edit, there are now many tools which can be used to bring a text up to scratch, annotate it, or add images and any other multimedia elements.

One of these quality tools is Lumin. Through Lumin’s software, PDF sharing and PDF collaboration are made extremely easy. If you’re looking to package a piece of text professionally, Lumin lets you do it in the cloud through both browser and desktop. If you’ve been working in any Microsoft Office files, or have images in JPG form, you can convert and compile them into one sleek looking document, which can then be annotated by any person you have given permission to for the purposes of reviewing. They can highlight, add comments, or even make direct changes depending on the level of permission that you provide.

Lastly, Lumin has built in OCR functionality, meaning that previously unreadable PDFs can now be searched within for a specific word or passage, making the document review process much more efficient.

Joint digital authorship as the way forward

With tools like Lumin at our disposal, we are now able to jointly create quality documents that look great and drive engagement, while still having intrinsic value. Having integrated with Google Drive and Dropbox, as well as having its own cloud storage, you can work on your document with Lumin when the inspiration strikes, not just when you are confined to the office!

Start using our free version today, or upgrade to the premium package for less than $10 a month!