Today, in the age of social media and the world wide web, publishing content for the world to see is extremely simple to do. With the click of a single button, a person can share their thoughts, criticisms and ideas extremely easily. Social media, especially, serves as a uniquely effective tool with which users can send articles or recommend books that they particularly enjoyed with their friends, who will then share with their friends. This will eventually cause these forms of literature to become widely distributed across various networks.

One of the most inarguably popular social media platforms today is Facebook. Through the use of Facebook, users are able to share digital literature, stories and articles sometimes faster than they are able to read them. Facebook specifically allows users to select from various options as to who they would like to share with, from solely the user (“Only Me”), to the user’s friends (“Just friends”), the user’s “Friends of friends,” and lastly, “Public” – which ultimately allows the post to be seen by virtually anyone with access to Internet. Because of this, news is able to spread extremely quickly. An example of such a case is a fairly recent one, when Paris was attacked by suicide bombers on a fateful Friday last year in November. Almost immediately, articles were posted on Facebook, not only by news outlets but also people who were personally affected by the tragedy – whether by having experienced it in person or being related to somebody who was personally affected. Sympathies and condolences were, in return, shared in waves, as those who read the news and articles were compelled to react.

The key point to note here is that despite being thousands of miles away from the place where all this took place, I learnt of the situation in Paris within minutes of it happening. Sitting in my room that night, looking out, there was no possibility of me experiencing what those in Paris were experiencing – and yet I was able to learn of the news by typing a few words on my laptop and scrolling on my mouse.

Another popular social media platform is Twitter, which allows users to share their thoughts with millions of followers within a 140 word limit. This forces users to be creative in what they choose to share with their audiences. However, many times, users may find themselves with much more to share than can be contained in 140 words. In those cases, many of them resort to the use of hypertext: proving their audience with a brief summary and then linking them to another site that hosts a much longer, more detailed article, story, or literary text.

In the age of today’s rapidly changing technology, the world of literature and how stories are spread is also changing. It is now possible for the sole distributors of articles and literature to be the authors themselves and other users on social media, which, ten years ago, would be something that was unheard of. All of these appear to be changes for the best – beneficial to users as information becomes more readily accessible to a growing audience. However, with all the changes happening, the role of literature and the distribution of literature in the modern world is also shifting. People are constantly bombarded with multiple distractions, thus making the task of aiming to keep readers engaged something that authors must take into consideration when writing. Apart from vying for the time and attention of millions of social media users, authors will have to consider their target audiences and be wary of how to engage their audiences, in order to compel them to spend their time reading their work instead of on the multiple outlets of entertainment readily available on the Internet.