Dear World,

No, technology isn’t going to steal our job. It has surely changed it, but we can definitely make it work to our advantage to enhance the experience.

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I grew up in an era with shows on TV like ‘The Jetsons’ and movies like ‘The Fifth Element’ + more that built my expectations of the future. Then, many things were analogue even though the digital devices we used were far more inferior. Fields like research, writing, and profiling required ‘foot to pavement’ groundwork to aciheve impactful results. They had to go out into the world and interact in order to yield more impact results. For its time, everything was better done in person, and we all had less work and worrying to do. However, I won’t lie, my personality loves the fact that I don’t necessarily need to interact too much with the world. My social anxiety and introversion would have a field day as an adult if I had to really do all that.

Things are much different today. Life and work – for the most part – have gone from analogue to digital and from digital to virtual. Some might even say they’re more immersive than anything, for example, there’s the shift from VR (virtual reality) to AR (augmented reality). Recently, I worked alongside a web developer who transformed imagery and text into augmented reality and I was truly amazed. We worked on a team responsible for capturing the organisation’s year in review. So, I formed part of the team that wrote, edited and put words together for readability and the developer was tasked with transforming that into a virtual magazine of sorts that had the capability to take readers and users through an augmented reality to enhance their UX – user experience.

Funny enough, AR isn’t where it ends. There is MR (mixed reality), ai (artificial intelligence) – and we all know about it because use it daily, SC (spatial computing), and BCI (brain computer interfaces). To be honest, I’m not au fait with most of these and that goes to show how vast technology is.

I’m in the writing and publishing field and most things have changed. This includes what we use to write or type, how we conduct interviews, and even how we go about publishing. Paper still exists and we still use it, but many prefer to type on a screen, use a stylus pen, or use voice to text and more, to write. Instead of an face-face conversation for an interview, we lean more towards a virtual connection even when our subject is within close proximity. It’s much more difficult to sell newspapers, and to be relevant in the online space, you need to have a certain je nais se quoi, that spark or charm that captivates. Add capitalism and continued globalisation to the mix and we now face a totally different landscape. This includes challenges with content creation, trademarking, content monetisation where owners actually earn, and audience reach through understanding algorithms, and more.

Everything can be done virtually these days. Most things are automated and it may seem like the answers to all our journalistic questions are already answered and lie in wait in a quick ai chatbot Q&A. Though most of that may be true, I stand firm in the belief that ai still doesn’t know how to truly replicate the human side of anything, and that includes how a story is explored and told. We still have that gift and I hope it forever stays that way.

Additionally, this world of ai provides many opportunities for lazy writers and journalists to cheat and depend on pre-fabricated work to hold their work up. So, the drive to get to the truth and impact often dwindles. This is also true for students in school. They have it easier and more difficult all in one. Avoiding this is easy. Instead of getting the technology to do your work, collaborate with it to enhance what you’ve done, balance the input received and stick to morality. Okay, maybe it’s not as easy as it sounds because the flesh can easily fall to temptation of ‘ease’. However, the key lies in using ai as a tool to amplify creativity while preserving the human perspective that drives meaningful storytelling.

A solid case can be used right here on WordPress. The platform has transformed so much from when I began using it to what it is now. Initially, there were no ai tools to help us generate title options or a featured image. Heck! Tools like autocorrect or the indication that a word may be misspelled didn’t exist back when some of us or our predecessors’ used typewriters. We had to know how to spell and how to correct errors.

So, while many writers and journalists share warranted concerns that their niche is slowly disappearing and that they’ll be replaced, I say that we have to hone much deeper into how we humanise our stories. We must focus on the people as much as we focus on the inanimate.

That’s part of how we stay relevant and continue to make an impact in this ever-changing world.

I am not a subject matter expert here, but I hope you enjoyed this, found insight and perspective, and learned how to potentially make the changes work in your favour.

Signed,

The Suburban Girl JA®