The Internet has produced a foaming Niagara of writing. Consider these current roughestimates: Each day we compose 154 billion emails and more than 500 million tweets on Twitter.On Facebook, we write about 16 billion words per day. That's just in the United States. In China.it's 100 million updates each day on Sina Weibo, the country's most popular microblogging tool.and millions more on social networks in other languages worldwide, including Russia's VK.Text messages are terse, but globally they're our most frequent piece of writing: 12 billion perday.How much writing is that. precisely? Well, doing an extraordinarily crude back-of-the-napkin calculation, and sticking only to email and utterances in social media, I calculate thatwe're composing at least 3.6 trillions words daily, or the equivalent of 36 million books everyday. The entire U. S. L.ibrary of Congress. by comparison, holds around 35 million books.        Is any of the writing good? Well, that depends on your standards of course. The sciencefiction writer Theodore Sturgeon famously said something like. "Ninety percent of everything iserap," a formulation that geeks now refer to as Sturgeon's L.aw. Anyone who's spent timeslogging through the swamp of books, journalism. TV and movies know that Sturgeon's Lawholds pretty well even for edited and curated culture. So a global eruption of unedited, everydayself-expression is probably even more likely to produce this 90-10 split--an ocean of dreck.dotted sporadically by istands of genius. Nor is the volume of production uniform. Surveys ofcommenting and posting generally find that a minority of people are doing most of the creationwe sec online. They're ferociously over productive, while the rest of the online crowd is quieter.Still, the sheer profusion of thoughtful material that is produced everyday online is enormous.       And what makes this explosion truly remarkable is what came before: comparativelylittle. For many people, almost nothing. Before the Internet came along, most people rarely wroteanything at all for pleasure or intellectual satisfaction after graduating from high school orcollege. This is something that's hard to grasp for professionals whose jobs require incessantwriting, like academics, journalists, lawyers, or marketers.
(excerpt from Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Minds for the Betterby Clive Thomson)
【題組】46. The most prolific form of writing nowadays is:
(A)blog posts
(B) tweets on twitter
(C) text messages
(D) Facebook posts