“Owlr will never work, no one likes to read these days,” everyone keeps telling me. “You should instead make an app for videos. Watching videos is all people do these days.” But there are already so many video apps - I want to tell them. But that’s hardly the reason why I want to build Owlr.
One big reason is that I disagree. I think people still love to read. We read all the time, perhaps without even realizing it - video descriptions, comments, subtitles. The internet is full of things to read. But Owlr is not just about reading. It’s about writing.
Writing is a way to not just express our ideas, but also to organize them, and even generate new ideas. We think of new things and we tend to think more clearly while writing. While many videos tend to ramble on about topics and sometimes misinformation, people don’t take them seriously. But the written word has power. Because it can be, and is expected to be, edited.
The process is editing makes an article well-thought-out. It shows that the author took the time to think and rethink, write and edit. That’s why we often discover surprising things while reading, because the author had been thinking about something a bit too much. And that’s the best part of reading. It makes you want to write.
Paul Graham, computer scientist and founder of startup accelerator Y-Combinator writes in his essay The Need to Read, “A good writer will almost always discover new things in the process of writing. And there is, as far as I know, no substitute for this kind of discovery.”
Writing is one of the earliest skills developed by every civilized society. One of the earliest things humans learned to do was to express their ideas and experiences - through art and cave paintings and glyphs. All the major religions have a written text as their basis - the Bible, Ramayana, Bhagwat Gita, Guru Granth Sahib, Torah, Koran…
And that is not a coincidence. Putting our original thoughts into words is based on a basic human need - immortality. Our words will stay behind, like our legacy. And that’s what everyone wants. To leave our wisdom behind. To feel like we, too, created something original and unique that’ll live on after we die.
In fact, even the internet started with written-only content. Blogs were some of the first formats of content on the internet that brought people online. However, the modern internet made writing shorter and shorter - like fast food - quick to digest and just as unhealthy. Because it gives you the feeling of being content in the short-term, making you feel productive without learning anything.
So I hope that in the age when social media has earned the reputation of making people feel anxious and angry and depressed, Owlr can help you learn new things, discuss new ideas, and most importantly, be inspired to write.
