In an essay in the New York Times, author Steven Johnson ("Mind Wide Open" and "Everything Bad Is Good for You") suggests that word processing "has been less revolutionary than you might think," because "writers don't normally rely on the computer for the more subtle arts of inspiration and association. We use the computer to process words, but the ideas that animate those words originate somewhere else, away from the screen. The word processor has changed the way we write, but it hasn't yet changed the way we think." But he thinks that tools for thought may finally become a reality for people who manipulate words for a living, with the advent of a dozen new programs that share "two remarkable properties: the ability to interpret the meaning of text documents; and the ability to filter through thousands of documents in the time it takes to have a sip of coffee. Put those two elements together and you have a tool that will have as significant an impact on the way writers work as the original word processors did." Johnson notes that "there's a fundamental difference between searching a universe of documents created by strangers and searching your own personal library. When you're freewheeling through ideas that you yourself have collated -- particularly when you'd long ago forgotten about them -- there's something about the experience that seems uncannily like freewheeling through the corridors of your own memory. It feels like thinking."
posted by Marcus Zillman |
4:00 AM
