“You are right,” Nietzsche replied, “our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.”
As we use what the sociologist Daniel Bell has called our “intellectual technologies”—the tools that extend our mental rather than our physical capacities—we inevitably begin to take on the qualities of those technologies.
When I was reading "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" these two quotes stood out to me. I think the idea that our thoughts and words are in some respects influenced by the tools we use to convey them is an interesting one. In the article, the author explains how writing on a typwriter supposedly made Nietzche's prose tighter. I remember making the move (way back in the eighth grade) from composing my stories in a spiral notebook to typing them on a computer. While I enjoyed many aspects of word processing (spell check being chief among them) I remember being bothered by the fact that when I edited my work on the computer, the older way I had written it just dissappeared. For a while I became somewhat obsessed with the "save as" button, renaming my files after every major change just in case I wanted to go back to an older version of my prose. I eventually stopped doing this and just learned to let the old versions go. Was that an example of me changing the way I wrote? Did it make me a more "decisive" editor? Was I starting to "take on the qualitites" of a word processor as Daniel Bell suggests? And now that I'm typing in a text box that I know will be posted to the web, how does this change the way I write. Certainly the idea of audience looms much larger in my head than it does when I am writing a story on my computer which I may or may not choose to send to an editor in hopes of publication. I find it a little intimidating to know that others can be reading this post moments after I click "publish." What if I decide later that I don't like what I've written? I can't go back and have people "unview" it. I think it makes me a little more timid and a little less likely to say something I'm not sure of. Perhaps, though, this is becuase I grew up in a generation much more private than the one that has grown-up with Facebook, blogs, Twitter, and all manner of public displays of information. Perhaps those younger than me don't have the same reluctance to take risks with writing that will become immediately public.
I am not sure whether I considered myself a writer before I was able to use a word-processor. Isn't that funny? Your point about the idea of an "audience" really hits home! I really need to watch what I put on Facebook as a student, parent or coworker could be reading it.
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