… 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.
Mr. Johnson has apparently been living my dreams for the past 3 years, by employing writing tools that I have only been able to imagine. It is unfortunate that there are no links in his article, something which I will try to correct. Also by the time you are reading this you will most likely have to pay to read it. Except I have copied it in it’s entirity. All in the name of research.
Tool for Thought
By STEVEN JOHNSON
Published: January 30, 2005
The New York Times
One often hears from younger writers that they can’t imagine how anyone managed to compose an article, much less an entire book, with a typewriter. Kerouac banging away at his Underwood portable? Hemingway perched over his Remington? They might as well be monastic scribes or cave painters.
But if the modern word processor has become a near-universal tool for today’s writers, its impact has been less revolutionary than you might think. Word processors let us create sentences without the unwieldy cross-outs and erasures of paper, and despite the occasional catastrophic failure, our hard drives are better suited for storing and retrieving documents than file cabinets. But 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.
