As we complete the first third of our journey exploring texts in context, text making technologies appear to dissolve the text into its context. Is context everything? Writing, printing, and word processing combine with the author as merely a vessel to point to unreal (and virtual) language as the answer to that perennial question: What is the there out there? While we chase our tails in epistemologies and the linguistic and literary turns culminate another spiral from the inward turn, how do we morally evaluate these seemingly emancipatory technologies during the irrevocable descent into the precipice of a climatic dead end, in which Mars in a dozen or so generations becomes the new Earth. Perhaps it would not be so apocalyptic to see the missing irony in Matthew Kirschenbaum’s colorful narrative, in Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing, of the first novel written with a text processor. Was not Len Deighton’s Bomber written using the MT/ST a clear example emancipatory text technology in the service of the glorification of violent aerial technology? Perhaps humans never figured out the self-sustainable uses of technology, blaming technology as if language itself was the cause of hate speech.

While much else could be said about the writer’s love affair with text making technology, it is perhaps a truism that most if not all technologies have some combination of benefits and drawbacks, upside and downside. A successful outcome in the use of a given technology comes down perhaps to achieving a net positive effect of benefits over drawbacks. To the extent technology places more power in the hands of the tool user, successful use of software tools would seem to depend on additional computer skills and proficiencies.

As the main work horse for writing, word processing software has relieved me of a considerable degree of mental recall and mental organization of text (defined as meaningful language) required to order my thoughts into a final sequential form. Similar to Kirschenbaum’s accounts of many writers’ experience with computers, word processing for me has enabled language to flow in an almost raw state onto the virtual page; editing becomes a matter of cutting and pasting with the keyboard and a pointing device, essentially trivializing the inserting, deleting, and moving of any amount of text. Spelling and grammar checking tools reduce the time needed to achieve levels of quality and correctness. These features have freed me to focus more on smaller units of language such as the sentence, clauses, and phrases. While experimentation, fluidity, and the malleability of vocabulary, idioms, phrases, sentences, and paragraphs are all possible without word processing, the paper approach to drafting and editing requires significantly more time and effort compared to the time and effort to draft and edit text in a software document. Thus for a given amount of time, more iteration, editing, and polishing can be achieved with word processing than with paper, assuming a proficiency with the software.

How has word processing impacted writing style? It is hard to tell. In addition to Kirschenbaum’s observations, it would be interesting to analyze or access analysis already undertaken to compare corpora before and after the advent of word processing using machine learning to see if software technology has changed the nature of written texts, especially if word processed texts could be labeled. To the extent more iterative editing smooths out awkward syntax, improves transitions, and achieves a higher level rhetorical effectiveness, I might arguably draw a couple of quick conclusions: (1) that readers and writers have benefited from software technology, and (2) that technology has enabled a larger number of people to achieve writing and composition competencies, echoing to some extent the democratizing impact of printing. Yet as we consider the writing of the first 3 quarters of the 20th century before word and text processing, perhaps software technology has merely resulted in a loss of one quality of writing and the gain of another. Perhaps, we have simply engaged in a pragmatic way with writing tools in the same way musicians become one with their instruments through exploration, adaptation, curiosity, sentiment, and, controversially, an overall ignorance of the consequences of these novel toys for humanity as a whole.

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