From Pencils to Pixels: Baron

I liked this article. It made a lot of valid points about why people fear to change anything about their communication, but how each new "technology" has assisted writing in different ways. I say assist, however, and not better, because in some ways, I feel our technology has not helped our writing at all.

Take, for instance, how technology has allowed newsapers to focus more on its graphic presentation than the actual writing. In the 80s, USA Today even declared that it wouldn't publish many long articles, instead focusing on infographics, because we'd become such a visual society that we just didn't read much anymore. I'm definitely one for the visual, but then what happened to the in-depth news coverage?

I think the Internet has hurt our writing in some ways, especially our ability to construct long paragraphs and trains of thought in exchange for immediacy. I hardly ever write letters to my friends anymore; my stationery is getting yellow. It's made writing better in other ways -- if I want to catch a friend, I can send an e-mail and know he or she will catch it before the day is up because my friends check their accounts daily. I depend on it heavily because I'm not home much, or at weird hours, and no one can catch me because I always forget to turn my cell phone on or I'm on the road. With e-mail, I can get ahold of people within 24 hours. As a freelancer, that's a tremendous help.

As for recording information, I think the Internet works almost too well. It's definitely better than paper -- paper gets limited distribution, it gets old and crumbles, people misplace it. The internet is everywhere, all the time, keeping studious records. But sometimes it records stuff I write that was just a passing fancy and now it's out there for years, even when I don't feel that way anymore. Of course, I guess that happens to authors too.