If I don't write it down, does it matter?

If your like me then you read for efficiency and immediacy, kind of like a crime scene investigator. Turns out there is a name for that, "power browsing". If your also like me than you read get most of your information online. Power browsing online is re-engineering the way our brains reads, and therefore thinks. So how does this affect writing.

To the history! When Nietzche was losing his sight he bought a typewriter and learned to touch type (typing without looking at the keyboard). Nietzche's writing style changed because of this new writing medium. Friedrich A. Kittler noted that Nietzsche's prose "changed from arguments to aphorisms, from thoughts to puns, from rehtoric to telegram style".

So we know that our brains (neurologically) are reprogrammed when adapting to new mediums of writing. So what has that done to my writing? When I was a boy I wrote poetry, even through undergraduate school I frequently got the comment, "Too flowery, write like a scientist". It makes sense that I wrote most of my papers in pen on paper until my undergraduate, when I was forced (in order to become a scientist) to adopt the new medium -the computer. If my brain had not reprogrammed I would not be a scientist, but what did I lose?

Bringing me to my big question, "if I don't write it down, does it matter?" I know, very "If a tree falls in the forest......" philosophy. But we did lose something in the transition from pen and paper to computer based (later uploaded online) writing, that being creativity. Thinking like a computer (or the internet) stifles creativity. If I were going to blame someone for my stifled creativity it would be Frederick Winslow Taylor. Freddy will be the topic of another post, because if your like me (a power browser), this is where you would stop reading.

Ideas generated for this post thanks to the stunning article, Is Google making us Stupid?