Ignorance of computers could also be a literary asset. William Gibson wrote Neuromancer on a typewriter because he couldn’t afford a computer, and when he finally got one it demystified a lot of what computers could dopic.twitter.com/86sVlqJqtl
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Ignorance of computers could also be a literary asset. William Gibson wrote Neuromancer on a typewriter because he couldn’t afford a computer, and when he finally got one it demystified a lot of what computers could dopic.twitter.com/86sVlqJqtl
But he was incredibly prescient that personal computers, once networked, would form a virtual unified universe he dubbed cyberspacepic.twitter.com/CXNGo9F9vW
Gibbons later worked with Bruce Sterling on The Difference Engine (1990), which ushered in steampunk as a genre. They developed a completely new way of working uniquely enabled by their matching Apple II computers, sampling and borrowing and reworking outside sourcespic.twitter.com/0cvZSPmaUT
It was a surprise to many that writers seemed to be adopting personal computers at a faster rate than scientists. Especially sci-fi writers. I think this is due to the level of imagination required to see their usefulness at that timepic.twitter.com/NSacfExvbb
Interestingly, it was the less glorified and more populist sci-fi writers who adopted word processing sooner, because they were less preoccupied with “bastardizing the craft” than literary elitespic.twitter.com/pgwDar1R0W
Early accounts struggled to articulate what these new devices were, including the term “TV Typewriter” prominently in advertisements such as this one for the Homebrew Computer Clubpic.twitter.com/L5u03kzf0h
Fits my priors. Genre fiction early adopted the web and ebooks too. Literary types are the ones still attached to paper books. Scrivener (the name is revealing)does a good job catering to literary conceits in an online era. I use it despite those pretensions rather than because.
I feel like there are a ton of gems in this thread for you. Nexus of computing, writing, & sci-fi feels rich for the kind of thinking you do. There’s some theorizing & model building needed in this area I think. Or at least I would love some to help with digital notes advocacy
Also direct interest in document-technology history retained from my time at Xerox which included one deadpooled product in the space
Reproduction and iteration technology is interestingly coupled to editing technology via proofing/correction processes.
Making n copies of 1 polished doc is a very complementary problem in some ways to making 1 polished copy after n iterations on a draft. In perpetual beta with an expanding circle of prosumer-reviewers of any text, they two become the same process.
Version N of a doc has f(N) “copies” and g(N) bugs, and we hope f(N)>f(N-1) and g(N)<g(N-1) Word processing and word distribution tech has historically been a sort of co-evolutionary tradeoff between functions f and g
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