I have mentioned several times the role of writing and the research we’ve been doing with Anca Metiu on the role of writing for knowledge sharing and the expression of emotions. Our argument is that a lot of the debates about online communication focuses only on the media, forgetting the modality - writing - which supports key mechanisms involved in the expression of emotions and the sharing of knowledge. Here is an interesting article by Nicholas Carr where he raises similar issues for reading.Carr cites Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University and the author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain who argues that “We are not only what we read. We are how we read.”  Therefore she worries that  when we read online, we tend to become “mere decoders of information.” and not interpret and make sense of the text.

Carr also cites a very interesting example of how Nietsche’s style changed when he started using a typewriter instead of a pen:

“Sometime in 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche bought a typewriter—a Malling-Hansen Writing Ball, to be precise. His vision was failing, and keeping his eyes focused on a page had become exhausting and painful, often bringing on crushing headaches. He had been forced to curtail his writing, and he feared that he would soon have to give it up. The typewriter rescued him, at least for a time. Once he had mastered touch-typing, he was able to write with his eyes closed, using only the tips of his fingers. Words could once again flow from his mind to the page.

But the machine had a subtler effect on his work. One of Nietzsche’s friends, a composer, noticed a change in the style of his writing. His already terse prose had become even tighter, more telegraphic. “Perhaps you will through this instrument even take to a new idiom,” the friend wrote in a letter, noting that, in his own work, his “‘thoughts’ in music and language often depend on the quality of pen and paper.”

“You are right,” Nietzsche replied, “our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.” Under the sway of the machine, writes the German media scholar Friedrich A. Kittler , Nietzsche’s prose “changed from arguments to aphorisms, from thoughts to puns, from rhetoric to telegram style.””