Thirty years ago I began using computers for writing. I was a Electronics and Computer Engineer and I used an editor program to write and edit program text. I could have used it also for writing my first short stories but in those days nobody considered the computer an appropriate tool for working on texts or for communication. Computers were looked on as complex calculating machines. Even science fiction writers couldn't imagine in which direction technology would progress. With the exception of George Orwell who describes in his famous novel 1984 an electronic system used to survey the privacy of people. He predicted also a machine to write and print out novels automatically.
Thirty years ago I used a pencil and my father's old typewriter to write my first texts. My writing tools were cheap and simple. Today I need an expensive and powerful data processing system to write, edit and correct my texts. On the same system I make the layout for books and magazines and send the documents over the network to printers and publishers. I also publish on line on the Internet (www.zopfi.ch). As a journalist I use the net for research and for everyday's communication.
On one hand I'm more independent than thirty years ago because the computer has greatly increased the power and the versatility of my working tools. I live in a mountain village but I can do my job as if the library, the post office and my editor were next door. On the other hand I depend totally on a complex and expensive technical system. Sometimes I feel more like a computer technician than a writer, I waste my time installing new software, repairing cables and testing modems. And I spend a lot of money for technology which is today's top and tomorrow's scrap.
Fifteen years ago I bought my first Personal Computer with a text processor. Some years later I tried to sum up how writing on the computer has influenced my style: "The tool alters the product, a banal observation in connection with hammers and files but comparatively unusual when applied to writing. Do texts tend to improve or suffer as a result of computers? That is the question."
"When John Steinbeck wrote East of Eden, he kept a log of the writing process. In The Journal of a Novel he describes the way he cultivated the work with pencils, checking the hardness of the leads, sharpening them until the writing tool felt right in his hand. Depending on his mood he changed pencils, occasionally using extra-soft ones because of the particular sensitivity they require."
"Whether the keyboard allows particular sensitivity is doubtful, that it affects one's mood is indisputable. Clearly a keyboard can never afford the same flow as the free and easy movement of a pen or pencil. Hitting the keys uses different muscles, the brain and thought processes are stimulated differently. The function of motor activity is one of the great unknowns of the creative process. What is certain is that movement, thinking and feeling are closely linked. As closely as tool and product."
"The computer is undoubtedly a perfect tool for word-processing and text layout. But all advantages are thrown away if a first draft is careless. Too much editing smoothes down the rough edges of any text, making it bare and boring."
"Copying is the greatest danger. Instead of writing a passage anew, which also means re-experiencing it, reliving it, the author simply retrieves it from somewhere, copies it in and polishes it up. Emphasis is shifting from creation to production. Works are constructed, built, patched, instead of dreamt, heard, seen."
(From The Tool is the Style in The Colour of the Black Mountains, Moonstone Press, London ON, Canada).
When I wrote this text ten years ago I hadn't had yet the experience of Internet. Nobody imagined that we would soon have such a powerful, easy-to-use and worldwide accessible computer network. But Internet is more, World Wide Web is the implementation of Hypertext. It is a new philosophy of text, a new way of reading and writing. It's the end of linear text structures.
In fact, no text was ever linear. When we read we follow with our eyes a linear stream of words but with the eye of our mind we see moving pictures and our brain spontaneously produces links. Reading the words "East of Eden" we link the word "Eden" to the Bible and we associate our picture of the paradise. Hypertext makes this process ("intertextual linking") visible and machine controlled. The writer sets the links and offers new dimensions of reading. It may help the reader find an individual way trough a text or a complex information structure. It may also confuse him or deprive him from his own associations. Setting links means also limiting the freedom of associations. The danger is that reading deteriorates to surfing on the surface of the net.
Hypertext is a challenge for writers like every new media in history as radio, film and television. Each new media has created new forms of story-telling. In 1996 I participated in the first Internet Literary Competition set up in Germany by the magazine Zeit and IBM. I was one of 170 competitors and it was a hard experience. Although being once a computer engineer, producing hypertext in a multimedia environment seemed to me too technical, to close to the profession I left behind. Today the Internet is a realm of Hypertext literature, Hypertext magazines, Hypertext novels. The authors are mostly newcomers often with technical background. A new generation of writers and a new way of writing are coming out.
Internet technology is a further step from creating texts in a flow to constructing texts like software, breaking up linearity, fragmenting stories, linking pieces together to a network or a cluster. Literature has always been a mirror of the society and Internet literature is no exception. It's the expression of a fragmented world.
In ten years from now not only our tools and techniques of writing will have changed dramatically but also the channels of distributing literature. On-line book shopping is already everday's business. The technology labs are working on a new type of book. It will be the real "PowerBook". It looks like a conventional book, you can carry it in your pocket, you can open it and you can read whatever you want. The Bible or The Coran, East of Eden or the Oxford dictionary or the phone book. The pages are made from so called "electronic paper", endlessly erasable and rewritable. The book is linked by satellite channels to the Internet. And wherever you are you can read whatever you like and in whichever language you prefer.
This sort of "PowerBook" could be a powerful tool to distribute news and knowledge, art and literature all over the world. But there are questions.
Who controls Internet? Nobody knows it exactly. Is it perhaps an anonymous Big Brother like in Orwell's novel?
Who has access? Fifty percent of the world's population haven't yet a telephone and great parts are illiterate.
Who produces the contents? Writers and journalists who are free to express their opinion, to tell their stories? Or dependents of governments or the big media companies?
Modern technology means power. The first computers were built during World War II and used to calculate the atomic bomb. Also Internet was initially a military project. The danger of modern technology is, that it broadens the gap between haves and not-haves, between rich and poor, that it gives power to the powerful.