If they had used word processors, would some of the great authors have been more productive?

Question

If they had used word processors, would some of the great authors have been more productive? Would the quality of their writing have been different?

Answer 1

Interesting question.

I think that if some of the great writers would have not produced quality work if word processors were available to them. There is a lot of emotion are artistic liberty when a person writes pen to paper. There is more time, energy and thought invested in their work. Reading contemporary essays and books, you can see the loss of passion in the work.

Answer 2

Such an interesting question; there is no way to know, since writers have matched their medium of writing to their way of working. For example, my former father in law was a poet, very prolific in his lifetime. He much preferred a manual typewriter and never adapted to the computer that came in near the end of his life.

One way that the work of writers would have been different is that frequently there are so many chances with word processors to edit writing, that the path of change of a work, or evolution through drafts, may be more commonly not as available as before. If you look at the Dictionary of Literary Biography, a set of reference books in many libraries, there are samples of writers' works with pages, often typed, but sometimes handwritten, with sections crossed out, revisions in the margins, etc. This whole way of working we no longer have to this degree, so it is more difficult to study the process of creation of writing, unless the author has taken care to save drafts.

This question perhaps relates also to Marshall McLuhan (quoted in the wikipedia below) who felt that new technologies fragment the individuality of print culture (think blogs)..

The main concept of McLuhan's argument (later elaborated upon in The Medium is the Massage) is that new technologies (like alphabets, printing presses, and even speech itself) exert a gravitational effect on cognition, which in turn affects social organization: Print technology changes our perceptual habits ("visual homogenizing of experience"), which in turn impacts social interactions ("fosters a mentality that gradually resists all but a... specialist outlook"). According to McLuhan, the advent of print technology contributed to and made possible most of the salient trends in the Modern period in the Western world: individualism, democracy, Protestantism, capitalism and nationalism. For McLuhan, these trends all reverberate with print technology's principle of "segmentation of actions and functions and principle of visual quantification" (Galaxy p. 154).

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The global village
Visual, individualistic print culture will soon — McLuhan is writing in the early 1960s — be brought to an end by what McLuhan calls "electronic interdependence," when electronic media replace visual culture with aural/oral culture. In this new age, humankind will move from individualism and fragmentation to a collective identity, with a "tribal base." McLuhan's coinage for this new social organization is the global village, a term which has predominantly negative connotations in The Gutenberg Galaxy (a fact lost on its later popularizers):

Answer 3

no, because they have to stop and think between sentences or paragraphs about what they want to write.

Answer 4

no, their computers would hang every two minutes!