Talbott on word processing Go back to Talbott and the Electronic Word
For example, the ease and rapidity with which I can cut and paste enables my hands to keep up much more closely with my mind, but also encourages me to reduce my thinking to the relatively mechanical manipulation of the words I see in front of me. To edit a text, then, is merely to rearrange symbols. Existing symbols and their "self evident" relations, [and] not the thinking that makes symbols, becomes almost everything. (Talbott 186-187)