How authors write according to MIT
I find the question of how new media and new technologies influence writing immensely fascinating!
“At a time when new media are proliferating, it is tempting to imagine that authors, thinking about how their writing will appear on devices such as electronic readers, tablet computers, or smartphones, consciously or unconsciously adapt their prose to the exigencies of publishing platforms. But that’s not what actually happens. […]
Egan, Gould, Sebald, Kerouac, and Baker were all writing in eras when new media were everywhere, but what computer scientists call “platform shift” did not get their juices going. The technologies of composition did. Why this should be so is not mysterious. The explanation is that literary writers are solitary creatures: their days are spent alone, with keyboards and pens under their fingers and a humming photocopying machine down the road at the university. Those things are real, and what one can do with them exciting, while websites, e-readers, and even books seem abstractions, mere mechanisms of distribution.”
How authors write, Jason Pontin, MIT Technology review, October 24 2012.