Writing and thinking: What changes with digital technologies?

Abstract

The relationship between writing and thinking explicitly or implicitly runs through all the contributions to this book. There is no writing without thinking and there is no new writing technology that does not alter the way thinking in writing happens. Many layers of the relationship between thinking and writing await conceptualization. Four of them that seem most widely affected by the currently unfolding transformational processes are described in more detail in this chapter: (1) the connection of inscription and linearization to thinking; (2) the relation of sub-actions of the writing processes to thinking; (3) the influence of digital technology on connected thought, networked thinking, and collaborative writing; and (4) the challenges of higher-order support for writing, including automatic text generation for the conceptualization of the writing-thinking interplay. We close with a short statement on the necessity to adopt human-machine models to conceptualize thinking in writing.