Pensare, parlare, scrivere, videoscrivere, digitare

The ideal path traced in the excerpt carries from the “thinking word” to the “spoken word”, with increasing degrees of formality and organization, then of consciousness, to the “written word”. The latter shows a high degree of consciousness, with at its roots a process articulated in at least two phases, the one of a draft copy and then the final one; such a path reaches its culmination when “word processing” appears, an activity that produces a form of writing that I would like to define as “digital writing”. “digital writing” is in fact not the same thing, the same activity, as “writing”: «... we come close again to the motions of thought», Cardona wrote; there is this re-approaching, which implies many other things («we are still far from having grasped all the implications of this techno-mental development»). My essay explores the implications of digital technol- ogy and “digital writing” on both the level of communication and cognition, with reference to the broader, more pervasive process of structuring (and perhaps dissolving) the subject.