Text is no longer linear

One of my best friends is studying for her Ph. D in English literature at Illinois, and she sent me this video awhile back. I'm a sucker for typography animation, and I thought this was a creative approach, as well as educational -- I'd never thought about how computer coding melds style and content. Spend four minutes of your day watching the video and then muse with me.

I wonder what Virginia Woolf's writing would have looked like if she'd been able to copy-and-paste, to pick up and move entire sentences or paragraphs or ideas. A lot of her writing is peppered with false starts and stops ("Think what it would mean if you could teach, if you could learn, the art of writing."), and we don't really write that way anymore: On the one hand, it feels old-fashioned, and a contemporary voice is much more hip, more jive, in our Internet-savvy, hipster-joke-laden, 20-something reader constituency. On the other hand, second-guessing a digital text piece is much easier than trying to make changes to longhand or even printed copies. There's a permanence to ink on paper that is both helpful and detrimental to the creative process; it makes the piece feel real, but it also makes it feel finished, perhaps falsely. In 1976, Tim O'Brien published an essay titled "Speaking of Courage." When he re-published the story in his 1990 book, The Things They Carried, O'Briend revised the essay, changing bits and pieces to emphasize the elements that he realized, 14 years later, were the true purpose of the story.

When I was 10 or 11 years old, I wrote HTML code for my personal website. It's odd to realize that as I was finding animated GIFs of flying unicorns, others were shaping the future of the Internet. If the Internet looked like this 13 years ago and then like this 8 years ago and then like this 3 years ago and then like this yesterday (notice the steadily increasing number of ads) -- I can't even imagine where we'll be just a few years from now. Holograms coming out of computer screens? Ooh, how about Minority Report-style computer interfaces, complete with backing classical music track? That would really make the animated unicorn GIF shine.