Computers and creativity

There was a rather curious article in yesterday's Observer (the Review section), headed 'Can the art of great writing survive the digital age?' (It has a different title online - which meant that the piece eluded my searching for some time! The author Tim Adams committed the heinous crime of generalising from a single example:

While the American novelist Don DeLillo is unable to work on anything but a manual typewriter, for a new generation of plugged-in readers the digitised word in the only language they know. So should we worry?

So, from a single example, admittedly he mentions one or two other writers who still use either pencil and paper or an old typewriter, he suggests that the whole of creative literature is in peril.

I imagine that for every writer still using a typewriter, there are probably thousands who are using a computer - and getting their work published; and thousands more, tapping away at the keyboard and never getting published.

The piece wanders all over the place, touching on Weizenbaum's Eliza program, the unaccountability of the blog writer to Sherry Turkle's Life on the screen to the point at which one is not quite sure what the overall theme is supposed to be.

I think Mr Adams needs to get a grip: the world is how we make it, computers are tools, not slave-masters, computers are inert, unresponsive, incapable of thought, but we can accomplish much through and with them. If you are a creative writer, you'll make the best use of whatever is the current writing tool - and that is now the word-processor. Don't like it? Then choose another tool and get on with it.

The downside of electronic theses

An interesting item in the Chronicle of Higher Education draws attention to a dispute at West Virginia University about their electronic dissertations policy. This policy applies across the university but has not, until now, affected students in the creative writing programme.

Naturally enough, the students (supported by their professor) do not want their creative works on the Web, since they might well seek a commercial publisher for the output. This seems to be one of those foggy areas of copyright law - a creative work is clearly that of the author and, presumably, copyright rests with the author, not with the institution - such authors are not in the same position as employees of the organization, for whom the situation might be different.

Apparently, this dispute echoes across the US, with other universities experiencing the same dispute.