In The Chronicle of Higher Education, Kenneth Goldsmith explores the way writing in the digital age is becoming something different. If you skim down toward the end, he offers some surprising examples of what people are “writing” and publishing. For those not familiar with it, the Chronicle is the mainstream publication of the higher education world, appearing weekly with hundreds of job ads and articles of interest to the industry (print and online). Here’s the link.

There’s been an explosion of writers employing strategies of copying and appropriation over the past few years, with the computer encouraging writers to mimic its workings. When cutting and pasting are integral to the writing process, it would be mad to imagine that writers wouldn’t exploit these functions in extreme ways that weren’t intended by their creators.