Compared with oral communication any sort of writing is a great labor saving device, since it frees communication from the restrictions of time and space and makes discourse wait on the convenience of the reader - who can interrupt the flow of thought or repeat it or concentrate upon isolated parts of it.
Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization, University of Chicago Press 2010, p.136
Printing Press
More than any other device, the printed book released people from the domination of the immediate and the local.
Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization, University of Chicago Press 2010, p.136
Paper
But the printing press by itself did not perform the revolution: paper played a scarcely less important part: for its uses went far beyond the printed page: The application of power-driven machinery to paper production was one of the important developments of this economy. Paper removed the necessity for face to face contact: debts, deeds, contracts, news, were all committed to paper, so that, while feudal society existed by virtue of customs that were rigorously maintained from generation to generation, the last elements of feudal society were abolished in England by the simple device of asking peasants who had always had a customary share in the common lands for some documentary proof that they had ever owned it. Custom and memory now played second fiddle to the written word: reality meant “established on paper.” Was it written in the bond? If so, it must be fulfilled. If not, it could be flouted.
Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization, University of Chicago Press 2010, p.136
even when such a society has developed a technology and a language and is already a product of its own history, it is conscious only of a perpetual present. Knowledge is carried on only by the living, never going beyond the memory of the society's oldest members.
[…]
With writing there appears a consciousness that is no longer carried and transmitted directly among the living.
Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, Bureau of Public Secrets 2014, 126 (p.68), 131 (p.71)
Writing is not simple. As with vision or speech or riding a bicycle, an immensely complex process is being unconsciously pursued.
Some people think you make an outline and follow it, filling out the details of the outline until the piece is finished. This is absurd. (True, some people can do this, but that is simply a shortcutting of the real process.) Basically writing is THE TRY-AND-TRY-AGAIN INTERPLAY of PARTS AND DETAILS against OVERALL AND UNIFYING IDEAS WHICH KEEP CHANGING.
In fact a number of things are happening, often simultaneously. We can separate them into three:
1. Provisional development of ideas and points:
A) forming overall organizing ideas, B) selecting tentative points; C) inductively finding overall organization among them; D) finding relations of interest between points.
2. Complex sifting and adjustment among collections of points, overall ideas.
3. Fine splicing within developed sequences.
A) transition and juxtaposition managements, B) cross-citations, C) smoothing.
Ted Nelson, Computer Lib/Dream Machines, On Writing
Hypertext
By "hypertext" I mean non-sequential writing.
Ordinary writing is sequential for two reasons. First, it grew out of speech and speech-making, which have to be sequential; and second, because books are not convenient to read except in a sequence.
But the structures of ideas are not sequential. They tie together every whichway. And when we write, we are always trying to tie things together in non-sequential ways. The footnote is a break from sequence; but it cannot really be extended (though some, like Will Cuppy, have toyed with the technique).
[…]
writers do better if they don't have to write in sequence (but may create multiple structures, branches and alternatives), and readers do better if they don't have to read in sequence, but may establish impressions, jump around, and try different pathways until they find the ones they want to study most closely.
[...]
in my view, a new day is dawning. Computer storage and screen display mean that we no longer have to have things in sequence; totally arbitrary structures are possible, and I think that after we've tried them enough people will see how desirable they are.
Ted Nelson, Computer Lib/Dream Machines, Hypertext
Paper moulders. Microfilm is inconvenient. In the best libraries it takes at least minutes to get a particular thing. But as to linking them together - footnoting Aeschylus with Marcus Aurelius, linking genetic data to 15th-century accounts of Indian tribes - well, you can only do it on paper by writing something new that ties them together. Isn't that ridiculous? When you could do it all electronically in seconds?
Ted Nelson, Computer Lib/Dream Machines, Hypertext
Now that we have all these wonderful devices, it should be the goal of society to put them in the service of truth and learning. And this is the way I propose. Not through obscure forms of "information retrieval;" not through newly oppressive forms of "computer-assisted instruction;" and not through a purported science of "artificial intelligence“ that will create new personalisms to irk us. All these obstructive oddities, I think, have developed as separate ideals because of the grand preposterosity of Professionalism that has created a world-wide cult of mutual incomprehensibility and disconnected special goals. Now we need to get everybody together again. We want to go back to the roots of our civilization - the ability, which we once had, for everybody who could read to be able to read everything. We must once again become a community of common access to a shared heritage.
This was of course what Vannevar Bush said in 1945 in an article everybody cites but nobody reads.
Ted Nelson, Computer Lib/Dream Machines, Hypertext
The hypertext solution in many ways obviates some of these other approaches, and in addition retains and puts back together the great traditions of literature and scholarship, traditions based on the fact that dividing things up arbitrarily just generally doesn't work.
Ted Nelson, Computer Lib/Dream Machines, Hypertext
In an important sense there are no "subjects" at all; there is only all knowledge since the cross- connections among the myriad topics of this world simply cannot be divided up neatly.
Hypertext at last offers the possibility of representing and exploring it all without carving it destructively.
Ted Nelson, Computer Lib/Dream Machines, Everything is Deeply Intertwingled
This all has a certain vagueness if you do not understand how bound you are today by paper— the problems of finding it , sorting it, looking things up. (If you write, that is, write a lot, you know all too well how intractable is paper, what a damned nuisance.) With a system like Engelbart's, now, whatever is written is instantly there. Whatever you want to look up Is instantly there, simultaneously interconnected to everything else l t should be connected to - source materials, footnotes, comments and so on. A document is completed the moment it is written: no human being has to retype i t . (It need not be typed on paper at all ,if it’s just for the workshop members: a printout is only needed if it has to go to someone outside the system).
In many ways, Engelbart's system is a prototype for the world of the future, I hope. ALL HANDLING OF PAPER IS ELIMINATED. Whatever you write, you write on the screens with keyboard and pointer. (No more backs of envelopes, yellow pads, file cards, typewriters.) Whatever you transmit to fellow users of the system you simply 'release' - no physical paper changes hands.
The group has also worked out some remarkable techniques for collaborative endeavor. Two people - say, one in California and one in New York - can work together through their screens, plus a phone link; it's as if they were side-by-side at a magic table. Each sees on his screen what the other sees; each controls a moving dot (or "cursor") that shows where he's pointing. The effect is somewhere between a blackboard and a desk; both may call up documents, point things out in them, change them, and anything else two people might do when working on something together.
Basically the system Is a large-scale setup for the storage, bringing forth, viewing and revision of documents and connections among them.
Ted Nelson, Computer Lib/Dream Machines, Doug Engelbart and “The Augmentation of Intellect”