How technology rewrites literature

Writers including Tom McCarthy and Joe Dunthorne consider whether the coming of computers and the net has changed the way they write: The Guardian

In an interview with the Paris Review, the American poet Frederick Seidel mentions a time in the 1970s when he visited an old girlfriend at Columbia University. Seidel’s girlfriend was studying for a PhD in Electrical Engineering and during his stay the poet was given five minutes to work in a secure room on the Defence Department mainframe:

“The computer was enormous and filled the room but it had such a tiny screen. I typed out the beginning of my poem Homage to Cicero and was hooked then and there. What hooked me was the way you could instantly change the shape of the stanza, the length of the line. It was the instantly part that got me.”