...without more detail, we can’t really know what happens between the (paper) sheets or the revisions of computer screens. There is lots else we can discover, though, in Mr. Kirschenbaum’s survey ... The best part of Track Changes, in fact, is its attempt to recapture the initial encounters with the technology ... One of the satisfactions of Track Changes is the discovery that other writers felt, as I did, that the best word-processing program was one of the first: the now-defunct WordStar from the 1970s and ’80s.
...fine and erudite...[but] in arguing for the literary history of the word processor, Kirschenbaum overstates the ease with which humanities scholars can interpret the political and artistic lives of objects. The invention of the word processor may have changed literary composition for the Updikes of the world, but it also facilitated the destruction of an essential genre of work usually done by women: secretarial labor.
As Kirschenbaum’s history reminds us, the story of personal computers supplanting older systems dedicated to word processing—and writers’ larger commitment to abandoning pens and ink and typewriter ribbons and correction fluid—was hardly the fait accompli that we sometimes think it was. His book attempts a full literary history of this shift. To do so, he ranges across a number of phenomena: the technical and managerial prehistories of the word-processing revolution; the imaginative, sometimes allegorical literary responses to how work was managed...and most prominently, how word processing both tapped into and reflected writers’ anxieties about their whole enterprise.
Culling from specialized publications, mainstream journalism, and author interviews, Kirschenbaum recaptures the excitement and optimism writers often felt in the face of this magical new technology...Beyond the ken of Kirschenbaum’s study are questions of how word processing affected the style of individual writers who transitioned from earlier methods of composing and revising, or how it has affected literary style more generally. He cites the work of scholars who’ve done important work in that dauntingly broad area, but, on this matter and others, he’s chary about sweeping summation and loose speculation.
...[an] unexpectedly engaging history of word processing ... In part, Track Changes is one of those histories of the everyday in which the broader claims are often open to question. 'Each of us remembers our first time' using a word processor, Kirschenbaum claims. But this is surely true only of generations that witnessed notable innovations ... [the] variety of attitudes and habits proves mildly less interesting than the history of the technology itself, because the former amounts to very little in the end ... Track Changes is as much the story of their distracting emotions as it is of what they wrote and how.
