Nietzsche, as proud of the publication of his mechanization as any philosopher, changed from arguments to aphorisms, from thoughts to puns, from rhetoric to telegram style. That is precisely what is meant by the sentence "our writing tools are also working on our thoughts". Malling Hansen's writing ball, with its operating difficulties, made Nietzsche into a laconic.
literary scholar and media theorist (1943–2011)
The general digitization of channels and information erases the differences among individual media. Sound and image, voice and text are reduced to surface effects, known to consumers as interface. Sense and the senses turn into eyewash. Their media-produced glamor will survive for an interim as a by-product of strategic programs. Inside the computers themselves everything becomes a number: quantity without image, sound or voice ... With numbers, everything goes ... a total media link on a digital base will erase the very concept of media. Instead of wiring people and technologies, absolute knowledge will run as an endless loop.
What remains of people is what media can store and communicate. What counts are not the messages or the content with which they equip so-called souls for the duration of the technological era, but rather (and in strict accordance to McLuhan) their circuits, the very schematism of their perceptibility.
Technologies that not only subvert writing, but engulf it and carry it off along with so-called Man, render their own description impossible. Increasingly, data flows once confined to books and later to records and films are disappearing into black holes and boxes that, as artificial intelligences, are bidding us farewell on their way to nameless high commands. In this situation we are left only with reminiscences, that is to say, with stories.