Writing and Thinking

I've heard that writing is closely related to the process of thinking.  Thus, when language instructors teach us to write ... with drafts and revisions and editing ... they are ultimately teaching us to think.

I wonder whether anyone has studied how thought processes have changed with technology, though.  I'm old enough to remember feeding a sheet of paper into an Underwood typewriter, where pages sometimes had to be typed multiple times before all of the footnotes ended up where they were supposed to be.  We had to think ahead and plan our writing back in those days.  Drafts and outlines were crucial, because failing to carefully plan meant that the work would never be produced.

Computers have changed the practice of writing.  We can easily rearrange text by cutting-and-pasting.  The machine does many things for us, like editing our spelling and grammatical errors, aligning those pesky footnotes automatically, and inserting page headers and footers with no added exertion on our part.  It's true that these advances in technology mean that we don't have to think about the production of our work, freeing us to focus on the content.  But does that mean that we are not thinking about the process of writing in the same way?  I suspect so.

What leaves me wondering, I suppose, is the fact that we are increasingly encouraged to "write" in short bursts -- 140 characters or less -- easily and quickly posted for all the world to see through our mobile devices.  Our "writing" is increasingly focused on status updates and off-the-cuff comments.  Are these posts carefully composed? edited? revised? Are we thinking about things?  Or have we become a society where we forget to think, because we forget to take the time to write?

Descartes gives us the famous line, "I think, therefore I am" (Cogito, ergo sum).  Perhaps we would do well to consider a revised version of the idea:  "I write, therefore I think."  The world could use a little more thinking, in my estimation.  So I write ...