In Bitstreams, Matthew G. Kirschenbaum distills twenty years of thinking about the intersection of digital media, textual studies, and literary archives to argue that bits-the ubiquitous ones and zeros of computing- always depend on the material world that surrounds them to form the bulwark for preserving the future of literary heritage.
Writing in the digital age has been as messy as the inky rags in Gutenberg's shop or the molten lead of a Linotype machine. Matthew Kirschenbaum examines how creative authorship came to coexist with the computer revolution. Who were the early adopters, and what made others anxious? Was word processing just a better typewriter, or something more?