Today, people repurpose content then trade and sell bits of it around the Web in much the same way that kids trade baseball cards. Word bites, the printed word taken out of context, are not really new. However, in the past, we did not generally make them, we received them. Even knowing that word bites did not just arrive on the scene recently, it sometimes seems as if text taken out of content is shockingly new. We've all been caught by the promise of movie ads filled with word bites from movie reviews.
Concordances are among the earliest analytical tools that took words out of context.
These indexes were labor-intensive and their production was generally limited to religious, legal, and literary works. Today, anyone with a PC or a Mac can take electronic texts and deconstruct them into inverted files with simple shareware text analysis or thesaurus programs. It is the ease and rapidity with which anyone can produce sound bites, plagiarize others' work without even re-keying the words, buy term papers over the Web, and generally manipulate and alter text that makes it all somewhat unnerving. It may be that there is a fundamental change in our way of viewing and using documents that makes it seem as if documents are different, vanishing, or falling apart. However, the content of documents, other than legal documents and some religious and literary works, was never as stable as the printed page made them seem.