Some reflections on writing and technology

I don’t have a way to really unify the readings of week 2 beyond “writing as technology,” and to gather up and discuss *all* the themes raised in this work would be, well, more than a blog post. So what I’ll do here instead is address a few themes raised by the work that seem particularly important to me.

The first thing I want to claim is that technology isn’t “changing” “writing.” By which I mean that “writing,” whatever it is, is the same as it has always been: the  composition and inscription of thought in symbols, which renders the thought both shareable and non-ephemeral. When we see writing differently as different technologies are brought to it, what we are seeing is light shown on different aspects of writing by the technologies that favor those aspects. So, for example, current technologies force us to consider the pastiche nature of writing more than some earlier technologies did because current technologies particularly afford pastiche. Similarly, with current technologies, revising writing comes as naturally as breathing, whereas technologies such as the typewriter tended to “lock” writing and strongly discourage revision. To no one’s surprise, then, in an age of typewriters extensive focus was devoted to planning writing, where in an age of word-processors planning gets somewhat less emphasis and revision gets a great deal more than it used to.

I think probably the most difficult of these pieces to read is Johndan E-J’s piece on “The Database and the Essay,” because it presents some of the toughest theory and some of the most complicated ideas. But also some of the deepest and most important questions to writers of our age: What is the line, if any, between “writing” and “compilation”? How much should a word be worth?  Who should make money off other people’s writing?  And -- if would I be right in reading E-J’s conclusion as being that there will be no agreement about such questions, only localized struggle -- is that condition unavoidable, “built-in” to writing technology now, or is it a human failing that could be fixed?  I would love for us to think about these things together.

I’m interested too in the apparent ironies and disjuncts and contradictions that current writing technology brings us. Consider the issue of time, which “users” experience as latency (how long it takes a thing to happen once we’ve asked it to). Latency drives us nuts: we like things to happen fast and happen now. (Think  of how you get your hands on music, or any other information, and how frustrated you get when it takes more than seconds.)  So here’s an irony: the multimodal creations that get us things instantaneously take eons longer to create than their pure alphabetic equivalents would. For every mode you add to your composition, you don’t double the time it takes to compose, you square it. And that’s if you’re highly skilled. Another irony: we work now in worlds of collaboration, yet collaboration slows us down -- you can work so much more quickly by yourself. We value speed but our work demands more than a solo performance.

I’ll return to my original claim, though: so often, what we think of as “new” in writing was always with us, and just masked. Wikipedia: fabulous example. Few people understand that every encyclopedia (and dictionary) ever has been a compilation of articles each written by an expert or a collaboration of experts and then edited toward correctness by other experts -- just like Wikipedia. Its early detractors seized on the “anyone can edit!” nature of the work as its weakness when it should have been easy enough to recognize from previous eras of writing that collaboration was always the strength of the encyclopedia, and more would thus most likely be better. (A complication for my example: much of the quality and reliability of Wikipedia now comes from how difficult it has become for “just anyone” to edit articles on it. Still, though, it remains mostly a meritocracy of informed persuasion.) Wikipedia isn’t really a change in writing; it’s the use of current technology to expose the same collaborative nature of knowledge-making in writing as was always there.

In a number of blogs I’ve read for this week so far, the futility of trying to see the future of writing technologies has been pointed out. This is one reason I like returning to rhetoric -- there are so few universals related to writing in part because writing is a technological sport and thus the tools will always be evolving and emphasizing different aspects of writing. Rhetoric has the few universals there are. So further food for thought for me is, how are technologies responsive to rhetorical principles such as contingency, situationality, and epistemology?  I can predict that tool that respond best to "it depends" and have the  most to do with knowledge construction will be most successful. (At last, I think I can.)  And whatever most enhances interaction is probably going to be very valuable.  The interesting questions are, how do we get any more specific than that?