#writing technologies

Braille text located on a Coinstar coin exchange machine. Latin script transliteration located above.

How is technology changing the art of writing?

Yet, this does not mean that Tumblr users that choose to create rather than re-use Tumblr posts are left out. On the contrary, those who create on Tumblr usually end up getting the most followers. They start dialogues and plant the seeds that can lead to a site-wide spread of ideas. At the very least, a single post that someone creates can become "Tumblr famous" and circulate around Tumblr with hundreds of thousands, or even millions of notes. Those who became well-known enough on Tumblr have even gotten book deals, employment opportunities, and cult followings just by posting the right things on their Tumblr pages. If someone is trying to spread ideas and make sure that their voice is heard, Tumblr is the place to start that. 

Jay David Bolter, Writing Space: Computers, Hypertext, and the Remediation of Print

             Jacques Rancière in his chapter ‘The Surface of Design’ from his book The Future of the Image talks about the concept of “communal space” which is created in many forms by anyone who designs something that an idea or intent is present within. This covers anything from architecture to literature to advertising and how these all not only present ideas, but often can contain similar or even the exact same idea, merely communicated through different mediums, often to different audiences but which cover the same communal surface. This in-turn affects not only the appearance of things such as paintings but also how its meaning can be construed by different people to mean different things during different time periods.              The idea of things representing different things to different people at different times in history I believe is where the idea of communal space really takes hold and creates new meanings. Through this process people are able to be inspired and inspire others in return, this can affect the entire society onto which the new idea is presented and completely reshape how that society is not only construed, by how in its operates in every aspect. An example of this that occurs to me is the Bible and how as a piece of literature it came to completely redefine the communal spaces upon which it was set, effectively writing history in the form we know today.              The idea of “communal spaces” also never seems to die, for as long as some work is built or made, someone else will find something within it which they are inspired by and the process seems to infinitely occur to that effect. This becomes especially relevant with more and more mediums becoming available in which these ideas can be expressed and by the freedom of people in modern society to be less and less restricted on who can create and distribute, especially with the advent of the internet.

             I suppose if someone in Ancient Egypt suggested that hieroglyphics were not the correct method to go about explaining things in a written form, that instead they should work out a system in which the sound of a word should be codified, people would be just as disbelieving as they are today of the idea of the numbers superseding letters as the main form of written communication.              Yet it is along these lines that Vilèm Flusser writes in the chapter ‘Letters of the Alphabet’ from his book Does Writing have a Future. By “along these lines” I don’t mean he writes about Ancient Egypt and their writing systems, but instead of how the alphabet seems to be becoming more obsolete with the advent of computers, which takes the binary code of computer systems (whose form is numbers) and converts that to other forms such as characters and pictures to depict an idea. He goes on to say that basically the entire reason behind this swap between letters and numbers would be that humanity is merely getting tired of the logic based consciousness that brought about the alphabet and desires a new form in which it can communicate through writing.              This theory seems to have a solid ground on which it spreads its root, shown through the fact that even tertiary institutions worldwide are beginning to phase out subjects concerned with writing from their teaching curriculums and instead are focusing on business and scientific courses as ‘the future’.               However there seems to be a slight, yet crucial flaw in this logic, that being the ironically simply, idea of simplicity. Languages as wholes are very different from each other, what can be said in one word in one language may take a full sentence, or even an entire paragraph to communicate in another. With that in mind if you are unable to use a computer to simulate what you’re trying to say into a picture through binary code it becomes a massively difficult and completely vague endeavour to depict what you are actually saying only using pictures or numbers and that doesn’t even begin to cover how difficult translation would become. Ultimately this seems a massive reason in which letters, for the moment, are far from on their deathbed.

             The idea of the University of Auckland’s business building as a “built pedagogy” presented by Stephen Turner and Sean Sturm in the article of the same title seems to reflect heavily on the entire society it situates itself in. The article itself focuses more on the idea of the business building being a deliberately constructed space used for the benefit of the University to manipulate its students into a certain style of learning. This in turn leads to a certain type of intellectual norm (or stereotype) within which new ideas can’t truly be formulated by those who study there, leading to a further manipulation once they have left, and in turn been constructed to work a certain way, in the employment dominated world. This whole idea seems to evoke the spirit of Giles Deleuze’s concept of “control societies” –an extreme form of capitalism in which the powerful few dominate and prohibit any sort of social climbing or action that could be construed as a threat to them from the masses.              While the business building is shown more as a summarisation of the Universities ideas towards how their students should act and interact in the article, I believe that could be taken further as a pedagogy to reflect the entire rest of society as a whole. There seems to be no lines between the different institutional stages of one’s life anymore, a person will move from primary school, to intermediate, to high school, to University, where they must be taught the proper procedures of how to go about a practice. This however is changing at a rapid pace as more and more time needs to be spent in these institutions in order to move on to the next and ultimately have the ‘proof’ to say you are entitled to speak knowledgably about a subject. Thus the ‘real world’ keeps getting closer, yet all one really ends up with is looking at it through a structured lens in which you can see freedom ahead, but remain trapped behind ultimately restricting your freedom of thought on what to write.

"My contention in this essay is a modest one: the computer is simply the latest step in a long line of writing technologies. In many ways its development parallels that of the pencil---hence my title--though the computer seems more complex and is undoubtedly more expensive" (72).