In this reading, Bolter talks about how writing is a technology, in which the “skills required is to learn to read and write”. It was interesting when Bolter started discussing the significance of being literate and the ability to produce, say a story, both aurally and visually. Visually in the sense that people can see it written down, but also associated through imagination in their heads and aurally through spoken words. The whole idea that we always are in this “writing space” even though we are not necessarily writing all the time, made me think about what this meant. I think that this means that when we arent writing ourselves, we are listening, seeing and thinking with perhaps other peoples work, that we deconstruct to understand through structure and technique.

The whole idea that writing was a “techne”, I thought was pretty thought-provoking, especially the part about Plato and how “techie” was used as a way to describe something of the arts. I like that writing is seen as an art, but I don’t think that it is all art, like medical writing for example that would bore me stiff, I think that seeing writing as an art is more subjective, because not all of it is creative.

Bolter, Jay David. Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing. Hillsdale (N.J.): Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1991. Print. (extract, PDF)