This week reading is about Writing as technology by Jay David Bolter. As the Author has assumed: ” Writing is a technology for collective memory, for preserving and passing on human experience”. it is and always been a sophisticated technology.
The mechanisation of writing began with the printing press in the fifteenth century and over several generations, printing did change the visual character of the written page, make the writing space technically cleaner and clearer. However, the computer in turn changes the technology of writing by adding new flexibility to the rapidly and efficiency of printing.
Writing as a state of mind
There is a good etymological reason to broaden our definition of technology to include skills as well as machines. Writing with quill and parchment is a different skill from writing with a printing press, which in turn differs from writing with a computer. However, all writing demands method, the intention of the writer to arrange ideas systematically in a space for later examination by a reader.Literacy is the realisation that language can have a visual as well as an aural dimension, that one’s words can be recorded and shown to others who are not present, perhaps not even alive, at the time of recording..Moreover, writing can be taken in and become a habit of mind.
Economies of writing
Each culture and each age has its own economy of writing. The earliest economies flourish in Mesopotamia and in Egypt, where picture writing was gradually replaced by phonetic systems, in which written symbols were associated directly and consistently with sounds in the language. Both the Sumerians and the Egyptians developed complicated word-syllable scripts, whose symbols sometimes stood for wholes words, sometimes more abstractly for combinations of consonants and vowels. The Sumerians and their successors wrote principally on stone and clay, the Egyptians on stone and papyrus, a paper like surface made from a reedy plant that grew along the Nile. Each new technology must find its place in the current economy of writing, and in doing so it may supplement or replace older technologies. For example: papyrus was replaced in the Middle Ages by parchment and paper and in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the typewriter replaced handwriting for business communications.