Bethany Fulton
Dr. Steve Krause
English 328
18 May 2009
Writing’s Simple Technologies
Everyday I come in contact with so many great technologies, from the time I wake up in the morning, to the time I go to bed I am toying with some type of technology or another. Often, I overlook these technologies, taking them for granted because they’ve always been a part in my life. When I actually think of the technologies that I come in contact with daily, I typically overlook the technologies such as my toothbrush, pens, and my running shoes. Instead, I think of my laptop that I carry in my purse, my cell phone that has a touchscreen, my car that uses gas and electricity to power itself, and so on. When I look specifically at the many technologies that accompany reading and writing, pens, books, and the like aren’t the first things that come to my mind. Rather, I think of the computer and the internet. As I began to really think about what amazing inventions both the pencil and the book are, I was reminded of being a child again.
As far back as I can remember, I recall admiring the many books that my mom has always kept around the house. I have memories of begging my mother to let me stay up while the other kids were down for a nap promising her that if she’d let me stay awake I wouldn’t bother her while she read. Because I am the oldest of eight kids, our nap time was my mom’s much-valued alone time, and she refused to give it up without a fight. She spent her alone time curled up on the couch with a book. The books that she often curled-up with were small, flimsy books that fit nicely in her hands and were easily bent back. My mother obviously enjoyed “the pleasure of being able to carry a book along on a walk or into bed” (Manguel 146). My mother has always loved reading; I have never known her to not have a book within arms reach. Eventually, she agreed to let me stay up instead of nap as long as I picked out a book to read and, of course, as long as I stayed out of her hair. Instead of picking out one of my books, I’d pick a book from one of her bookshelves and pretend to read it. At the time, I wanted nothing more than to be able to read the words that I was studying over and over again. I had a hard time understanding why I couldn’t read just like my mom could; I was under the impression that writing was something that everyone could do naturally, I hadn’t yet realized that “writing is completely artificial. There is no way to write ‘naturally’” (Ong 23).
The books felt big and thick. I always made sure to pick out a hardback book because I liked the way that they felt. As I “read,” I made sure not to turn to the next page until my mom would turn a page in her book. As I waited for her to finish each page of her book, I would concentrate on the words in front of me, trying to find the same word over and over on a page. These books always seemed so big to me. I remember thinking to myself that I would never be able to complete an entire big book because there were too many words. My mom started teaching me to read somewhere around this time, just before I was four years old; I instantly fell in love with reading, and it has played a large part in my life since that time. The first two things that I loved about books was their size and their weight. I loved hardback books because I thought that they looked important; I appreciated being able to “feel the physical weight of knowledge” (Manguel 145). From the very beginning, I realize that I have always judged a book by its cover, even before I could read. “Books declare themselves through their titles, their authors, their places in a catalogue or on a bookshelf, the illustrations on their jackets; books also declare themselves through their size” (Manguel 125). As a child, even without knowing what I was “reading” about, I knew that more important content could be found in the books with hard covers.
Although I have always loved reading and writing, I haven’t considered the very things that make it possible for me to read and write technologies until I tried to invent a writing technology of my own. As I struggled to come up with a new idea for a writing technology using natural products only, I really started to truly appreciate the simplicity, and complexity, of the pencil and paper. I spent days trying to come up with something portable, practical, and useful unsuccessfully. Finally, on the day that I had to present my writing technology, as I made dinner (Fettuccini Alfredo) my writing technology was born: fettuccini noodles on a plate. How ridiculously unpractical, difficult, and messy! However, the noodles worked.
As I tried to invent my own writing technology, I really began to realize just how big of a role the “simple” writing technologies that I use daily – the pen, pencil, and paper – play in my life, and how thankful I am for those technologies. There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t have to write something down. I am a very busy person and unfortunately, I am pretty forgetful as well. In order to make sure that I remember everything that I need to on a daily basis, I use Post-It notes, a daily planner book, a pen or pencil to jot things onto, and into both, the calendar on my phone, and email to make sure that I don’t miss a beat. The thought of my writing technology replacing even one of the aforementioned technologies is laughable! Yet, what is more simple (and practical) than a pencil and a Post-It note? It’s these very things that are overlooked and taken for granted. As Ong mentions in Writing Is a Technology that Restructures Thought, “writing is utterly invaluable and indeed essential for the realization of fuller, interior, human potentials. Technologies are not mere exterior aids but also interior transformations of consciousness” (23). Without writing, I cannot imagine how I would juggle the everyday tasks in my life.
It is hard to imagine a time in which reading and writing was thought to be something done by the less intelligible and less knowledgeable people. As Socrates says in Plato’s Phaedrus, “I cannot help feeling, Phaedrus, that writing is unfortunately like painting; for the creations of the painter have the attitude of life, and yet if you ask them a question they preserve a solemn silence” (Plato). To imagine a world in which reading and writing is considered something that the lazy and unintelligent do, is something very difficult for me to do. Having grown up in a society where I was taught to read in write by the time I was four years old, and my skills in both have been expected to advance further and further as I get older and older, I can hardly fathom life without reading and writing. In this day and time, information can be passed around the world within seconds thanks to the continued advancements of many different writing technologies.
Reading and writing is required of me in almost every task that is asked of me: from working, to school assignments, to checking my facebook page, to ordering dinner. Although I am aware that there are countries in this world that do not have a written language, I cannot even begin to imagine how the lives in those countries are better for not reading or writing; I am not passing judgment on them, instead I am admitting to being very ignorant to the idea that is it possible for a society to function without written word. Perhaps I have grown to be a little too dependent on writing technologies; certainly I could not function effectively without a computer, my cell phone, a pen and paper. It may be possible that the same technologies that have made life easier for me have made me lazy, and thus less intelligent. “Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the Internet, not to mention the popularity of text-messaging on cell phones, we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice. But it’s a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinking—perhaps even a different sense of the self” (Is Google Making Us Stupid by Nicholas Carr). So the question that I raise having to do with reading and writing technologies is have we become so dependent on our technologies that we have lost our ability to think outside the box?
Word count: 1,507
bethanydfulton
