How technology shapes writing and how I'm supposed to feel about that

Does anyone write for themselves anymore? I’m sure people do, but I don’t really. I used to. I used to journal in notebooks, in word documents, write little scraps of poetry on little scraps of paper that wind up torn into little scraps in my wastepaper basket. Now it seems like everything I write, I write to produce for someone or some purpose. Those one-time poetry scraps make it into my online journal that 3 people can read. Same with my rambley journal posts about personal things. Three people can read them. In a way, it’s like having a journal / diary that you leave unlocked on your desk in your middle-school bedroom. For whatever reason, you want SOMEONE to read it, even if you say you don’t.

For this reason, I keep coming back to the Martin reading. I’m not sure if it was purposeful, but I kept seeing this theme of writing as a social activity spring up through the text: libraries become useful for conservation of knowledge, Cuneiform develops as a way to keep social contracts, Luther promoting literacy so individuals could develop their own understanding of scripture, the Koran written in classical Arabic to keep a sense of Muslim unity, and indecipherable writings on Roman statues leading others to invoke magic.

It’s all interconnected, and I don’t want to start sounding sappy, but writing seems like a way that we as people connect to other people, and technology shapes how we do this. It’s easier than ever to have others read the things that I write. If once I left poetry in library books or lying on floors, hoping people would read it, now I disconnect that uncertainty entirely and watch as my blog-visit numbers climb.

So these new writing / publishing technologies open others up to this same experience. Even if the writing comes through social networks, it’s still this open sharing of words that others read, and our instant-posting technology allows this seamless transfer between thought and distribution.

In class, we talked about how writing things out by hand slows us down, making us consider each word, and might lead us to more thoughtful writing. We also posited that typing is much faster, and allows for a better stream of thoughts to paper. I’m sure that this phenomenon changes the way we communicate through writing.