The writing technology I “invented” used coffee grounds to form letters, glue as a bonding material, and disposable coffee filters as the substrate. I found carrying out the task of “creating” the technology irritating and time consuming but perhaps that speaks to how I take my easy-to-use writing technologies for granite. Hence, I think I “get” the point; I am supposed to think about the writing technologies that we are surrounded by and that we use all the time by being forced to not use it. A few points came to mind about writing and communication, and its relationship to technology, having a record that is semi-permanent for future generations, and the way that different technologies influence writing and language.
As a poured my coffee grounds onto my glue-letters, and shook the grounds around the filters, I could only think about how flimsy my writing technology was. That without real tools, my writing technology was worthless, wouldn’t last any test of time. In fact, it didn’t, I threw it away immediately after taking a picture, the digital picture being a media that would last much longer than my fragile food letters. However, there is a tangent that I’m led to from here, none of our writing or communications technologies will ever stand the test of time. All media paper, stone carvings, paint, electronic files, and the like, are subject to natural deterioration. Nothing truly permanent can ever be created because we are not permanent by nature. All communication technologies are subject to destruction by natural causes.
However, just because nothing that we have created (yet?) will be absolutely permanent, does not mean that our semi-permanence is not (almost?) equally as useful. All writing is communication that we want to have some lasting effect, because we won’t always be there to communicate our ideas in person. This is true for practical reasons such as the inability to communicate to very large numbers of people, or disseminate information to people in different geographic locations, or because we will die one day, or because we will simply not remember everything that we wanted to convey, or maybe the person we are communicating with is hearing impaired (or I cannot speak), and so on. Two of the most important reasons we write is to get information out to many different locations more quickly than we could do in person, and also so the ideas will be communicated after our lifespan is up.
In Plato’s Phaedrus, a point was made by Thalmus that,
“you who are the father of letters, from a paternal love of your own children have been led to attribute to them a quality which they cannot have; for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing”
I understand the love of the spoken word too, but Plato does not consider the fluidity of the human mind. Memories are not permanent in knowing. Our brains are the ‘first’ communication storage devices. The problem that Plato and other’s who thought less of ‘writing things down,’ is that our biological storage devices are fragile. We are susceptible to injury, diseases like Alzheimer’s, brain-farts, cells dying, and our own emotions and opinions causing less than objective records and memories stored in our skulls. In fact, much of history is lost because there is no record, or we have to search scientifically or anthropologically to find clues and piece together a record of history. Should Plato’s play never have been written down it might be irrelevant to this discussion because perhaps none of us would know that it ever existed. Hence my case in point, because it was written down in some media other than the spoken word which can only exist in that exact moment, if it is not stored somewhere, even in the fallible bio-storage media of our brains, we would not have it today. And should this play have been passed down verbally though the ages until current day, I’m sure it would have been so altered and mutilated that Plato himself may have not recognized it.
Another point from the same quote that I differ about is that I do not believe that just because we read something rather than learn it in another manner mean that we don’t really “know” it. This brings me to another famous quote that I like from Isaac Newton (and others), “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” If we should not use the best available technology to create the best record of our discoveries, histories, and artistic expressions, than how will we build and advance beyond the natural limits of our human bodies? Writing is an essential record keeping tool that allows many types of progress. For example, in science if we could not obtain our learning through writing, and had to learn by other means, we would mostly likely have less time and base knowledge from which to advance further with our own ideas.
The other main point I wanted to make was that although many technologies are invented for conveying ideas, or writing, often they end up changing our language themselves. Baron says in From Pencils to Pixels: The Stages of Literacy Technologies that, “we often lose sight of writing as a technology, until, that is, a new technology like the computer comes along and we are thrown into excitement and confusion as we try it on, try it out, reject it, and then adapt it to our lives – and, of course, adapt our lives to it.” Technology changes us and our language. Take the advent of immediate short text messages, either in the form of ‘Instant Messenger’ or a telephone text message. Now people use “lol” and “ttyl” (among a whole alphabet-soup of shorthand) and most people in who are technologically literate, probably know what that means, but if you are not, then it’s lost on you. Further, I’m afraid to mention what has become acceptable grammar, only because it would be like the pot calling the kettle black (my grammar is horrific). Another point embedded within this Baron quote is that writing is a technology, letters and symbols are a technology to communicate that we must learn to “read” just like we learn to “read” anything else. For instance, we must learn to “read” or understand the spoken word as children, by being taught, because we as human beings, desire to communicate with each other. Thus even the written word is a communication technology, a sort of umbrella group of other subgroups of writing technology such as the pen, word-processor, or engravings. Even I would consider speech under the same heading group of “communication technology,” to me; this is all the ‘same difference.’
Thus, communication technologies have changed language, and vice-versa. Embracing such new and promising technologies is very beneficial now, and for future generations. Sometimes this is only evident after the fact, because we haven’t seen all that our new writing technologies can be used for yet for future generations. Further, it is important, for the record, and to satisfy the curiosity of people after us, to keep a record that will exist after we cease to.
