Tony's response to "Why Technology Matters to Writing"

In Joe Porter’s article, “Why Technology Matters to Writing: A Cyberwriter’s Tale” he states a simple claim: technology matters to writing. He not only presents this argument through text, but cleverly intersperses his article with the evidence of technological influence. The inclusion of images of cartridge pens, typewriters (what are those?), and word processing machines make a strong case for his argument metatextually, while at the same time providing nice visuals of the evolution of writing devices. One could see this as forced, most academic journal articles do not include this type of material, but his use of hypertext in particular within the body of the article show how this technology has truly advanced the form of writing. As someone who has developed a nasty habit of seeking out the sources and references of writers, which often involves a page-turning time vortex spiraling back to the Greeks, it is a beautiful time-saving change to have arguments linked directly to the source texts, and to be able to examine as I read, instead of paging my way down through foot/endnotes to answer the question in my head. [Sidenote: the ability to search digital texts for keywords and phrases makes the ability to quote, make allusions and connections to earlier texts (intertextuality) mind-blowingly simple. I wonder whether the future will de-emphasize these techniques in creative writing? If anyone can produce a text rich in allusion, will the future’s favored texts those that are the most startling original or that have little connection to the past?] So the article also demonstrates that technology also matters to reading.

I am surprised that in Porter’s discussions to the feminist/humanist views of how technological advances have changed writing he nowhere alluded to Derrida’s analysis of “style” and “stylus” in Spurs, or Luce Iragaray’s Speculum.

In class we briefly discussed whether the computer world produced “” manly or womanly” text and brought up the fact that 80 percent of Wikipedia was composed by white men. If Derrida’s assertion that the stylus: pencil/pen etc. is related to the phallus and that the history of discourse preferenced men over women. Does the interface of the computer keyboard eliminate these concerns? Or since typing originated in this sexist world, as Porter puts it, “secretarial skill for non-college bound girls” perhaps this new technological world might actually preference the voice of women? I am kidding about the last part here, but the implications of the interface being neutral is an interesting idea to me.

P.S. I tried Jing for this and it works pretty well, but I think the image capture device connected to the SMART board software works just as well.