Why Technology Matters to Writing: A Cyberwriter Tale

In his article “Why Technology Matters to Writing: A Cyberwriter’s Tale”, Jim Porter explicates how the emergence of writing technologies (from pencil to typewriters, word processing applications, Macintosh and so forth) influenced his own writing process not only in speed, but also socially and rhetorically. He states at one point that “One of the features of this story is certainly the importance of social networks and personal help, as well as the value of having access to public labs. Whenever I pushed to another level of technology use, somebody was there to help give me a boost to that next set of skills.” (381) He then goes on to challenge Dennis Baron’s view that “ . . . computer is just another in a long line of writing technologies – from the pencil to the typewriter to the computer. These tools foster incremental change that aids our writing process – but writing, language, and communication remain pretty much the same as before. Why should we get excited about the computer as revolutionary literacy technology? We didn’t get excited about the pencil. We didn’t start a field called “pencils and writing.”’(384) Jim porter argues that the emergence of computer is not so revolutionary, as was not the emergence of pencil, but it does change our language, communication, and how we use it affects our publishing practices. He justifies his idea by holding a differing idea from technological instrumentalists, who believe “Guns don’t kill, people do. “(385) I agree with Jim Porter and found his relating the idea of technological instrumentalism to his opposing idea very justifiable. It is not only the new technological innovations that are changing the world; we humans are changing it as we are the creators. What is fundamental about the new technology is not the technology per se, but its use.

Another approach that has a fundamental impact on our view of technology and new technological writing tools is our being a formalist as opposed to a contextualist. To a formalist, writing is words, sentences, paragraphs, prose, coherence, and organization. To a contextualism proponent, however, writing is not just printed words, but the process of writing, delivery, research, inquiry procedures, and invites the audience to think more critically.

In the end, Porter draws three sketches for another approach called the humanist approach including the utopian, the dystopian, and the neutral views. The utopian approach, as discussed in the last part of the article where Porter’s son’s question of “What is a computer?” gives Porter a new insight that technology is progressing, and what we may think of a computer as a writing tool, will be a different idea from what we think today. According to the Utopian view, technology is progressing and is dynamic. The dystopian approach, on the other hand, is a more pessimistic view of looking at technology and computing technology in particular.  The proponents of this view see technology as human-threatening. Hackers are one example of being threatening to humans through technology.  The third view, the neutral view, emphasizes that a machine, given a computer, is only a writing tool, and “the art of writing” is not  determined but maybe decreased or increased by the machine.

The last approach, a feminist approach, and also supported by Jim Porter, is the posthumanist approach in which technology is an “extension”(387) of human being and it challenges us as where the border between bodily existence and a technological innovation is. According to this approach, innovations are the result of humans and their intelligence, and therefore, a should not be disembodied from them.