Post #3...Writing as a technology/Show and tell

First part of post:
Response to the question about connections between the Manguel and Barron essays and my own relationship with writing technologies...

One connection between the two essays discussing histories of writing technologies is that both of the authors write about the ways in which writing technologies have become available, and eventually vital, to the common person.
I see my own relationship to writing technologies in these essays as related to the connection between them: writing technologies are necessities to me and to many. In the essays, writing technologies are described as originating from tools designed for specialized groups with no percieved uses for the larger population. Where now literate cultures cannot function without writing technology, when the same technologies were new, few saw the use for them. In short, my relationship is that of one tiny part of an ongoing history of writing technology that began as nonexistant, turned revolutionary, and is on to evolutionary.

Response to the question about the relationship between ideas about writing technologies and histories in Manguel and Barron and the ideas discussed in Plato and Ong...

Plato and Ong are each, in their own way, talking about the changes to individuals and cultures made by writing technologies: Plato is objecting to speculated affects of a shift from an oral society to a writing one in the midst of it and Ong writes about what he believes have actually been the affects ages after the shift. The relationship between the two sets of essays lies in the way Plato and Ong tackle changes to the mind and culture and Manguel and Barron catalogue the concrete manifestations of the changes in the form of improvements (?) to the mechanics of writing technologies. Put simply, Plato and Ong are concerned with thoughts and Manguel and Barron are concerned with the objects that accompany those thoughts.


Second part of post:
A bit about my invented writing technology...

First, to use the word "technology" might be a little excessive. The writing technologies I've been reading about in essays were refined and refined to the point that ease of use has made literate life and culture impossible without them. Of course, I did not expect to be able to find something useful; I expected to fail but I also expected to think and I certainly did do both.
When thinking about what to use to write, I really tried to remain as "pure" as possible and use no technology, but this project intersects with technology at every point. For materials, I used snakegrass gathered from a ditch near my house as my "pencil" and my dirt and rock driveway as my "paper." Even there I ran into problems because the driveway was so dark that the snakegrass did not show up very well, but everything around that was light in color was too far from natural that I didn't want to use it. This was the first instance that technology had to bleed into my writing technology: I could have written just about anything I wanted with my materials, but I also had to keep in mind that the words had to be photographed because the writing could not travel with me and deciding what would be small enough and color-contrasted enough was a huge limitation. Then technology further rained on my natural writing parade when I tried to take a sample picture of a word to see how I could visibly capture my writing technology and my camera then inexplicably decided to stop working altogether. I was not able to actually express anything with my technology (aside from the word "the" that you see below). Writing technologies, through all of the incarnations discussed by Manguel and Barron, have allowed people more and more to express themselves through communication and have affected changes in the way that communication and other thoughts are to be processed by the mind, as discussed by Plato and Ong. My technology does not even enter into this world. All that happened was a word oriented person, such as Ong discribes, got frustrated by not being able to write with ease. One final thought: at least two of the authors mention the alphabet as the ultimate writing technology and throughout the project I kept thinking about how writing technologies must have been driven by the need to use this brilliant tool.