Response to Brooke & Grabill’s “Writing is a Technology”
Earlier in the semester, we read the article Writing is a Technology Through Which Writers Create and Recreate Meaning, by Collin Brooke and Jeffrey T. Grabill. The idea of writing, in it’s many forms and methods, as a ‘technology’ interested me, because technologies are so often thought of as tangible objects. Like physical tools that we usually consider to be technology, writing affords us the ability to spread ideas and concepts. Because technology is the application of knowledge for practical purposes, humankind quickly grew once the technology of writing was able to be written down.
“A book is a machine to think with.”
(Richards 2001).
The article begins with this quote, shaping the way that the reader thinks about “technology”. Although I previously hadn’t considered a book to be ‘technology’, the article goes on to explain how just like how we read texts on computers and tablets, a book was an early form of technology that allowed society to quickly progress through shared knowledge. When people read books, they are combining their own preconceived thoughts with whatever concepts are written in the book, and the machine progresses into a system in which more knowledge and concepts are formed. Thus, different writing technologies create even more concepts. Items that we usually consider to be “technology”, like a laptop, or headphones, or a car, allow humans to further their horizons and experience new encounters/feelings/concepts. Writing therefore is also a technology because it allows for more thinking to happen and for new “possibilities of meaning” to occur.
This article in itself is an example of how writing is a technology. Every person who reads this article has a completely unique understanding and undergoes their own thought process during their conceptualization of the article — new meanings and ideas are formed just through the combination of the reader’s thoughts + the words on the screen. The thinking process and writing processes are both ‘machines’ because they create new meanings and concepts. A person who reads this blog post will also have their own new thoughts, from my words, that were created as a result of Brooke and Grabill’s article. Writing is the technology that is responsible for every new technology that comes as a result of building off of other works.
Sophia Maynard 