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Inventing A Writing Technology Essay examples

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"Inventing" A Writing Technology

According to Walter Ong, an influential scholar of the relationship between technology and media, "Literacy is imperious. It tends to arrogate to itself supreme power by taking itself as normative for human expression and thought. This is particularly true in high-technology cultures, which are built on literacy of necessity and which encourage the impression that literacy is an always to be expected and even natural state of affairs" (316). Ong would probably agree that literacy is so embedded in our current technological culture that it has become part of the standard of living, a necessary requirement for functioning in this highly professionalized world. However, the point of Ong’s prior statement …show more content…

Portability was described as the extent to which the text could be moved or carried. Nature referred to the extent to which the materials used in creating the text and/or writing surface were found in nature and not manufactured or highly processed. During this experiment, I tried to consider what completely natural materials I could find. I resorted to using materials found in my backyard including rocks, dirt, sand, sticks, grass, and leaves. The permanence criterion of the assignment narrowed my choices by eliminating writing in the dirt, sand, or mud or with grass or leaves. Wind or rain would erase any writing created using these materials. The issue of portability further narrowed my decision to use a small, hand-held, sharp rock to scrape or chisel words into a larger stone which was able to be carried. The stone needed to have a writing surface large enough to chisel words but not so large that it could not be easily transported. All in all, inventing a technology which was creative was somewhat of a problem when considering permanence and portability and was overlooked as a criterion.

Although the solution to the assignment may sound easy, the creation process was actually very challenging. One reason may be that "Oral speech is fully natural to human beings in the sense that every human being in every culture who is not physiologically or psychologically impaired learns to talk" (Ong, 322). In U.S. culture, oral speech and writing are

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