I think the main characters in the above story, the one I just made up, are the pencil and the typewriter. Sure, the playwright throws something and the industrialist dies, but without the pencil and the typewriter, neither person would even be in this story. And the best thing is, in my story, neither thing plays the role it was designed to play. The pencil, in this story, is a commodity that earns a man his fortune, possibly putting him on that block, walking to his car, at that exact moment. The typewriter is the object of a playwright's frustration and the falling object, which could just as easily have been a potted plant, or if I had been feeling clichéd, a piano.
But I chose these objects to illustrate what Jim Porter calls "technological instrumentalism" (385), because nobody uses the pencil or typewriter to write in my story. The western attitude towards writing technology often over or underestimates the effects of the computer on writing because it divorces the writer from the tool of writing. This singular view of the computer as a thing without a user allows some to claim that technology simply creates tools for writing and nothing more, and that computers represent just another in a long line of tools, including the chisel, pencil, and word processor. On the other end of the spectrum, technological instrumentalism allows for a dystopian vision of computers and writing, in which the computer consumes the human writer, finally standing alone after the humanity is eradicated from writing.
In fact, technological instrumentalism arises often when we encounter pictures of technology. Porter admits that even his article has this fallacy encoded in it when he notes that the pictures of computers he has used "reinforce instrumentalism by showing writing machines standing alone" (385). But if he had included himself sitting at his machines, or if he had created a Norman Rockwell-esque image of a happy, wholesome family gathered around a Macbook, would we have recognized what we saw? Maybe we would have taken the image as farcical, given the ways in which computers and writing technology are very often represented.
Even Apple's homepage--remember Lanham praised Apple for being more in touch with artistic, human users (47)--represents their machines sans humanity. The only human faces on the web page appear on the computer screens, perhaps tacitly suggesting that they have been consumed by the technology. Similarly, Dell's site includes no computers on the homepage. There are just people, standing there being happy and successful, and the Dell corporation, and I'm assuming their products, somehow plays a role in this, but the technology remains only a tool for this success. Though, I must say that those "Dude, your getting a Dell" ads managed to include humans and technology equally, if even only to convince users that Dell's products can be tailored to their needs.
Porter and Lanham suggest similar approaches to the humanity/technology relationship. Porter's approach is reciprocal. Humans ultimately govern how they will use technology to write, while the technology they use can open doors for the writer, allowing their writing to evolve. For example, hyperlinks allowed reader's of Porter's essay to jump quickly to citations and references at the end of his work. Porter could not have made that stylistic choice had he used a typewriter.
Lanham argues that technology and postmodernism have brought us back to a beginning point, specifically when it comes to aesthetics. Text need not be only writing, and Lanham uses collage as an example of how creators of text can use technology to play. There is a childlike playfulness in this type of writing because the "rules" have not yet been codified. We can experiment without being held up to the likes of the chat room Shakespeare or the Virginia Woolf of the comments section.
Yes, Dadaism and collage predate the Internet, but with Internet technology, but Internet texts are much more aesthetics-oriented than print. Even the interface between the writer and cyberspace lends itself to the visual. For example, "[o]ur computer font menus regularly include printer's dingbats...but the range of readily available proverbial icons now runs thousands" (17). And as we have seen, the aesthetic choices we have in creating blogs often seems overwhelming, much more so than a QWERTY keyboard.
Reading Porter's description of technological instrumentalism inspired me to make up that story about the pencil and the typewriter, because I began to think about these objects without humans using them for their designed purpose, writing, and whether a such a story would make sense. I don't think my allegory is all that profound. The typewriter killed the pencil, all without a human writer's agency. I could have added that the playwright threw her typewriter out of the window out of frustration at not being able to type and delete over and over to find just the right word, so after she threw out the relic, she turned to her computer, typed and deleted until she found some words she liked. Then, she emailed that draft to a friend to take a look at it.
I could not think of a way to include the computer without a human user, and I think that illustrates Porter's argument that the computer writing technology not only requires a human user, but also encourages human communities to arise--whether in the form of online writing communities, social media, or, like the platform we are using right now, blogs that allow for commenting. Therefore, we ought to view the computer as more than another writing tool like the chisel, pencil, and typewriter.
EDIT: I can do this because blogging takes a lot of the permanence out of publishing, but the Blogger platform doesn't seem to allow pics and video in the comments section.
Not everyone values Macs for the reasons Lanham does. I found this on Reddit:
I like your example, Chris. It shows a clear understanding of the text.
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