Technology and Me

For this final blog for English 201, I am going to discuss how technology influences my own writing. I don't really consider myself to be a person who sticks to either technology or writing things out by hand. There are some things that I enjoy writing out by hand, and there are some things that I'd prefer to type out. For more personal pieces, such as poetry, journal entries, or notes, I prefer to write by hand. I love the feel of a pencil to blank notepaper. I love how the pencil feels in my hand. It is a way of releasing my own thoughts, and there's just something comforting about it that I really enjoy.

This is not to say that I don't enjoy typing things. In fact, I take pride in how well I type (I think this is partially due to taking 10 years of piano lessons, but I digress...). In today's day, many times it is simply more practical to type things rather than write them out by hand. Typing is cleaner, neater, and with today's tools like spellcheck, it definitely helps the reader understand what the writer is trying to say. This is especially useful to me when I am composing things of a longer nature. Writing out term papers is much easier when you can type out your thoughts quickly and then go back and add more. Composition on a word processor allows (for me) a much more fluid thought process.

Ong talks about the separations that writing has. He mentions that "writing divides or distances more evidently and effectively as its form becomes more abstract..." (28). I completely agree with this. As writing moves to typing, it becomes more abstract. When things are hand-written, it is more difficult to critique than when it is typed, simply because I feel that writing by hand is more personal. It's more intimate. If your mother were to hand write a letter to you, you would find it more difficult to respond in a more honest manner than if she were to just send you an e-mail.

For the last part of 201, we were supposed to do all of our journaling online. This was quite an interesting experience for me. I thought it was a challenge. It was difficult to figure out the technicalities of actually navigating through the blog site and figuring out how to 'follow' prople and post entries. (I still have a hard time with this!) Once I sort of figured out those basics, I found it easy to type about the essays we read. My thoughts were easy to capture because typing made me get them out more quickly than if I were to academically journal by hand. So while there were some minor challenges with blogging online, I did find it enjoyable. The spontaneous-ness of being able to type more fluidly and record my thoughts definitely made it easier than writing journals by hand, so I think it was more useful than writing a final paper. I also felt a lot less pressure to make everything absolutely perfect-- my thoughts were more important than things like paragraph formatting and page numbers. The lack of formal structure was liberating in a sense that I don't normally get the opportunity in classes to express my own opinion.

In conclusion, blogging was fun :-)