Technologies and the Future of Writing Spring 2008

“If online reading was eating away at book reading, how did we explain literary weblogs that command thousands of readers a day, or book recommendations and dialogue as crucial features in the next generation of social software?”

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Writing Technologies is an online peer-reviewed journal which publishes research on the relationship between technology and textuality.

When I write--text or hypertext, fiction or theory--I must set aside a certain space in which to work. I use the word "space" here to group several kinds of space: physical, temporal, and cognitive. The writing space is not merely a desk or office where I keep my manuscripts and disks and pens and computer. It is also a space of time set aside from day to day life: from my job, from my wife, from all people and activities other than the work, the writing. But all the time and (physical) space in the world would be to no avail if I could not set aside one further space, a kind of internal solitude--a meditation perhaps--to which I turn to recapture the vision I had when last I wrote, or to see what lies ahead. This space is a little hard to describe, but it is there that writing, as I have quoted Walter Ong elsewhere, transforms human consciousness

I use the term "writing space" not just because I find it apt, but on purpose to augment the ways in which Jay David Bolter uses it in Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing. Bolter uses the term in at least three ways, all developed out of his initial concentration, the literal writing space,"the physical and visual field defined by a particular technology of writing": the papyrus, the page, the computer screen (Bolter 1991, 11)

became a classic. What fun to hear and feel Magic in 3-D, and how reassuring to hear the new tracks join the ranks of the classics that are really like old friends -- you smile when you hear them because they bring such pleasure t