User:Nadiners/ essay

Writing is a Technology; A Personal Account

Apologies in advance –

I am sorry Steve, I know you gave a structured plan of how to write an essay, but I’m really struggling to comply with it. This is after a few days of staring at my screen and procrastinating in ways that are unimaginable. So I am writing this:

Ever since I have had to write formal essays or anything that would be marked by a teacher (or official texts such as application letters) I have put myself in a state of crisis. I don’t have the excuse of being dyslexic, my grammar and spelling seem to be just fine. The problem lies in putting down my ideas in a linear comprehensible way for an external reader. I have used the technology of writing in many ways for my personal life, I would write down my dreams or if I were deeply upset with someone, instead of taking it out on them I would take it out on my pen and paper.

I have done pretty much everything to avoid academic writing; in school I wrote badly, got my low grades, which were still passes. To compensate, I enhanced my mathematical, artistic and French skills. When I went to study in France for my bachelor in an art and design school, I always used the excuse of being a foreigner and not being able to write when I was given assignments. However, I could speak fluently, so in a way I would fool myself and people around me. Until one day I had to write my thesis... I cried for two weeks. Really. I asked everyone around me for help, my friends, family, teachers, and they all did. But they couldn’t write it for me. So, the day before the deadline, I suddenly got that last minute adrenalin and started writing, in very basic French, just putting headings and throwing in my ideas into the sections. No structure, but the ideas were there with lots of images. I handed it in way below the word limit, but it ended up being more than ok, partly because I was in an art school, and because my ideas weren’t so stupid after all!

Now I am doing a Masters and I don’t know if I can get away with it, maybe, being in an art institute, breaking the rules might not be so bad?

I realise that the topics of writing, communicating or translating, have been haunting me. I started researching the topic of illiteracy, which was such a vast topic I couldn’t deal with. Subconsciously I must have thought about creating something where I wouldn’t need to write. Well, now I’m aware of it.

So I am writing this, as a last minute urge, instead of writing about ‘writing is a technology’ and comparing Walter J. Ong’s Orality and Literacy with Italo Calvino’s Cybernetics and Ghosts. Which is extremely relevant in my case. I think maybe I’ve eased myself into talking about those topics with this long personal introduction.

An automatic writing machine is an idea that attracts me. If only I could throw some ideas into a machine and it would automatically put it into prose. Structured, with an introduction and a conclusion. Would the ghost that Calvino is talking about still be there, in the machinic prose? Must an author have his own style of writing, what if I could accustom my machine to have a literate style.

I will compare it to a camera: the writing machine, and an amateur photographer: me. So, there is a man who owns a super expensive DSLR camera that he doesn’t know how to use, nevertheless he takes a picture (because he knows that when he presses the big button on top, it will take a picture). He photographs a subject that interests him; a girl. The girl is beautiful and the machine he uses is powerful. Yet his lack of technical and artistic skills produces a bad photo. He is aware that the photograph is not good. He doesn’t know what the aperture, shutter speed, or white balance all mean. And, he just doesn’t have an eye for taking photos. He’ll just put it on his computer and get the software to automatically fix the white balance and levels. Now his picture is better. It’s not great, but he has a picture of the beautiful girl, whom remains beautiful despite the technology that he couldn’t master. So, without the technology the photo wouldn’t exist, and the man’s memory of the beautiful the girl might disappear. The photo will help him remember (or it might alter the memory, but that is another subject).

The technology of writing for me is similar, I use it, I need it to capture my ideas, to communicate, but I am lacking the skill, I just don’t have it in me. So a machine that would take my ideas and automatically structure them, the ghost writer machine, it wouldn’t have the soul a true poet has, but for an amateur like me, it could be a really helpful tool. Literate people use writing all the time, like people use their smartphone’s camera, they are both technologies that have been made accessible for the wider public.

The truly skilled artist (the photographer, or the author) stands out, and is praised for it. Although today there are many blurry lines between the amateur photographer or an artistic/professional photographer. The same goes for writing, everyone can be their own publisher, but does it mean their writing is worth reading? Oh, this is another topic.

"The true literature machine will be one that feels the need to produce disorder" Calvino states, so what would be a true ghostwriter machine? One that listens to the user, and could neatly write out the user's intentions with the messy information he receives.