Have you ever read a text and in its entirety one sentence revolutionized your thought for a day? A week? Maybe even for the rest of your life? Well for me this happens often. I read something and I internalize someone’s ideas or thoughts. I become consumed by that idea. For this reading the obsessive compulsion had an early onset. In Ong’s Chapter 4 became obsessively attached to a sentence which read, “we find it difficult to consider writing to be a technology as we commonly assume printing and the computer to be.”(80) For many of us who have grown up with writing as a standard in our lives I believe we tend to over look it as technology due to the fact that we rarely think of it as an innovation in the area of speech.
Technology is defined to many of us as a type of scientific knowledge tied with machinery or equipment but when I really thought about it I came to the conclusion that technology is simply an innovation that enables the simplicity of life. And when one really thinks of the idea of writing, how is it possible that we separate it from the idea of technology? Writing itself is the foundation of all technologies. It is innovation that allows us all to communicate our ideas faster and in a more in-depth and concise manner. Writing has allowed us to transcribe ideas and store them in a way that we can return to them and build upon them.
I think that the separation of concept in technologies between writing and the computer or printing comes from the idea that technology is scientific and writing is not seen in that aspect. Writing is connected to literature and literature in no way shape or form is connected to technology. But what we fail to realize is that writing has paved the way for computers and printing in its entirety. I believe this is so important because there is a giant misconception between what the ideology of writing as a technology and what technology really is. When we think of technology we think of a smart phone, a laptop, a fax machine never a book, a letter or even a word. Writing itself has been able to change the way we think. I found it unbelievable that I personally never thought of writing as a technology because I too have created a bridge which does not connect the two. I think it is important the bridge the two ideas because when we do we really understand how far writing has brought us and that it is because of its invention that we are able to even formulate the concept of technology as a whole.
