Dynamic Writing

I’ve decided that for this blog, instead of working off a website included in the article, I’m going to work off a specific quote in Morris’s article. So here it goes:

“The different between the pen, the printing press, and the computer, however, is the gist of Bush’s vision: like the Memex, a computer is an intelligent machine, not just faster but more precise, more capacious, and more dynamic than a pen, typewriter, or printing press. In an important sense, it is said to think with us—even in dystopic imaginings, for us or against us” (11).

Dynamic is what I really want to focus on. Why do we need a machine of technology to make our writing, our poems, our work, our creation, more dynamic? Shouldn’t our writing, the words we have created and arranged on the paper, be dynamic enough?

What may make writing displayed in a technological medium more “dynamic” is the machine’s ability to change fonts, attach images and links to words and make virtual creations, like five by five. But by doing this, we manipulate the words, ultimately manipulating the meaning of the poem. But is this manipulating meaning for the better or for the worse? Maybe because of this “dynamic-ness” people are able to better express themselves. But then I think, through history people have used words to express themselves—some write, some speak, some perform. But those who write to express themselves have that skill of writing—they can arrange their words and speak their mind in a coherent manner. And the same applies to those who use speech as a means of expression.

But now, using a computer now requires a new skill—the knowledge of technology. To write poetry in a virtual medium you have to know how to make this expression occur on your computer—frankly, I have no idea how to make “words come alive,” in a literal and virtual sense, on a computer.

I’m not dismissing virtual poetry as a means of expression, but I am as a means of writing. “Making your writing more dynamic” is what one should do through words, not virtual effects. As computers and intelligent machine comes into our lives, we must not dismiss them but we also must not rely on them. We must work with them, like the quote above says to “think with them,” to better develop ourselves as people. For some, the beauty of expression and the most dynamic words still remain on a sheet of paper, without any virtual enhancement.


Some Notes:
What’s funny, as I read this, is that I basically refer to the machine as person. I say “the machine’s ability,” meaning the machine completes the task. But how does this task originate? Should I instead say it’s the computer coder’s codes entered into the computer that completes these tasks? Or the computer coder himself could’ve indirectly completed this task. Or is it the “writer” sitting and typing at the computer who has created this task?

I also must add that “blog” is a not in this edition of Word that I’m currently using.