Week 15

What role does technology play in everyday writing and composing?

Technology has allowed for new was of creating and sharing writing. As new technologies are created they are not given attention because they are a new technology but rather because they provide some kind of service or use that makes it easier for someone or a group of people. The ability to communicate more easily allows for collaboration to happen and people learning from others. Technology allows for writing to be about more than just writing and has become a way of using writing to teach each other and learn from each other on more than just things that were common before the new technology. Now any topic was fair game when writing because there was a wider audience for the writing and the writers had more motivation to write. When writing the writer knew that they could get feedback from what they write that would allow them to learn in return for what they are providing. Some examples of how technology has changed everyday writing are blogs, social networking websites, and online review boards. Blogs are used to put information about a person or topic out to a place where a large community can access it. This focus on a specific community changes the way that the writing is composed it is written with words that are specific to that community. The physical composition of writing has also changes due to technology; it has progressed from scratching in stone to using pen and paper to a printing press and now to computers, which offer a variety of different ways of creating a text.