In the first reading for week 4, it is stated that writing is a technology for collective memory. The reading suggests that writing is a technology for preserving, presenting and communicating human experience as a record, so those in the present and the far future can learn from a secondary source. This ensures that information is communicated widely, and is more easily accessible. The reading addresses the histories of writing forms, and suggests that writing is not strictly writing in it’s literal sense, but the writing of information, whether that be in words, pictures, art forms, sculptures, vocally, or other technologies. While it is stated that a writer “always needs a surface upon which to make his or her marks and a tool with which to make them”, it is also noted that spoken language is a written technology, as “literacy is the realisation that language can have a visual as well as an aural dimension, that one’s words can be recorded and shown to others who are not present, perhaps not even alive, at the time of recording”.

Another point that caught my attention was the proposal that “all writing demands method, the intention of the writer to arrange ideas systematically in a space for later examination”. Similarly to what has already been discussed, this point, to me, translates to mean that any single thought that is recorded in the real world, and taken out of the dimensions of our mind becomes a writing technology- it is recorded or noted in order to communicate our human experience, whether it be to our peers, bosses, or to ourselves in the future. The act of writing is a technology used to preserve the information we concoct in our minds and present it as something tangible, or legible, which we can refer to in the future, in order to communicate our human experiences of learning, of growth, or of general thought.