Sunday, October 30, 2016

A Reflection on Writing and Paper


Tomorrow (Halloween) will mark two years of the Potions For Muggles blog. It’s always good to spend some time reflecting on why I spend time on any particular activity. After all, I want my students to do the same. Earlier in the semester (between weeks 4-6), I had my first-year advisees keep a timelog for a week. I wanted them to see where they spent their time, and then have them stop by my office to share their reflections. (I specifically tell that I’m not going to ask to see their actual timelog – I just want to know their reflections on the activity.) So far the students have found the activity helpful to them!

Has blogging been helpful to me this past year? One of my goals was to improve my writing. While I think I saw significant improvement my first year, I’m not sure how much more I have improved over this second year. I’ve noticed that I don’t spend as much time drafting and crafting my post compared to my first year. Can one’s writing deteriorate? I think so. Like many other skills, continued practice is important. I also think blogging about the new things I am trying in my classes keeps me accountable. I think I am more likely to follow through on an idea once I have announced it publically in some form or other. Blogging has also helped me reflect on the new things I am trying in class, simply by forcing me to sit down and write down my thoughts in some coherent fashion.

This past week I have been reading Paper: Paging Through History by Mark Kurlansky. Socrates shows up in the first chapter. In Phaedrus, there is a dialogue titled “The Superiority of The Spoken Word. The Myth of the Invention of Writing”. The familiar argument is that writing is both inferior and dangerous – our memory recall becomes flabby through lack of exercise, one-way communication through writing does not allow the dialectical asking and answering of questions, and being removed from the writer makes it “not sincere, not heartfelt, and thus in a sense less true.” In the dialogue, Socrates describes what happens when (Egyptian god) Thoth invents writing. The pharaoh tells Thoth: “You have invented an elixir not of memory but of reminding, and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant.” (As we move towards more online A.I.-driven education, I see an argument for having a live instructor here.)

Reading the history of paper and writing made me think about the difference between the last millennium of writing on physical objects versus digital writing – moving 1’s and 0’s around on a computer chip stored somewhere in a cloud. In ancient times, only the most important things were etched into stone or carefully transcribed on papyrus or vellum. Very few people could read or write, and a class of scribes grew in power and influence with the “technology” of writing. While many valuable ancient writings have been preserved, many have been lost. Much was lost when the Library of Alexandria was destroyed by fire. The burnings of the Mayan codices by overly zealous Spaniards erased much of the history of a people.

But as paper got cheaper and the printing press was invented, the hunger of the general populace for reading material helped to drive the technology of printing for the masses. With spreading literacy, more folks even took to writing. Kurlansky goes into great detail describing the impacts in each technological iteration. He weaves a loom by pulling in threads from political pamphlets, the invention of newspapers, the scouring of rags, the fad of paper clothes, and the relationship of artists to their paper. I greatly enjoyed the first half of the book, but the second half felt ponderous and I found myself skimming.

In early times, ideas spread as quickly as paper and printing could spread. But this would change in the 20th century as new media superceded paper. When I was young, I very briefly (for a few months) kept a diary. I have no idea where it is anymore. Lost forever perhaps in a landfill somewhere after being thrown into the trash. (This was before recycling became popular.) Now, I have a blog that is broadcast to the world with the press of a button. It exists, not as ink molecules binding to the molecules of paper in some sort of permanence, but in a transient form of bytes somewhere in a cloud hosted by Blogger. The spread of my writing is almost instantaneous. It could all be lost in an instant unless a bunch of folks downloaded local versions. But even then, digital files can be corrupted just as acidity can destroy paper.

Tagging my blog posts and using the search function means that I do not exercise my memory in the way Socrates wishes. The external hard drives in the cloud have become an extension of my memory, searchable by anyone connected to the network using standardized pattern recognition; they are only transiently stored in an idiosyncratic neuronal network in my brain. I don’t claim to offer my readers true wisdom or even the appearance of wisdom as the pharaoh avers. But maybe it’s not the elixir of memory that is important, but the reminding in the form of reflection. Looking back allows us to see where we’ve come from. Those who do not learn from history are likely to repeat its mistakes. So perhaps writing’s utility is as a reflective reminder to the writer. Perhaps I should keep blogging for another year!

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