We are cyborg writers now. Can we write at all without machines?
When my laptop broke, I felt bereft. I decided to write by hand. But how could I share it? Could anyone read it? Writing offline felt scary: it was clumsier, less secure, more precarious.
While my laptop was being fixed, I started writing this in a google doc on my partner’s laptop. None of my programs and files were on this strange machine, it worked differently, everything was slower. To work, I needed to find stuff online: references in GoogleScholar, notes in my encrypted cloud drive, and VitalSource books in the app on my phone. How could I write well without my companion screen (a laptop is like a companion animal, isn’t it, or at least like a farmer’s horse)? I discussed this in our social writing group on Zoom and we shared our stories of tech glitches. In a browser, you can connect with others, but writing is clumsier, less secure, more precarious.
You could start to translate this post at one press of a button (I did, to use a version of it in another language I speak less well). Lots of writers use machine translation, never mind generative AI. But who gets access to your text, then? Finishing and polishing it might need as much work, if not more, as translating or writing yourself from scratch. You’d need another human to read it, to make sure it sounded right. The text the machine made might feel clumsier, less secure, more precarious.
We are human writers still. Can we write at all without each other?
We write with our bodies, senses, and feelings. I started writing this on a retreat I also facilitated, in a sunny rooftop room, with other writers, after a good lunch. An hour before, we were walking outside on the frozen lake. Despite the technical glitches, because the community was supporting me, I felt better, and my text felt better. Even if I’d been writing alone, other people would have been with me, whether they’d written things I’d read or were going to read what I wrote.
When I trained to facilitate writing retreats, I remember thinking that as a facilitator, I won’t be able to write anything myself. Now, if I’m not facilitating, I struggle to find time to write. The community has become essential to the process. But so has the machine. We need to get together online, even in oder to meet offline. Still, for our writing retreat to work, for us to connect with each other and our texts, we have to disconnect. We have to get away from our phones, email, and social media. We might even draft and create with pencil and paper, by hand. It feels less clumsy, more secure, less precarious.
Ridge Writing Retreats 
Lovely layered reflections on thinking/writing in relation to the cyborg, computer, paper, pencil, body, hand, others. All these writing instruments are tools of the mind, as Vygotsky put it; scaffolds for our ability to think. Our dependence on these writing tools—or no, as you say, the integration of them into our thinking—means that their absence, presence, working order can have profound effects on our ability to think/write. Our thinking/writing is more ore less clumsy, secure, precarious because of them. Writing this on my phone for pasting into the WordPress app does feel clumsier, less secure, more precarious. Happily getting out my pencil and notebook now to think cyborg-like with my hand before a day spent thinking with my computer.
LikeLiked by 1 person