This week I have been mostly wasting time on the internet reading about Kenneth Goldsmith’s new course ‘Wasting time on the internet’ and wondering how our digital lives can be reflected in our writing. Meanwhile, in The Guardian, technology is something that writers need to ‘rise above’ because it threatens the future of reading.
Has writing really evolved much since the days of the invention of the printing press? I love e-books but really they just duplicate the flat page-after-page of a physical book ( I did once prod my finger onto a word in a paperback and feel quite disappointed that a dictionary definition didn’t pop up). Technology doesn’t even seem to feature much in the day to day lives of most fictional protagonists – unless I’m not looking in the right places? On my first OU course I wrote a flarf poem before I even knew that such a thing existed, so experimenting with technology is something which seems to come naturally to me. Is technology something writers should fear, or is it high time we explored it and started to think beyond the paper page. I’m going to sign up to Kenneth’s course and find out*
*in my dreams
brick/by/book 