Journal 3 Carly Gillingham

Writing and technology together establish a first and foremost important relationship. If we view writing in the more abstract way like how we discussed in class, as in viewing a pen and paper as a sort of technology, then technology has always been vital for writing. Technology allows for a myriad of different mediums in which writing can take form. Writing, as discussed in our first journal entry, can take the form of arbitrary things like jotted down notes, or it can be a profound way for poets and artists to express themselves or for journalists to convey an important idea to the public. This leads into the next term: circulation. If not for circulation, then an audience could not be reached. Nowadays, more advanced technology, especially social media and digital publishing, is vital to circulation. In a digital age, social media can have a great impact on how far ideas are circulated. American newspapers used to be available only in print, and therefore only to regional US citizens. Nowadays, western news outlets are available in digital form to people across the world. Penney & Dadas, in their article, discuss how tweeting and digital composition played important parts in the Occupy Wall Street movement. Another example where social media and modern technology played this kind of role is the Arab Spring, which consisted of a number of individual revolutions in the Arab states that were coined “twitter revolutions” due to how tweeting facilitated the movements. These movements were also facilitated by digital news media, especially Al Jazeera. So, the interconnectedness of writing, digital technology, and circulation can be seen in these examples. Jolly’s article, however, also shows us a different way that ideas can be circulated through writing without tools like Twitter. She discusses the “imaginary” community created by the circulation of the symbolic “web” during the women’s peace movement in England in the 1980s, a large part of which was played by letter-writing. Jolly writes, “The feminist peace protests … found a powerful resource for making virtual community in articulating a collective identity of ‘Greenham woman through personalized address and epistolary networking.” This shows a deeply identity-based, personal means of circulating ideas through writing. This example uses a more abstract/loosely defined form of technology that was discussed (pen and paper, symbolism), than the automatic definition that we now think of with the word “technology,” which constitutes something closer to social media and digital composition. Either way, both examples show how important each tool – writing, technology, and circulation – are to one another and the different ways in which one can facilitate the other.