Journal 3 - Dakota Helbig

To analyze the relationship between writing, technology, and circulation it would be important to look at the relationship each individual concept has with the others. Writing, for example, can be looked at as a combination of the concepts of general communication and technology (written alphabet). Circulation involves a degree of reproducibility so that the idea being spread can move beyond the original instance of the idea; this doesn’t necessarily mean a reliance on technology but technology has improved the capability of reproduction, especially for texts. Technology has circulation as a core concept but in a different way. Technology has circulation as an end goal as it relies on people adopting new technologies in order to succeed. As such, many innovations and new technologies are designed around the idea of being easy to circulate or easy to adopt. Writing relates to circulation fairly naturally, a written text is only useful if the target audience has access to it and therefore is paired with the idea of circulation. Now that individual relationships between these three concepts have been established it’s easier to look at them together. They work as a cycle that can move in any pattern between its three steps. Writing can influence technology which can influence circulation, circulation can influence technology which can influence writing, technology can influence writing which can influence circulation, etc. To see examples of this we can look at newspapers and their history. The first recorded history of a newspaper is in Germany during the 1400 which existed as circulated pamphlet. The invention of the printing press in 1440, also in Germany, improved greatly on the concept of circulation as a newspaper could now be mass produced exactly the same much faster and much more efficiently. As technology continued to improve circulation increased as well as how much writing could be in a newspaper. Look to the mid-1900s and we see mass produced, multi-page newspapers being circulated across the continental United States on a daily basis. The invention of television and the subsequent widespread adoption of the technology loosened the newspaper’s hold as the dominant source of information for the public but it wasn’t until the invention and widespread adoption of the internet that newspapers were forced to innovate to survive. Newspapers began to move online to compete with the instantaneous transmission of online content. This cycle has each concept of this complex relationship influencing various changes and innovations on the real world text.