Writing Technology

One definition of writing is to form letters, words or symbols on a surface such as paper with an instrument such as a pen . To many this is an obvious definition. We use paper, pens and pencils almost every day of our lives. It has become so much the norm that we take it for granted and don‘t give it a second thought. But in retrospect, writing can be looked at as a technology that has come a long way and that is more complex than we may know.

When given the task to write 20 words or less by using something natural, I found it to be very difficult. I thought long and hard. Without using something that was created by someone such as a pen, I came up with very few ideas . Not only did I have to find the instrument to write with, but also the surface on which to write upon. What in the world around us today is truly natural? Not much is the conclusion I came to, and being as it is winter, a whole lot less with all the snow.

At first I thought about using my nails and writing into a piece of fruit. However, I would have to go to the store to get a piece of fruit because of the season, and stores aren’t really natural. I really wanted to do this project with as little use of things unnatural as possible. Than I thought about doing something with fire and ashes, but I don’t know how to start a fire using only two sticks. There were plenty of matches around, but like the store, those aren’t natural either.

My final choice was to use a stick to write in the snow with, since there was plenty of both around. However, I had difficulty getting a stick to break off the frozen branches of the trees. So, what I ended up choosing as my instrument was an icicle.

The icicle was very cold in my hands, and very uncomfortable. I could feel it melting as I stood there thinking of what to write. So I thought quickly, and proceeded to write “hi” in the snow. I chose “hi” because it was a short greeting that is commonly known. As I etched my word into the snow, I found it very smooth to move through. At first I hadn’t written deep enough for the word to be readable, so I had to trace it over again , this time with my icicle halfway into the snow.

My hands were freezing cold, so I was very happy when it was over. I set the icicle down next to the word and proceeded to take a picture of my work for show and tell. Once I finished with this, I started to think about what I actually had done. Up until this point I hadn’t exactly put too much thought into why our class was doing this as an assignment, and about what the parallels to writing in the snow were to writing as a technology or as a whole.

At first I began to wonder why we were using things from nature. Determining what to use while staying within this limitation was probably the hardest part of the assignment. No matter how creative I tried to be, most everything I came up with dealt with using something