In Writing Space, Bolter states that as we begin to move beyond print technology, “it is no longer appropriate to dismiss the visual history of writing . . . .” (63). Bolter points out that creating oral literature requires “a technical attitude toward the acts of composition and performance, a sense of difference from everyday speech” (57).
In considering this history, compositionists will move beyond the more simplified allusions to keyboard replacements, dictation, and conversation. We will move toward acknowledging that in C-MOC, the mind itself is the writing surface, as it was for the Zulu, Xhosa, Homeric, and Irish poets referred to by Bolter (56), in that the writer is more removed from a physical external writing surface. In describing artificial intelligence as “simply another way to write with the computer (171), Bolter shows us how we get to the point of ascribing human traits to the technologies we compose with. Users of any computer program, he argues, find themselves “acting as if they were communicating with an intelligence rather than activating a series of instructions” (189). And, hence, we begin to talk to the computer and begin “to ascribe malice or good will to the machine” 189).
