draft I
After six years of undergraduate writing, I’m well acquainted with the ritual of opening a blank word document and struggling to fill it with something intelligent. Yet despite the fact that we’ve met often enough in literary combat, that blank white rectangle never fails to intimidate the heck out of me. There’s something about the proportions and the blinking text cursor that feels claustrophobic. Last week I was struggling to put pen to paper when I found myself thinking again how much easier it is to come up with a clear argument and train of thought when speaking out loud to another person in the world--unconfined. This got me thinking about how we write, the ritual of writing, and the mediums we use to hold our thoughts.
The first step that I always take when beginning a writing task is to open a document on screen or to take out a blank piece of paper. In either case, my writing is contained within the window of the page, screen, etc. This makes me wonder...what would windowless writing look like? Is it possible to imagine a new way of writing that is as containerless as speech? Why are our modes of input so limited...so unchanged for hundreds of years?
There are some clear benefits to having standard containers for writing. The physical and visual limitations might be freeing to some. As with any design problem, limitations are essential parts of defining and solving a problem. Perhaps these limitations actually free up the writing process. Perhaps the default means of displaying text and graphics also aids in the mass communication of messages. Perhaps mediums and sizes help people to focus on the content rather than the delivery. Certainly tasks like sending physical mail and printing on a large scale would be very difficult without some kind of standards for output of written communication.
However, we’ve been contained within these mediums for so long that I wonder whether anyone even considers that there might be another way. In following this train of thought, I’ve struggled to come up with an image of what truly containerless writing would look like. It’s difficult to imagine a world where history hasn’t brought us to a place of paper, windows, and ubiquitous rectangles. Certainly writing in the post-Gutenberg world has been limited by paper, and this has extended to our ways of writing on screen, despite the fact that the physical limitations of press, printing, paper, and the postal service no longer exist in the digital realm. These types of writing mediums also seem to privilege text heavily over image. Since most of the mediums came out of a verbal tradiiton, the mediums are not specifically created for images. Images are often placed into and formatted for these rectangular containers regardless of content and appropriateness.
When I first started thinking about the category of contained communication, I thought of writing on a screen, writing on a page, video chat, instant message, email, blogging, etc. Containerless communication would be talking on the phone or person to person in real life. I didn’t realize until after making the lists that I’d neatly put all the inherently visual communication I could immediately think of into the container category and the two most potentially non-visual into the containerless category. This isn’t really accurate. Phone conversations are also contained within a medium even if the medium isn’t a rectangular window of some sort. And there must be a way of working within the ‘contained’ mediums so that the text/image isn’t so limited by the parameters and syntax that we’ve become so accustomed to when writing in rectangular spaces.
But again, what would this look like? My first thought was the work of Stefan Sagmeister:
I suppose the main issue is that we seem stuck with writing traditions that were developed in the 1400s. Surely it’s time to rethink or at least stretch our awareness of our means of writing and possible alternatives?
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