This week, I am tasked with writing a journal entry (500 words) by hand / manual production. To be honest, this was quite a therapeutic experience for me since I grew up learning using the paper and pencil method. This is the results of this experience:

I enjoyed this exercise quite a lot, especially when I had the chance to do this on my sailor moon mouse pad 🙂 It reminds me of my childhood where I would write book reports and then add stickers to decorate my creation. In fact, I still have a photo of this!

• Do you normally write by hand or type? Did you find this task difficult or easy? Explain.

I am a hybrid hand / type communicator so I found this task to be quite nostalgic. It was easy visiting my childhood to remember the good times of doing everything by hand. However, I’m also fully adapted to technology and even have my bachelors degree in Interactive Arts and Technology. I missed knowing the word count right away without having to manually count it on paper. I enjoyed the backspace button which is neat and tidy compared with me crossing out certain words when I made an error.

• What did you do when you made a mistake or wanted to change your writing? How did you edit your work? Did your choice of media play a part in how you edited your work?I crossed out my mistake. I appreciate the codex of modern technology where words that are incorrectly spelled are underlined in red. They can also be easily copied and or erased. In fact, rather than having to compose a series of text, words can now be suggested to you by AI such as ChatGPT.  Humans have evolved greatly from struggling with documenting laws / tasks on scrolls and delicate Egyptian papyrus paper to parchment paper to digital canvases.  What an incredible evolution of history.
• What do you feel is the most significant difference between writing by hand and using mechanized forms of writing? Which do you prefer and why?Readability, Replication and distribution. With the technological development of paper and the printing press, the “availability of paper encouraged a highly literate community with regular postal services, delivering correspondences as far away as India.”  (Lamb et al., 2020). However, with the digital platform and web 2.0, text can be generated, replicated and distributed worldwide with a click of a button.I prefer using the pen-to-paper method for ideas that are private because you never really know who is on the other side of the screen and what they can do with the information. However, outside the realm of cyber security, I prefer the digital method as a form of writing down ideas that I can freely share to my peers and to the community because it is enjoyable to me and I can find peers with similar interests faster with this method.

References

Lamb, R., & McCormick, J. (Hosts). (2020, May 26). From the vault: Invention of the book, part 1. [Audio podcast episode]. In Stuff to blow your mind. iHeart Radio.

Lamb, R., & McCormick, J. (Hosts). (2020, May 28). From the vault: Invention of the book, part 2. [Audio podcast episode]. In Stuff to blow your mind. iHeart Radio.