The first three chapters of this book have leant heavily on the history and development of writing. Throughout these chapters, I have tried to illustrate the different ways in which we can think of writing as a technology. I have suggested that writing can be defined as a technology that enables us to make durable visual marks, and that it is also, at the same time, a meaning-making technology, a linguistic symbol system that we use to make and communicate meaning. I refer to this as the ‘double technology’ of writing, but emphasize that these two technologies are co-dependent. There is no writing without a technology to produce it, and no writing that hasn’t meant something to the people who used it. Technologies are used to make and display durable written language which can store a meaningful message to be retrieved at later date. The way in which writing can store or preserve a message is its key characteristic. This has led many commentators, from Plato onwards, to reflect on how writing, as a way of preserving messages, acts as a sort of substitute for memory.

On the basis of this memory or storage function, it has subsequently been argued that writing may enable us to order our thoughts, to reflect, and to achieve levels of abstraction that may transform consciousness. In what follows, I critique the idea that writing has unique benefits, using the example of extended writing. I argue that the promise or potential of writing lies in what we do with writing, rather than what writing does with us. In order to interrogate this idea, I focus on the ways in which we think with writing – but a degree of caution is necessary. Just because we can do this, and because writing may outlast its immediate use, doesn’t mean that its prime function is always about keeping records, storing knowledge, cultural transmission and so on. It is just as important, and in fact incredibly useful, as a way of labelling and organizing our environment, and helping us to navigate the world, both literally and metaphorically. And, it has also evolved as a way of initiating and sustaining our social relationships in different ways. There are then many ways in which we have put writing to use and a wide variety of things that we do with writing.

Despite all of this, the print book still holds an important place in our culture. Its material solidity and its historic significance lend it an air of authority. The book as a material artefact combines with our associations and assumptions about it to create an impression of importance. But the permanence of writing, and print in particular, does not always or automatically confer knowledge or authority, and although the written word may sometimes appear to have authority, to fix meaning, to create some sort of objective truth, a moment’s reflection can call all this into question. Lies, misinformation and fake news play with these sorts of assumptions about writing and authority. Writing can be used to mislead us or to persuade us to do things we might regret. In this chapter, I look deeper into the double technology of writing to show what writing has and can be used for – its promise – but I will also consider how writing can just as easily mislead or undermine, control or cajole in ways that can be harmful to individuals or social groups.

4.1 The Promise

The memory function of writing releases facts, ideas, discoveries and stories from the present moment, from the constraints of both time and space, making them accessible to readers in other times and places. Partly because of this, writing has become key to the ways in which knowledge and understanding have developed. Of course, it’s not the only way that knowledge and understanding develop, it’s just that the invention of writing has, in a very general sense, served some of us well and has been used for that purpose. Writing is in fact so tightly bound up with Western ideas about knowledge and culture that it has sometimes been seen as synonymous with civilization itself. Barry Powell’s otherwise informative book ‘Writing’¹ is subtitled a ‘Theory and History of the Technology of Civilization’, as if to suggest that civilization – whatever we might mean by that – is somehow a result of the invention of writing. But I want to suggest that civilization is itself a problematic concept. Part of the difficulty is that the idea of civilization is based on an outdated and at times blatantly racist comparison between industrialized and technologically advanced societies and those who they colonized, dominated or otherwise exploited – those thereby deemed to be uncivilized. The grand narrative of civilization has reinforced cultural dominance and exclusion. And what’s more, accepting a linear monocultural conception of human social development has often meant turning a blind eye to the cultural practices and literacies of dominated groups. Of course, Powell himself does not argue for this view – in fact, it seems more likely that he is simply suggesting that writing may be important to human progress and perhaps to more complex forms of social and cultural life – but the idea raises the question of whether writing is important to human progress, and if so how? Does writing offer us distinctive individual or collective benefits that can be separated from the status it has achieved in our social worlds?

In language and literacy studies, this question received considerable scholarly attention from the 1960s onwards. Two ideas central to the claim that writing is important to human progress have been challenged by this body of work. The first idea is that learning and using writing develops particular ways of thinking or reasoning, including such things as reflection and abstraction, that might not otherwise be available to us. In some way or another, this implies that writing might be instrumental in restructuring consciousness, in how we think, in the ideas we hold, and the ways in which we then lead our lives. This couples with a second idea – that written expression can enrich our minds, by liberating us from the limiting conditions of our immediate everyday experience. In other words, writing – and reading – might somehow expand or extend our view of ourselves, and help us to realize our ‘full potential’. The central problem with both these ideas is that they lead to an unhelpful distinction between societies with high levels of literacy and established ways of valuing writing, and those that do not. And this, then, just becomes another iteration of the grand narrative of civilization set out above. If the distinction were to be held true, it would suggest that those from non-literate societies were somehow cognitively and linguistically impaired. There is not a shred of evidence for this. Surely, literate societies could value their achievements without disparaging others that have functioned perfectly well without writing? The distinction is a way of thinking that ignores other (non-literate) ways of knowing. Researchers have not been able to find any evidence of either social or cognitive benefits.² They have in fact shown how false claims have repeatedly been based on a confusion between the effects of schooling and the effects of literacy. The so-called divide between oral and literate societies works to reinforce White, ethnocentric and Western notions of superiority. Moving beyond debates about the cognitive benefits of writing, a generation of scholars has now focused on the more productive idea of literacy as a social practice, which emphasizes the ways in which writing and other semiotic tools get used in everyday life and, by implication, the habits of mind associated with different kinds of writing.³

Conceiving of literacy as a social practice turns our attention away from thinking of writing as a highly specialized technology with intrinsic cognitive benefits and encourages us to focus on that whole spectrum of human activity that includes the written word in some form or another. The central animating notion of literacy as a social practice holds that writing is always embedded in social relations, part of achieving specific day-to-day tasks and that in doing so it maintains particular kinds of power and authority. This point of view highlights how writing is woven into our daily lives and how specific interactions, or events, reflect broader patterns of practice.⁴ It shifts attention away from unhelpful cultural comparisons, focusing instead on the uses we make of literacy. But despite all this, we are left with the awkward question of whether writing allows us to do some things that would be difficult to achieve without the technology of this particular system of symbols. I suspect that the question is really unanswerable – in the end, we might just have no way of telling. However, I want to explore the particular case of extended writing because of its cultural significance and because of its centrality in dominant conceptions of knowledge.

4.2 The Potential

It might be helpful to start with a practical illustration. Imagine, for example, that I want to outline a campaign to reduce the impact of vehicle pollution in my neighbourhood. Straight away a number of possibilities present themselves. I could draw a few pictures, take some photographs or, of course, I could simply record myself speaking. But actually, I’d be more likely to try and write, or type out my ideas. That would be the go-to place for organizing my thoughts. I might develop some notes, use a mind-mapping technique, or I could simply just start writing. Wherever I chose to begin though, I trust that at some level or other that writing would allow me to advance my cause and develop my argument. The current situation is this, vehicle pollution is a problem because, pollution could be reduced by taking a number of actions, those actions would, in themselves, be beneficial in a number of ways and so on. The result, I hope, would be persuasive – and it would hang together as an argument. It would be a development of ideas and it would help me keep a number of ideas in play at the same time. It’s perhaps worth noting, at this point, that the process of thinking things through with writing, as illustrated in this example, can sometimes be a quite private affair, and whilst most of the examples in this book involve writing practices that are in some sense public, there are arguably as many writing practices whose sole audience is the writer.

To return to the example under consideration, the preference for approaching the challenge of outlining the campaign as described, through writing, is, of course, the result of a particular set of dispositions that are largely dependent on my own social and cultural conditioning. But also, without needing to resort to any sort of stylesheet or template, that particular way of writing, that genre, is familiar to me – it is, after all, learnt, and would most likely be familiar to those who might read it. It seems to me that I could communicate my ideas clearly in this way. It seems like a relatively simple task, and one that involves both of the technologies I mentioned above. The technology of making a mark, and the technology of recording and sharing information. What’s not clear though is whether there’s any necessary advantage in my using writing, as opposed to any other mode, for this purpose. Yes, it helps me to organize my thoughts, but that’s probably because I’m used to thinking with, and thinking through the written word. And all that, of course, is a product of education and experience in the broadest sense.

However, if you consider a longer piece of writing – such as the argument that I’m developing here, in this chapter, or even the broader scope of ideas that play across the book as a whole, something else begins to emerge. Yes, all the same basic ideas about writing drawn out in the example above are present, but I’m also playing with larger building blocks. Concepts that are developed, illustrated and refined, concepts that can be held in memory through the writing and concepts that refer back and forth to one another across repeated words and phrases, through headings and subheadings and so on. In this way, the writing becomes a sort of conceptual architecture. The conceptual architecture of the writing is somewhat different to that of spoken language. As Gunther Kress argues: ‘the co-ordinating, “chaining” syntax of speech presents conceptual materials in a distinctly different form from the subordinating, embedding syntax of writing. The one points to the order of sequence, the other points to the order of hierarchy’.⁵ In other words the syntactical organization of writing supports the conceptual architecture required for presenting complex, abstract ideas. And, of course, the hierarchical organization of ideas is a familiar, conventional use of writing closely associated with the technology of the book. Extended writing in book form also shows how writing can, and indeed has, become a cultural resource. Yet, despite all of this, I want to resist the idea that this is some special or essential quality of writing itself. It’s just what we do with writing. The developed written form invites, sustains and justifies particular ways of thinking. This is in line with current thinking about writing which has moved from a concern with what writing does to people to a concern for what people do with writing.⁶

4.3 Thinking with Writing

To develop this argument about what writing helps us to do, I want to suggest that extended writing – which includes the writing that we normally associate with the accumulation of knowledge and the development of longer literary forms like the novel, has come to perform a number of important functions in society. Although these forms are not exactly ‘markers of civilization’, they do have a significant shaping influence on contemporary life. I suggest that these extended forms support significant cultural practices, and that they are, in general, useful. Amongst all the practices and activities that involve extended writing, I want to highlight three particular qualities, or ways of thinking: reflection, connection and elucidation. In a way, all three have something to do with refining or marshalling our thoughts. They could then be seen as ways of thinking with writing. But I want to hold open the possibility that these functions could be achieved in other ways, too – we might, for example, have oral recounts and moving images as useful comparators, and I return to this later.

Firstly, reflection. It seems legitimate to claim that writing allows us to represent things in a way that enables us to reflect on them. Writing something down can objectify an observation, an event or a thought that we can revisit later. In other words, it can give something transient or abstract a material form. This is why different kinds of journaling are important. Journals enable us to replay the day’s events, our dream life, our moods or thoughts, so we can sift through them and perhaps see them more clearly, understand them better, or analyse their significance or pattern at a later date. They are an example of how, by writing things down, we can represent the world to ourselves and to others in ways that offer some critical distance. Not only is extended writing a way of representing ourselves to ourselves but it also allows us to construct possible worlds, or possible futures – scenarios that can help us explore our current predicaments and future plans through projection, analogy or contrast. Both factual and imaginative writing can have this reflective quality in offering us alternative readings of the past as well as the present.

Secondly, connection. Writing can give us access to the minds of others. This is probably most noticeable when we read what was written in another place or time. The translation of Cuneiform, of Roman tablets, or a close reading of Early Modern manuscripts offers us fascinating insights into the lives of other people in other times. Scholars who work closely with these and other historical texts often speak in terms of getting to know the writers themselves. A human connection is made – sometimes across thousands of years. And another example of connection lies in what can be achieved through fictional writing, through literature. Readers are introduced to different perspectives via imagined characters and situations, perhaps being more able to understand how others might see things. Tolstoy shows us what life might be like for a passionate character like Anna Karenina as well as for the hesitant and independent-minded Levin⁷; Damon Galgut shows us contemporary South Africa from the contrasting viewpoints of different members of the fictional Swart family.⁸ Both writers observe the thoughts of others and the world they inhabit through the eyes of invented characters, inviting readers to connect with the experience of others. Of course, they do a lot more than this, too, but connection is a central thread.

Thirdly, elucidation. This refers to the development of a particular idea or collection of ideas. My own experience tells me that there is no better way of developing an idea or analyzing a problem than through writing, as I suggested before. This may not be the same for everybody. In fact, it probably isn’t – but it is still an important function of writing, and it’s one of the reasons that I’m writing now. A vague idea can slowly become more vivid, more specific or clearer through the writing process, both to oneself and to one’s readers. That’s somewhat idealistic, of course – it’s not always like that. Perhaps you can relate to the experience of thinking that you knew what you meant until you tried to write it down! Sometimes, an idea just collapses or becomes so much more complicated than it seemed at first. You end up in a mess. But at its best or at its most effective, writing helps you to clarify your thoughts for yourself – and hopefully for others, too. I think this is what Hannah Arendt was alluding to when she described writing as an integral part of the process of understanding.⁹

If as I suggest reflection, connection and elucidation seem like good examples of the benefits of writing, do they stand up to scrutiny? Straight away two possible criticisms present themselves. Firstly, it could simply be the case that this is just a softer way of arguing for something we have already dismissed, namely the cognitive benefits of writing – that it somehow enables us to think in particular ways. And secondly, as mentioned previously, is it possible that these things could be achieved at least as well through other modes? If, as I asserted in the introduction to this section, these are seen as important examples of what I called thinking with writing, primacy is not actually invested in writing itself. This may help to address both possible criticisms. The three categories are actually culturally valued cognitive functions. Skilled users of highly developed technologies of writing express or enact these functions through particular written genres. But the cognitive functions aren’t mysteriously embedded in the genres themselves or in writing per se. In fact, in all probability, they have been learnt concurrently. As we will see in Chapter 6, education systems, and universities in particular, privilege the kinds of extended writing I have been referring to, and this gives some of these written forms status – so it’s easy to see how we can confuse the two. For the time being though, I want to underline that the kind of writing that accompanies carefully considered and sustained thinking is culturally valued. However, if the cognitive functions it embodies really are independent of writing we might well expect that they could be expressed in other ways.

So, could reflection be effectively achieved by other means? Technologies for recording have become so common that the idea of creating an audio or video diary is certainly possible for anyone with a smartphone. Keeping a diary can be a useful way of reflecting on experience and is widely used for personal and professional purposes. So could audio or video diaries work in the same way as written reflections? In therapeutic settings, where reflecting on problematic relationships, compulsive behaviours or dependency are regular themes, journaling is a well-established approach. But not all those in therapy are comfortable with, or confident in, keeping a written diary and, as a result, audio diaries have become an acceptable alternative. Anecdotal evidence seems to support the view that the key ingredient is reflection, rather than the medium used for that reflection. And of course, there are a whole variety of personal and professional practices that depend upon and use reflection. Vlogging (keeping a video blog) is another example of how personal reflections on experience find expression in new forms. Although it has often been argued that writing is easier to scan and search in ways that make higher levels of abstraction and synthesis possible, such operations can now be done quite easily in audio and video files. Reflection, it seems, is not the exclusive province of the written form.

Similarly, the function of connection, as defined above, can also be achieved effectively through other modes. Take the moving image as an example. Movies are not simply written narratives transferred to the screen – they have their own distinctive techniques of expression and representation which make comparisons with print fiction problematic and often unproductive – but they do offer similar possibilities for thinking at a more abstract level. We might easily substitute the phrase thinking with the moving image for thinking with writing in this context. Finally, and following on the previous examples, there seems no good reason to suggest that written elucidation is inherently superior to other approaches. For example, the lecture, or the TED talk, is an effective way of developing ideas and still stands as a mode of elucidation, even if some kind of writing is used either in preparation or as a support (for instance, if Powerpoint slides are used).

Despite all of this, writing still matters. It matters precisely because it is used to do culturally important work. And it matters, because of its history of use, both for these and other purposes too. After all, we have access to the thoughts of Socrates and Confucius precisely because those thoughts were committed to writing and translated into print form. Although those philosophies can be presented in other media, they exemplify the prestigious influence of thinking with writing. In other words, what I am arguing for here amounts to a cultural-historical perspective on the importance of writing. Such a perspective offers us a useful way of understanding how printed books, as a particular form of writing, have gained such a high status in society. It also helps in accounting for how powerful social groups and institutions have organized and asserted influential cultural practices around the production and distribution of the book. In the West that influence has been secured by religious, educational and legal institutions, and developed through a wide range of civic and commercial organizations as we will see in the second part of this book.

4.4 Bookspace

So far then, I have argued that one of the most valuable ways we use writing is in supporting and recording what I have called ‘carefully considered’ and ‘sustained’ thinking. I am not, however, suggesting that writing has a monopoly on such things, or that it is the only aspect of writing worth considering. Writing also combines with many quite ordinary and everyday routines as we will see later. But having raised the idea of the power and possibility of extended writing, I want to disentangle this from any direct associations with the print book as a material object – because, when we use a description like ‘thinking with writing’ or the concept of ‘extended writing’, that’s often the first image that comes to mind. I use the term ‘bookspace’¹⁰ as a way of drawing attention to that particular image and to connect back to the idea of the book as a thing – a very particular kind of graphic space with a specific history. The problem here is one of disentangling the status of books as objects from the verbal messages they confer. A couple of examples will illustrate the point.

The first example is concerned with the late Queen Elizabeth’s Platinum Jubilee. In early 2022, the UK government chose to celebrate this event by providing every child in a state-funded primary school with a free commemorative book. Queen Elizabeth: a Platinum Jubilee Celebration, published by Dorling Kindersley, cost the taxpayer 12 million pounds – and this at time when school funding was under pressure and school resources seriously squeezed. Aside from this, bolstering monarchy was a touchy subject for the Principalities, increasingly at odds with Westminster, and some stormy debate ensued. In the end, copies of the book were distributed to school children in England and Northern Ireland. Schools in Wales and Scotland had to opt-in following regional criticism of the book’s Anglo-centric bias. In this first example, it turns out that the idea of a book to mark a national event became contentious because of its content and the viewpoints expressed in it.

The second example illustrates a fascination with the form of a book, rather than its content. To acknowledge esteemed fiction writer Ian McEwan’s new work, The Lessons,¹¹ a special collector’s edition was published by Jonathan Cape. Pitched to a very specific audience of book lovers, the publicity quite overtly targeted both the appearance and the rarity of the book. An extract from the publicity material¹² reads as follows:

The book in question is elevated (if that’s the most appropriate word) to a highly desirable, collectible item. The quality of the paper, the typeface and the way in which the book is bound are given detailed treatment – and all this for a work with a mixed reception from literary critics. Fetishizing the book in this sort of way has quite a long history.¹³ We might think, for instance, of the passionate evocation of what it is to be a bibliophile in Benjamin’s Unpacking My Library¹⁴ and the prestige value of specific book collections and private libraries.

But books enter our lives in many different ways and their particular material form allows them to function in all sorts of different ways – as door stops, flower presses or as headrests for practitioners of the Alexander technique. We’re accustomed to seeing books as decorative items in houses, in hotels and pubs. Emma Smith,¹⁵ in a very entertaining exploration of the book form, introduces us to the idea of ‘shelfies’ – those shelves of books which form the backdrop for many a videocall or Zoom meeting. And, even though the book may no longer be the most dominant form of writing, or the sort of reading that we do on a daily basis, it still enjoys an important place in the cultural imaginary. It seems as if any book-related endeavour can feed off its prestige value. The recent attention given to a technique called fore-edge painting is a contemporary example of this, and one that highlights an interesting interweaving of new media and print book. Maisie Matilda revived the Medieval practice of painting on the opening edge of a book’s pages, first by showing her painting process on TikTok and then later, as her following grew, by selling her work on Etsy.

4.5 Misleading Writing

In the beginning of this chapter, I explored the influential idea that writing has distinctive or beneficial qualities that have significantly contributed to the development of individual and collective life. Although there are undoubtedly ways in which we could see writing in this way – as a transformative technology – a cultural-historical view of the social practices associated with writing suggests we should be more cautious. Writing isn’t an inherently positive force. In fact, it turns out that the temptation to assume that what is written down is accurate, authoritative or even truthful can lead us into all sorts of trouble. The written word can deceive, dominate, misdirect and manipulate us. Texts can twist the truth, promote bias or misinformation, they can shape perceptions as well as exert a pernicious influence on society. They can even lead nations to war. Some of the worst ideological excesses and human atrocities of the twentieth century were based on ideas promulgated through books.¹⁶ And often the kinds of religious fanaticism and radicalization that lead to violence are propped up by particular readings of sacred texts.

Ideas that incite hatred continue to circulate in our digital age, and as we know, propaganda and fake news are prevalent on social media. The potential for writing to distort truth or simply to influence public opinion is ever present in contemporary society. Our personal lives are also implicated. Writing that offends, upsets or threatens is unfortunately quite commonly reported in digital communication. Trolls would still be seen as mythical creatures from Scandinavian folklore if the word had not been appropriated to describe those who post inflammatory comments on sites like Twitter and Facebook or harass individuals with hurtful or threatening messages. Such is the reach and influence of digital communication in the contemporary world that we must acknowledge that writing still matters – both for the benefits that it can contribute and the harm that it might cause.