Paper proposal for 2013 Joint Eaton/SFRA Conference

I've been thinking a lot lately about representations of media technologies in science fiction. Below is a paper proposal I submitted to the 2013 Science Fiction Research Association conference. It doesn't have much of a conclusion or "pay off," perhaps because I'm still working out that dimensions of the argument. Mainly, I envision the presentation as a way of getting at the questions I pose in the second paragraph; it's more about opening a conversation than it is offering a definitive position on the topic.

"Science Fiction and Writing Technologies"

To understand writing as a technology is to foreground the techniques of material inscription by which humans record memory in a durable form outside of the mind. Technological processes of material inscription, like other technologies, have co-evolved alongside and with humans. Katherine Hayles, following Bernard Stiegler, labels this process of co-evolutionary development between humans and technics “technogenesis” (30). When its technological dimension comes into focus, we find that writing is always instantiated within a particular material medium. To think of writing technologies, then, is also to think of media technologies. Hayles has recently presented the field of “Comparative Media Studies” as a way of conceptualizing the relationship between print and digital media, in particular. Further, writing involves technological competencies in addition to language-oriented literate skills. Put a different way, literacy is itself a technological competency. In a fundamental sense, then, writing technologies are always embedded within relations of social power and material production; a class of premodern literate scribes, the invention of high-volume mechanical printing, and contemporary multi-modal forms of self-publishing and digital media creation are examples of writing’s embeddedness within changing social and material ecologies.

The idea that SF speculates about the consequences of, and possibilities for, technological and scientific development is a familiar notion to scholars of the genre. However, the imaginative contribution that SF makes to how we conceptualize writing technologies largely remains to be explored. The proposed paper will ask two interrelated questions. First, what might SF texts that represent writing technologies allow us to say about how we live, work, and play with emerging forms of material inscription and prosthetic memory? Second, how do SF texts, as writing and rhetoric, circulate within the globalized information system at the same time that they attempt to represent this system?

As a way of getting at these two ideas, I will briefly explore three SF novels that directly address writing technologies broadly imagined. In 1949, Orwell’s infamous dystopian novel 1984 showed how totalitarianism might achieve a stranglehold on human consciousness in large part through control of the printed word. In Frederik Pohl and Cyril M. Kornbluth’s 1952 novel, The Space Merchants, the protagonist is a “Copysmith Star Class” who writes advertisements and works for corporations that unleash new hyper-invasive media technologies in order to condition consumers to purchase an endless supply of unnecessary products. When 1984 came to pass, Apple launched the Macintosh personal computer, and William Gibson and Samuel Delaney foresaw the emergence of “cyberspace” and the World Wide Web. In Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (1984), Delaney explores the racial and class barriers to accessing digital information that scholars now refer to as the “digital divide.” Delaney figures this divide through Rat Korga’s illiteracy and inability to access the General Information system.