Writing Matters

Does writing have a future?

This eerily prophetic question was posed by media theorist and phenomenologist Vilém Flusser back in 1987. Amidst the ever-expanding use of GenAI in scholarly writing, it is indeed a question that educators are confronted with today. On the one hand, GenAI offers visions of a hopeful future, as it is a powerful tool that enables us to more clearly articulate our thoughts to others. At the same time, the very fact of having to put thoughts down on paper is surely still a crucial skill, one that risks disappearing altogether. As I’ve written about elsewhere, the very existence of GenAI has no doubt forced educators on both sides of the debate to think carefully about what it is that we value as scholarly practices.

Although we often talk about GenAI as being “unprecedented,” technological transformations have already existed in embryonic forms throughout human history. The fact is, writing has never been simply an activity of an author putting thoughts on paper. It has always been mediated by various technologies of a sort: the chisel, the paintbrush, the reed, the biro, the computer keyboard. Each of these materialities matter in very distinct ways, and the more they change and develop beyond recognition, the more the experience of writing itself evolves alongside them. Many of us do not reflect on the obvious fact that the “desktop,” for instance, is a virtual replacement of the “desk.” Of course, what we can do with a desktop instead of a desk is immensely different. Its portability and ease have indeed shaped our experience and understanding of what writing is and can be in important ways.

In discussions around GenAI in particular, the focus tends to be on the ends of writing—the essay assignment, the journal article, the writing skills being eroded or that need to be cultivated anew. But in order to truly understand the ends of writing, we also need to consider the means. This is precisely what I take from Flusser’s provocative and (perhaps intentionally) contrarian work. Whilst at times inconsistent in his normative claims about writing (i.e., whether its disappearance is a good or a bad thing) there is nevertheless much we can learn from him about writing as a practice both today and in the future.

When Flusser talks about “writing,” he means it in a very specific way: namely, the means by which we use symbolic systems (e.g., placing one letter after another) in order to put thought in order—that is, making thought linear and sequential. Thought becomes linear in the sense that it is, quite literally, put into lines. It is sequential in that it must be “read” it in a particular (irreversible) order, unlike the circularity of thinking. Without this, thought itself remains noisy and unintelligible. Indeed, the point of writing is also to make thought communicable to others, since, without at least the possibility of being read, writing is but meaningless etches on a surface. What Flusser gathers from this is that writing and particular forms of thinking are intimately related in that sense—most notably, what he calls historical and political consciousness.

And yet, with the informatic revolution, writing no longer retains its linearity, nor is it aimed at a particular audience. Instead, we increasingly write for an apparatus—think attentional metrics such as likes and shares, character limits that encourage brevity, “prompts” that in essence produce writing for us. Our engagement with writing is no longer sequential—rather, we must synthesize information across multivocal networks where everything is available to us simultaneously. To what extent do such changes signal not only the decline of writing itself but also the emergence of a new post-historical and post-political form of consciousness?

Certainly, there is much to unpack and, indeed, challenge about Flusser’s claims: his overly monolithic understanding of writing, for instance (ironically, quite contrary to the constant wayfaring that characterizes his own!). Flusser is no doubt prone to wild exaggerations and unsubstantiated speculations about the past and the future. And yet, by attending closely to the means of writing and the kinds of thinking that develop alongside this, he offers us a fresh perspective on thinking about the impact of technologies such as GenAI on writing practices today.

In Gestures, Flusser remarks that writing requires “among other things: a surface (a piece of paper), a tool (a fountain pen), characters (letters), rules (orthography), a system (grammar), a system that signifies the system of language (semantic knowledge of a language), a message to be written (ideas).” Whilst all these elements exist at different levels of reality, it is only through their ongoing interplay that writing can be said to exist. To unpack this further, let’s consider just one of these elements: writing paraphernalia.

Interestingly, paraphernalia historically referred to “bits and bobs” women brought into a marriage that were separate from the official dowry—personal items deemed superfluous and without value. “Writing paraphernalia” similarly evokes the trivial objects scattered across our desks, overshadowed by the writing that appears on our screens (“the paper”). But despite their absorption into the background, such objects not only support writing. They temper the experience and the thinking that goes alongside it in distinct ways.

As we’ve seen, writing paraphernalia have undergone various technological developments across history, and it is worth considering the changes in both writing and thinking that have developed in tandem. From chisels to reeds to quills to biros and onward to digital styli and smart pens—writing paraphernalia have evolved partly to enable a more efficient recording and transporting of information as per the growing needs of society. There is a symbiotic circularity here between these needs and the development of writing technologies: as our ability to communicate evolved, so too has our level of communication increased, which in turn generates demand for more advanced writing technologies. Throughout history, certain writing paraphernalia have been specifically designed to accommodate the linearity of writing—parchment scrolls with clearly defined margins, lined notebooks that guide inscription. Lines and margins in turn create restrictions on writing—we feel compelled to stay within them to prevent ink from seeping out beyond the pages. Crucially, then, these tools are not simply “aids” for expression—they also actively incentivize and shape what is (humanly) possible when it comes to writing.

But what happens to writing then when chisels give way to more automatic, efficient, and accessible tools? And if it is true that certain forms of thinking develop alongside writing, then what do these developments do to our thinking at large?

Consider the difference between inscribing letters into clay versus typing on a word processor. Both of these paraphernalia enable or restrict distinctive “writerly orientations”—in this case, I am thinking of what Chandler refers to as the planner-discoverer continuum. In simple terms, planners see writing as a means of transcribing what is already clear in their minds. By contrast, discoverers use writing as a means of working out what they want to say. Since planners do not need to undergo extensive editing for their thoughts to become clear, chiseling would (theoretically) pose little difficulty. Discoverers, however, require more fluidity and ephemerality in their writing—and certainly, the ephemeral medium par excellence is the word processor. Whereas the chisel requires accurate foreplanning as writing is irretractable, the word processor enables a mode of writing that is more akin to thinking as it unfolds in the here and now. But more importantly, perhaps, word processors also enable a new mode of writing entirely—and, indeed, new possibilities for thinking.

Word processors resist the idea of writing as irreversible and final. Writing no longer requires linearity or careful sequencing—indeed, words can be easily (re)inserted or deleted, entire sentences subsequently realigning. Writing can happen in any order. In fact, word processors encourage continual revisions and a discovery of new meanings: retracting and refining, whittling down an argument to its most exacting form. Whereas earlier implements meant that writing was characterized by repeated interruptions—pauses as the quill is dipped in the inkwell, the typewriter’s ink ribbon is changed, the page turned—what we might call the staccato gesture of writing largely disappears with the word processor. The word processor instantly eliminates any trace of the evolution of a thought, as opposed to handwriting that bears traces of the struggle with recalcitrant materials. Heidegger warned us that our personal script becomes homogenized with standard font types, a concern that is no doubt aggravated with GenAI.

Although tempting, trying to figure out which tools are better or worse is sort of besides the point. But what we can say is that, since writing paraphernalia are not simply tools that we make use of but active players that shape our writing practices and the kind of thought that can emerge from this, they ought to be foregrounded in our discussions on GenAI.

For Flusser, digital technologies do not merely transform writing—they signal the end of writing entirely. Since he admits that we live in a time of textual inflation (a reality likely to accelerate even further with GenAI), his concern is not so much with the “ends” of writing but rather with the practice of putting order on thought. To what extent does GenAI mark the end of this? And what should we do, then, if anything at all?

Imposing specific institutional rules banning the use of GenAI is likely to be ineffective. Wily students will almost certainly find a way around these, hence many universities are uneasily accepting the inevitability of GenAI whilst limiting its use in the recognition that writing is important. A second educational response concerns the cultivation of critical digital literacies. But one crucial consideration in all of this must be the distinctiveness of any specific tool—digital or otherwise—in how it mediates the experience of writing and thought. In that sense, “the digital” is not some quasi-magical, homogenous realm devoid of materiality—it too contains within it a relation of various kinds of paraphernalia that each require careful and distinctive attention.

Since writing paraphernalia are the very conditions for what constitutes writing in the first place, writing is therefore implicitly technological. The human is not simply a “user” of tools—instead, tools make certain things possible for us; they limit or constrain us in other ways, depending on their specific structure and functionality. This is true of digital tools, including GenAI. Of course, GenAI is immensely different from other tools—say, pens or papers. Prompting GenAI is not the same as taking command of a pen to write down our ideas. It is not recalcitrant in the way that a pen is—rather, it is frictionless. When we talk about GenAI as “merely a tool,” we need to think about what we mean by this. Most importantly, I would argue, we need to provide a more distinctive account of what kind of tool GenAI is, including what elements of writing and of thinking it enables or constrains.

With developments in GenAI, many, like Flusser, are perhaps anticipating a shift in which writing is increasingly outsourced to automatic systems, the writer in turn taking on more of a managerial role. Whilst the task of thinking would remain with the writer, it would nevertheless look entirely different—less linear, less directed toward a human audience, more oriented toward an apparatus. Perhaps the question then remains: is this still writing? Is GenAI writing for us—or is it, in fact, writing at all?

If we accept that AI is a tool that will not simply support writing but radically change the way that we think, it will indeed open new possibilities and new capacities, and with that, new forms of thinking. But we cannot broach this question by focusing merely on how GenAI troubles the “ends” of writing, and our institutional responses should also not focus solely on this. Instead, we must seriously consider the impact of this (new) paraphernalia on writing and thinking processes at large, a consideration that requires that we foreground the specific tools with which we write and think. In doing so, we might take what Bernard Stielger calls a “techno-centric” account of human beings—namely, where we conceptualize ourselves not as completely separate from technological reality but as inescapably bound up with it in a myriad of ways. It is only then can we really ask the question: does writing have a future? And perhaps more importantly, what does this future look like?