Computers and Writing

Chapter 11

Feeling constraints from traditional forms of expression in writing, the Beats, a group of writers in the early 50s, created an innovative form of writing rhetoric due to the advancements in technology.  In chapter 11, Rice explains the different concepts beat writers used to illustrate how we can incorporate these techniques into writing cool on the web.  Rice uses examples from Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs novels to illustrate different styles of writing.  In The Subterraneans, Kerouac uses a nonlinear spontaneous writing technique.  Relying on the audience’s cultural awareness and knowledge, spontaneous writing links shifting ideas together, therefore allowing the reader to make new and different associations between the words, phrases, or ideas they represent.  Furthermore, Rice uses Kerouac’s rhetoric of race to illustrate how language can shape attitudes and stir reader’s emotions (110).  Nostalgic writing, also used by Kerouac, focuses on mundane and unimportant details from the past to recreate an “idealized past.”  Popular television shows, such as Happy Days and That 70s Show, illustrate how effective nostalgia can be.  Next Rice discusses Burroughs’ cut-up strategy which involves cutting up and rearranging the words of original writings to create a new message.  The cut and paste functions on the computer, for example, allow the writer to quickly cut, paste and rearrange writing to create a different meaning.  Juxtaposition, placing unrelated items together, is a form of the cut-up strategy.  In Burroughs’ Nova Express, The Subliminal Kid records sounds and conversations of people, he then remixes or juxtaposes these sounds to construct new arguments.  According to Rice, these styles can improve cool writing because all of these techniques involve using associations with previous knowledge to create convincing arguments. 

Chapter 12

Advancements in technology have influenced literacy.  The printing press expanded literacy in the aspect that more people could read and write, but the computer affected literacy by reshaping the use of language electronically to be persuasive.  Computers created a new form of expression called electronic writing.  In chapter 12, Rice explains how skratching, a form of electronic writing in Hip-Hop music, shapes its own literate practices.  First, skratching involves cutting associations by isolating parts of different recordings and using them in an alterative way.  Disassociating from original music’s intention creates an alternative view point and also a critique.  The importance of skratching in relation to cool writing is, as Rice points out, it created its own literate practice through innovations in computer technology (131).  Like skratching, cool writers must also “cut assumptions.”