Blog 10

The Writing on Clay Baron discussed the importance of clay as a writing technology whereas the Pettegree reading focused more on the impact of the printing press. With regards to the printing press, I agree with the idea that it caused a crisis even though this may seem overdramatic. This was one of few inventions which was controversial and people were not sure what to think of it. I understand that there were people who traditionally used manuscripts to hand craft all their writing and books and that the invention of the printing press could be seen as "unpure" writing. What they could mean by unpure is that since many copies could easily be produced with the printing press, this took away from the experience of hand crafting every single detail yourself in a manuscript. This idea is also address in the Baron reading when it compares writing on clay to computer and pencil and paper writing technologies. I believe that even now typing on a computer is not as experiential as using pencil and paper even though it is more efficient. Furthermore, I do agree learning to writing on clay has its merits. Each stroke must be thought of before hand which would teach the writer to be thoughtful and straight lines are easier to produce which would result in more linear looking texts that are universally easy to read.