Writing has long been used as a metaphor to understand computing. From the virtual desktop of modern operating systems to the way we name portable devices (the notebook computer, the iPad), writing provides a seemingly inevitable model for computing. This book explores the implications and contradictions of this metaphor. Writing not only provides a way to think about the operation of the computer, it also embodies the way that we think about the work that we do on the computer (programmers “writing code”) and how the often muddy line between our home and work life today. In the last decade, s ... More

Writing has long been used as a metaphor to understand computing. From the virtual desktop of modern operating systems to the way we name portable devices (the notebook computer, the iPad), writing provides a seemingly inevitable model for computing. This book explores the implications and contradictions of this metaphor. Writing not only provides a way to think about the operation of the computer, it also embodies the way that we think about the work that we do on the computer (programmers “writing code”) and how the often muddy line between our home and work life today. In the last decade, scholarship on digital media has sought rigor by limiting its work to particular hardware and software platforms. This book argues, instead, that we should embrace the power and muddiness of the writing metaphor for computing. Because computing isn’t simply a discipline or set of technologies, but also an idea that plays a role in contemporary culture, the cross-disciplinary migration of the writing metaphor is so important. This book seeks out the unlikely places where computing and writing, creativity and corporations converge—from debates about the scope of patent law in the U.S. to design trends within computer user interfaces to the representations of archaic writing technologies in the video games. These kinds of cross-disciplinary comparisons are only possible if we are willing to tolerate a broad understanding of the digital and the ways that it can invoke writing.