Within the first few pages of “The Book,” by Amaranth Borsuk, there is a quote that really opened my eyes to a thought I’d never had before. The quote is as follows: “Content does no simply necessitate its from, but rather writing develops alongside, influences, and is influenced by the technological supports that facilitate its distribution” (Borsuk 3).This idea that the writing within a book, scroll, website, etc. has not necessarily been the impetus of certain kinds of technology, but vice-versa. My mind immediately thought about fanfiction posted on sites such as AO3 or Tumblr. Fanfiction is writing based on another person’s story, comic, TV show, movie, book (etc), that is not ‘cannon’ (isn’t actually in the story either at all or at the moment) in the original work. This can cause a fracturing of the story into something new, but still related to the original, that can be disseminated through those aforementioned sites to other fans of these stories. My point here is that fanfiction seems to have been mainly an effect of the web—aka a new technology that is able to support its distribution. I had always though of it being the other way around, that it was the content that caused evolution within the technology. So flipping this idea on its head in regards to some content was something that caused me to think about which technologies made it possible for certain content to become available, made, and popular.
Hi Sierra!
I am glad to someone stuck in thought of seeing the book as a form of distributing knowledge. I have always seen a book as way to acquire knowledge, being that I have always been a student who would only spread knowledge orally such as a presentation. However, after reading this chapter, I realized how fast I spread distribute knowledge through these blog post! Like you said, fanfiction through tumblr was such an easy way to spread a story, which is often a fragment of the original. This brought me back to the class discussion of how easy it is to get published.