Rarely do we hand write anything anymore. Maybe a card here and there, or a small note to leave for someone to find, but the mass of our writing is done through technology which has a tendency to change the way we have to present it.
I was not able to participate in the activity, but I can imagine how difficult it may be to put what you want to say on a slab of Play-Dough where you have limited space to work with. When writing on a computer through an email or an essay though, the amount of space you have is almost indefinite. These two extremes definitely have a way of changing your writing process and style.
When writing an essay, I always go to my computer where I have a full keyboard and can really focus on the screen and what I am writing. But on the other hand, I have no issues writing up an email on my phone because it is typically less formal than an essay would be.
Technology also greatly effects how we read or receive certain things because there is no emotion attached to the message. For example, we talked in class how a simple text message saying “K” can mean so many different things depending on the capitalization, punctuation, and context within the conversation. Technology has the ability to put a spin on almost everything you say if you don’t say it exactly right.
The space limitation aspect of writing on clay is interesting. That was an issue even for digital writing until relatively recently. If you were writing on an early word processor, it could only hold so many pages. I wonder if that kind of limitation made us more concise writers.