The Changing Technology of Writing

It is almost 11:00 p.m. on Wednesday night as I write this. I have spent the last three days in Emory hospital. It was, to say the least, unexpected. I was supposed to go for a test that required some surgery. I thought I would be home Tuesday afternoon. The surgery was successful. The test was successful. My recovery was not.

In recovery, I was unable to get my blood oxygen level high enough to satisfy the doctor. They admitted me to ICU. I spent a day there and another day in a regular hospital room. They discharged me tonight, around 8:00 p.m., and then I had a two hour drive home. It takes some time to get my wheelchair loaded into a specially equipped van hence the 11 o’clock arrival at my computer.

There are a few things that made a distinct impression on me. I would say that the most powerful memory is of the pain. I have Multiple Sclerosis. I am trying to get a Baclofen pump to relieve the horribly agonizing spasms I experience. I had to lie in a bed which makes the pain that much more excruciating.

There are many words for pain, and none of them come close to describing the agony of the experience. The nurses ask you to identify your level of pain on a scale from one to ten. Twenty, thirty, one-hundred, one-thousand — only someone who isn’t in pain can ask such a stupid question. There are no numbers. There are no words. There is just pain.

Pain robs you of yourself. You are a slave to pain. You will do as it bids. It changes you. There is nothing else in the universe but your pain. It stabs and pulses and burns and tears at you with no respect for your soul. It digs at you and rips your being to shreds. You would do anything to stop it, but there is no devil to bargain with. You crash and burn.

There is nothing but you and the pain.

I am home now with a more manageable level of pain. I face two more surgeries with the added risk of breathing and oxygen issues. For now, I survive.

In the end, I guess there was only one thing that made a distinct impression on me.

P.S. On page 4, Brian Carroll (2010) sums it up succinctly when he observes, “The tools that we use to communicate affect how and what we communicate.” The transition from something like stones to tablets, eventually, eliminated the use of stones. In terms of the “change” from paper to digital, there is room for both. The digital medium is an additional way of communicating as opposed to a replacement.

In my opinion (because I had no time to do research and synthesize it), two crucial ways that writing for the digital platform differs from writing on paper are immediacy and interactivity. I started writing at 11:00 p.m. with something powerful, at least to me, to say which makes it immediate. I included hyperlinks the reader can choose to follow which makes it interactive.

As for best practices for writing a “story” on Medium, or any platform for that matter, it comes down to capturing the reader’s attention.

Bibliography

Carroll, Brian. Writing for Digital Media. New York, NY: Routledge, 2010. Print.