Poem and Technology

I could simplify the concept of poetry and technology, the former as human expression and the later as a tool. This way we can easily relate technology and poetry and say people have always used technology to make poetry. Since the invention of ink and paper, poetry and technology have gone through a long journey together; passing by the printing press, the typewriter and now the digital world. I would say that it is thanks to technology that poems have evolved into many kinds, with different depths and people can perceive them in different ways.

Ink and paper was one of the first means to capture poetry. However, with this technology poems were not able to be easily distributed, reaching only a very select audience. Later on, with the development of the printing press there was an improvement over ink and paper since with this technology poems were distributed to more people and it also discarded the problem of handwriting. However these two technologies were available to only a few poets so not everybody was able to share their poems. The next development in text technology was the typewriter and the photocopier. This piece of technology allowed more poets to share their poem and reach more people. All these technologies so far are limited to paper, which decays over time and cannot be modified . With the advent of the Digital World, every poet now has a huge range of devices that allow them to create, distribute and endlessly modify their poems and leave behind (to a certain point) the limitations of paper. Now poems can go beyond cultural, language, and distance barriers reaching even more people and different audiences.

         Technology and poetry, although they seem to be unrelated, actually have a common link. Technology has shaped the way that poetry is created and distributed through its developments over time. With today’s technologies poets can include videos, music, pictures, text in different colors and shape, changing the presentation of the poem and how people perceive it in infinite ways. All this is just another step in the evolution of poetry and technology. This leaves me to wonder: what and how could be coming up next?