Writing To

Digital inscription is a form of displacement. Its fundamental character is to remove electronic objects from the channels of direct human observation. This is reflected in the everyday language we use to talk about the inscription process. The commonplace is to speak of writing a file to a disk; to say writing “on” a disk sounds vaguely wrong, the speech of someone who has not yet assimilated the vocabulary or concepts of computing. We write on paper, but we write to a magnetic disk (or tape). Part of what the preposition contributes here is a sense of interiority; because we cannot see anything on its surface, the disk is linguistically refigured as a volumetric receptacle, a black box with a closed lid. If we were writing on the disk we would be able to witness the residue—even microprint is visible under rudimentary magnification. Instead, the preposition of choice, “to,” becomes a marker for our intuition that the verb “write” is not altogether appropriate, a rough fit at best. The preposition is also a legacy of the von Neumann model, where storage is a physically and logically distinct portion of the computer (the EDVAC, the first stored program computer built according to von Neumann’s principles, used tubes of mercury to store an electrical signal). Writing data “to” the storage element thus entails a spatial as well as a sensory displacement.

We do, of course, often speak of putting a file on a disk. Likewise, “saving to” and “saving on” a disk appear to be used with about equal frequency. Since it is clear that we can thereby conceive of disks or other storage media as a form of material support for data, it becomes all the more conspicuous that we only seldom speak of writing a file on a disk. I would argue that writing implies a level visual feedback that is generally absent from electronic storage media, obtaining instead at the level of the screen or other output device—architecturally distinct components of the von Neumann model. The OED helps chart this lexical unease: in the 1940s, one could comfortably say either write “on” or write “to” tape or disk (or indeed, more commonly, write “into”). Since the 1950s, however, the preferred locution has been simply “to.”