ABSTRACT

Communications ecosystem is becoming increasingly populated by a tablet of a different sort: the modern-day tablet computer, exemplified by devices such as Microsoft's Surface, Apple's iPad, and Samsung Galaxy TabPro S, to name but three. This chapter proposes that people can engage productively in comparative analysis of two iterations of the tablet—taken together, they bookend fascinating history of how communication, the body, and the materiality of writing-based technologies have always been bound up with one another. It seeks to make the argument that deltos largely served to support more writerly forms of communication, and that this particular technology was highly instrumental in helping to usher in the initial phase of literacy in Western society. Considering the original deltos alongside the digital tablet invites a useful opportunity for comparison, and raises inevitable questions about the roles that materiality and agency play when bodies interact with technologies in the communicative act.