The world of print media has been ever evolving since its inception in the fifteenth century. Woodblock printing gave way to the Gutenberg press, which gave way to the Rotary press, which gave way to the internet. In just the last few decades, online media has catalyzed the largest change in the discourse of public literacy since the very invention of mass printing. Globalization has given us the ability to share ideas with one another at lightspeed; do art or literature or business in seamless collaboration; and to form meaningful relationships with people we’ve never even met face-to-face.

In all of these interactions, there is language—there is writing. How we communicate with each other is fundamentally altered by the technology available to us at a certain time in history. Our relationship to language, is in part, our relationship to our devices. But, as the tech industry rolls out each yearly update, and each new generation of mechanisms, it becomes harder to keep up with the constant onslaught of technological evolution.

That is precisely why we need people like Dr. Colleen Reilly. Since the beginning of her academic career, she has been examining this strange relationship between man, machine, and language. She has been thinking about how we can best utilize these writing tools that are available to us, and how to better implement them into our classrooms, routines, and lives. She has wondered, how are these tools that we’re utilizing shaping us, and how are we shaping them?