Joe Berkowitz has written an Oct. 29, 2015 article for Fast Company about Margaret Atwood, creativity, technology, and dystopias (I gather Ms. Atwood is doing publicity in aid of her new book, ‘The Heart Goes Last’; Note: Links have been removed),

In the latest thought-provoking, dystopian parable from noted words-genius, Margaret Atwood, society is experimenting with becoming a prison. The entire population of the unsettling community of Positron, as depicted in The Heart Goes Last, spends half the time as prisoners and half the time as guards. It does not go great. Considering that the story also involves sex-robots and other misfit gadgetry, the central premise serves as an apt metaphor for our occasionally adversarial relationship with technology. …

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… One element of this symbiotic relationship Margaret Atwood is especially interested in, though, is the impact new technology has on creativity. The paradigm-shifting author doesn’t merely write about the future, she has also helped bring about changes to how we write in the future. As the creator of the LongPen, she’s made it so that authors can sign books from great distances; and as the first contributor to the Future Library project, she’s become a pioneer of writing novels intended strictly for later generations to read. A master at building future worlds in fiction, Atwood is also doing so in reality.

She has some things to say about the cloud and how the medium shapes the message (thank you, Marshall McLuhan),

… Being a selective early adopter means communicating with the tools one feels comfortable with, and avoiding others.

“I don’t trust the cloud,” she says. “Everybody knows that Moscow has gone back over to typewriters. Anything on the internet potentially leaks like a sieve. So we are currently exchanging scripts by FedEx because we don’t want them to be leaked. Anything you absolutely do not want to be leaked, unless you were a master of hackery and disguise, you should transfer and store some other way, especially since Mr. Snowden and what we know. …

… Being a selective early adopter [Atwood] means communicating with the tools one feels comfortable with, and avoiding others.

“I don’t trust the cloud,” she says. “Everybody knows that Moscow has gone back over to typewriters. Anything on the internet potentially leaks like a sieve. So we are currently exchanging scripts by FedEx because we don’t want them to be leaked. Anything you absolutely do not want to be leaked, unless you were a master of hackery and disguise, you should transfer and store some other way, especially since Mr. Snowden and what we know. …

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“Any new technology or platform or medium is going to influence to a certain extent the shape of what gets put out there,” Atwood says. “On the other hand, human storytelling is very, very old. To a certain extent, technology shapes the bite-size of how you’re sending it into the world. For instance, people put writing on their phone in short chapters. So Proust would not have done well with that. We develop short forms because we’re limited in characters but we did that with the telegram. ‘6:15 Paddington, bring gun, Sherlock Holmes.’ Or better, ‘Holmes,’ actually.”

The last time I mentioned Margaret Atwood here was in regard to ‘Canadianness’ in my March 6, 2015 posting where I noted that Atwood is sometimes taken as an American or British author as her status as a Canadian is often omitted from articles about her.

Finally, Marshall McLuhan was a noted Canadian communications theorist who achieved awareness in pop culture during the 1960’s and 70’s with this phrase amongst others, The medium is the message.