Aramis and writing technologies

After the first page in chapter one, I was pretty confused (but it got easier): Latour wasn’t kidding when he described the book’s format in the prologue. I thought this was going to be like Bijker and Gitelman, but the format of the book actually fit the content really well. Latour adjusted his writing to his argument: a technology is multifaceted and involved in a network of contexts: social, political, financial, scientific, etc.) Therefore, his book wasn’t a novel, an academic treatise, a collection of historical documents, or an opinion, but took advantage of all aspects involved in the creation of such a study.
“Either you change the world to adapt it to the nominal Aramis, or else, yes, you need – you needed – to change Aramis” (Latour p. 292). Aramis died because those involved in its creation “believed in the autonomy of technology” (Latour p. 292). To connect with Van Ittersum, “objects are neither passively dominated by people’s will, nor all-powerful in their ability to control humans. Instead, objects and people shape each other through their interactions” (p. 145). Aramis wasn’t an all-powerful idea incarnate, but instead it needed to interact with the society in which it would be placed.
To connect this text with writing and writing technologies:
-Latour supports the careful consideration of the interrelations between technology and the social, thereby acknowledging the effects of writing technologies on society (the writer) and vice versa.
-To reappropriate Latour: “[Writing/writing technologies is/are] not in a context; [they give themselves] a context, or sometimes [do] not give [themselves] one. What is required is not to ‘replace [writing/writing technologies] in [its/their] context’…but to study the way [writing/writing technologies is/are] contextualized or decontextualized” (p. 133). I think this relates to the relevant social groups (Bijker) that engage with a technology. According to Latour, “The context is not the spirit of the times which would penetrate all things equally. Every context is composed of individuals who do or do not decide to connect the fate of a project with the fate of the small or large ambitions they represent” (p. 137). The context for Aramis was not the zeitgeist of the 24 or so years of its ‘life,’ but instead was composed if the spaces, people, ideas, politics, etc. that drove its creation. So, how is writing contextualized through different social groups using different writing technologies today? How do these technologies contextualize the writing done by those different social groups?
Therefore, to return to Latour, “Aramis had not incorporated any of the transformations of its environment. It had remained purely an object, a pure object. Remote from the social arena, remote from history; intact” (p. 280). Thus, as Latour’s sociology intern argues, “they really succeeded in separating technology from the social arena! They really believe in the total difference between the two” (p. 287).
(Warning: rant below…)
Aramis was an object on a pedestal with, what seemed to be, rather stubborn engineers that made sure it stayed away from revision, adaptation, and, God forbid, an actual consumer. This is the same problem with traditional writing instruction (i.e. my high school and undergrad English courses): here’s your mode, here’s your medium, this is writing, and it’s alphabetic, linear, print, and that’s all you need to know. Writing technologies have been perfected, we are comfortable with them, and nothing is allowed to change.

What’s so wrong about changing things? Or at least allowing for the fact that literate practices aren’t static?