Writing Machines enquires into how writing assembles media, technologies, and cultural techniques to produce its own material difference to advances a media theory of writing and its literary aspects (reading, text, language, notational materiality).

Mujie proposes a media archaeology that explores historical and contemporary examples from electronic literature, media art, and digital and computational culture that exemplify creative uses of this capacity for difference. This is a thought experiment that works with a precise collage of writing-related theories and practices, demonstrating the creativity inherent in the process of 'becoming writing'. The discussion of writing machines is supported by key concepts drawn from the work of philosophers and media theorists such as Jacques Derrida, Bernard Stiegler, Gilles Deleuze, Friedrich Kittler, Sybille Krämer, Wolfgang Ernst and John Cayley, among others.

The most important contribution of this book would be its account of the digital and computational through the lens of writing and media language. The book brings writing, language and literature into the field of media theory. It is interdisciplinary and offers a material-processual view of studying writing and language in digital culture. The book has global appeal in that, it brings together Western and Eastern historical and contemporary theories and practices of art and media. This includes art practices of Dada, Surrealism, Fluxus and contemporary Chinese artbook making and publishing, online memes and social media writing, as well as materialist theories of linguistics, media and culture from the West, and ancient and contemporary Chinese literature, aesthetics and philosophy. It is trans-cultural and de-Westernises and de-colonises media theory.