Typing is dead ? long live writing | canada.com

By: Ben Macintyre

LONDON ? As the last British typewriter rolls off the assembly line, it is worth recalling the astonishment that accompanied the first one, patented in 1714: ?An artificial machine or method for impressing or transcribing of letters, one after another, so neat and exact as not to be distinguished from print.?

When the typewriter arrived in general use in the 1860s, many feared that this new-fangled contraption would lead to a decline in literacy. Precisely the same fears were expressed in the 1980s, when the typewriter gave way to the word processor and personal computer.

Today, as voice-activated writing takes the place of keyboard and mouse, we are on the cusp of another written revolution.

Making notes on the train in preparation for this column, I simply dictated to Siri, the voice-activated personal assistant inside my iPhone, who took it all down word for word. One day most writing may be done this way, not by pressing buttons but through speech, spoken words translated into written words by instant voice-to-text technology.

Once again, there are fears that this new machine will degrade the nature of writing, and thus the quality of thinking.

Once again, those fears will prove groundless.

What we write with, and on, shapes the way we think, whether it be quill and parchment, QWERTY keyboard or touch-screen text message.

?Our writing tools are working on our thoughts,? wrote Friedrich Nietzsche, who penned some of his most celebrated aphorisms on the first commercially produced typewriter, the Hansen Writing Ball. Nietzsche thought the machine would help him to write faster (which it did) and stave off his incipient madness with its regular tapping (which it didn?t).

Every new shift in writing technology has been greeted with skepticism and nostalgia for the old methods. Even writing itself, the oldest information technology of all, was considered by some to be a dangerous departure from the oral tradition of communication. Socrates feared that the written word had made humanity less intelligent, as the act of reading had replaced the active effort of remembering.

Plato wrote that the ideal method of learning was not to be found in books, but in lively discussion between skilful speakers, able to defend and adapt their arguments. Written words, he worried, ?cannot protect or defend themselves.?

The invention of the printing press and the typewriter provoked similar anxieties, a feeling that if writing and reading became too easy and widespread then knowledge itself would be degraded.

?My two fingers on a typewriter have never connected with my brain,? said writer Graham Greene. ?My hand on a pen does. A fountain pen, of course.? Martin Heidegger feared that ?mechanical writing? would remove the ?particular closeness? of hand-written prose reflecting a writer?s personality: ?The typewriter makes everyone look the same.?

Each new writing method brought critics.

In later life, Henry James began dictating his novels to a typist, which some connect to the more tangled and wordy style of his later works (the change is said to occur about halfway through What Maisie Knew).

Iris Murdoch wrote every one of her 24 novels in longhand, and dismissed the word processor as a ?glass square which separates one from one?s thoughts and gives them a premature air of completeness.?

After Jack Kerouac famously hammered out On the Road on a single 40-metre-long roll of paper at 100 words a minute in under two weeks on his Underwood portable, Truman Capote sneered: ?That?s not writing, it?s typing.?

Writers tend to fetishize their tools, as if the older the technology, the more honest the prose: Cormac McCarthy with his Olivetti Lettera 32; Beryl Bainbridge and her 1980s Amstrad; Ernest Hemingway and his Royal Quiet DeLuxe. (?There is nothing to writing: All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed,? growled Hemingway, just in case anyone though ?DeLuxe? meant ?easy.?)

I look back on my earlier writing tools with nothing but horror, and gratitude that they are gone: the knuckle-breaking typewriters at journalism school, the Tandy with a shimmering-green screen and a battery life of about 20 minutes, the early floppy-disk word processor that ate half a book.

Yet the strange notion that the older, slower, supposedly harder methods of writing are intrinsically more valuable lingers on in our culture. When a newspaper wishes to indicate literary authenticity, we use the font Typeka, which mimics the blotchy letters of the typewriter age.

Handwriters disdained typists; typists disparaged users of computers and word processors; and now, once again, there are fears that new technology that can translate spoken words into text will undermine writing.

If composing a text is as easy as talking, will we write in extemporized, casual slang? When instant computerized dictation is the norm, will the reflective pause between thought and word disappear altogether? As Capote might have put it: ?That?s not writing, it?s prattling.?

With historical hindsight, every revolution in writing technology has enriched the value of words. The typewriter did not induce arthritis of the fingers, general intellectual lassitude and the breakdown of family morals because women got jobs as typists and clerks; instead the invention of this magical machine accelerated the spread of literacy and made the transformative experience of writing available to all. The digital revolution has transformed our relationship with writing, creating a Twitter, text and email world of words.

For most of human existence, the spoken word was the only method of communication. Today we principally communicate by writing, digitally and instantly.

The arrival of computerized dictation technologies will lead to a hybrid of speaking and writing that may actually improve our understanding of words by returning closer to the Platonic ideal of communication. If the writers of the future must think and speak before they write, then they may become more articulate, and therefore better writers. If the form of the written word is dictated by the spoken word, we may begin to think harder before we open our mouths.

Socrates would have preferred the iPhone to the typewriter.

Source: http://o.canada.com/2012/11/29/typing-is-dead-long-live-writing/

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