Technology's of a Contemporary Writer

The way that we write is integral to who we are as writers. I just read an article on The Guardian online called Why Writing is Better with a Pen, by Lee Rourke and it got me thinking about how we write and what it means.

Currently, I am drafting this blog post on the 97 express bus headed up to the university using the program OneNote on my iPhone. I am not sure how that figures into my writing practice just yet, but I can tell you when I started writing I never dreamed it would look like this-all hunched over, button mashing and hoping autocorrect doesn't mess with my sentences too much (there isn't even a key here for an m-dash!)- but before we get into the leaps and strides of trendy writing tech let's talk about what I guess could be considered analog writing.

Pens vs. Pencils

There are two kinds of people in this world: pen people and pencil people. I, for one, would put myself in the category of pen people. There is something weird and tactile about pencils that I hate and maybe that is because I was forced to use pencils for all my math homework ever and there is some weird connection with that and maybe there is also something about the texture that is just weird for me in the same way that I can't stand the feel of mass market paperback page fibers.

Needless to say the difference between pens and pencils is about permanence. Pens hold you accountable to your writing in a much different way that pencils do. You aren't usually able to erase pens, although erasable pens exist.

Ink is permanence.

That said pencils are much more forgiving as a medium. You are not held accountable to errors with pencils you can go back and try again with each erasure leaving an airy palimpsest. Not to get too judgmental about the implements that each of us chooses to use in our writing practice, but I have come to think of my chosen writing implement as an embodiment of integrity. Because there is no erasure I am forced to take responsibility for the scratched out words that may have been too many adjectives or a cliché phrase. I think this all keeps me honest, kind of like I am not cheating and pretending I am a more flawless writer than I am. That said, everything that I hand in or work through in a second edit is all done on a computer, the ultimate in ephemeral text and grace in errors.

The article I mentioned earlier does not really talk about pencils at all. The pens mentioned in the title of the article really represent writing by hand, in a hand vs. tech argument, enumerating the values of permanence and the uniqueness of each person's writing style. Every hand crafts a different kind of letter malleable to desire and not trapped by font designers. For that matter, each letter has it's very own character… the character of characters so to speak, regardless of pen or pencil media. I think that the prevalence of technology and print has standardized fonts so we have lost that uniqueness, and personality of each person's script, like losing our fingerprints.

Tech vs. Analog

This is where I think it is important to remember what it is each writer is trying to accomplish when writing because I think different things require different media.

Technology has played a huge role in dissemination of knowledge (yay the interwebs!) and in clarity. The rise of email has created a resurgence in letter writing, that has not been seen since the Victorian period. The importance of correspondence and it's documentation has come full circle. We began in Victorian England with the letter being so important that post came one to two times a day and people set aside large amounts of time in the crafting of letters. This form was nearly eradicated with the rise of the telephone and now it seems we have come full circle returning to letters through text and email. We use text for everything. I wonder what my collected emails would look like in an archive. 

Imagine an archive of  prime minister Harper's email correspondence!

Illiteracy today would be so much more detrimental, I can't imagine a teenager who would be so adamant about not learning to read they would forgo the text based culture of social networking.

Also, technology means that I always have a notepad and pen with endless ink, though limited battery power.  The document I am creating even now is being saved in the cloud and I can seamlessly go to work on it on my home computer.

There are, however, drawbacks. Battery life, the NSA, and so many other reasons not to use technology for writing. We have a new and improved ability to share resources and intellectual musings and if we are going to run down the rabbit trail of technology there is another discussion to be had about how new media's function in a classroom.

"In my classes, we use computers for the things that computers are good for, and we use books for the things that books are good for," 

writes Meredith Broussard, assistant professor in the department of journalism at Temple University, Philadelphia.  

Different technologies function differently and the place for analog writing tech - the book, the pen, the notepad - seems to be when we analog humans are face to face. It seems like the introduction of new media has increased our overall "interface" time, communicating with others to the maximum, but it has also strained our ability to concentrate. In some settings the ability to check your email, or text, or network is not necessary and I would argue that those are the times when we are already in community with a group of people. There should be priority on who is in direct physical proximity. Or at least until we are all cyborgs with super networked brains that are programmed to function on multiple levels - to paraphrase Kale Greenfield - "it won't be a problem when we are all space robots". 

All that is old is new again

There seems to be this idea that with the new technology the old will die out. I think that it is safe to say that is not true after what I have witnessed in the music industry. I'm talking about vinyl. We all thought that with the insemination of digital media that the record and the cd would die out entirely leaving us with digital copy, but what has happened for those in the know is the opposite. I have seen cd sales take a nose dive accompanied by increased interest in vinyl records. The new records being released are beautiful editions of the band's music and include a digital download copy, so that purchasers won't have to between having easy access to music and having a beautiful collectors object. These records are then sold at double to triple the price of the CD and the buyer gets more of what they want. I think that it is safe to say this isn't just nostalgia. Sometimes analog is just better quality, and it does something different to our brains.  

Different technology has different uses. In the end, I will always come back to writing, because there is something about the brain feel of a pad of paper that is totally different to the brain feel of a keyboard. There is something meditative about starting off my writing practice by scrawling down everything in my head that I don't think that I will ever be able to emulate with a keyboard.