How is technology affecting the way we read and write?
A bunch of things I’ve read this week speak to this question. It is intriguing both to think about as a “big question” and also to imagine if and how the way we communicate and express ourselves might practically be changing.
1) I’d venture that most people who write today with any intention of publishing do so on a computer. Most of us have grown accustomed to recording our thoughts and messages on a keyboard when we choose to share them. But in the case of people writing books and articles for print, the digital words and pages they’ve created are probably intended, imagined to be read in physical form, from an object that’s held in hand or lap on a train or in bed.
2) But the way the words are taken down isn’t a consideration to the reader, or at least to this reader. I’ve never wondered how a given writer did her work. But I think there is still an expectation that readers will turn the pages of a book to read rather than do so in e-book form or on an iPhone or website. The Atlantic article suggests that our writing medium impacts what ends up on the page. I’ve seen that in myself. An email will be very different from a letter even if I start out with the same idea.
3) I remember being struck by the part in The English Patient when he interrupts Hana’s reading of Kim – “Read him slowly, dear girl, you must read Kipling slowly. Watch carefully where the commas fall so you can discover the natural pauses. He is a writer who used pen and ink. He looked up from the page a lot…” I like the idea that an author’s habits and pace while writing might be accessible to a reader in a finished work (although it’s often challenge enough to read all the words alone…) In the unlikely event that I would read Kim again, I’d pay better attention to Kipling’s commas.
4) This possibility interests me in the way the NZ Book Council’s Read at Work site does. I realize it’s intended as something of a playful ruse, wherein the literature-starved and cubicle-bound can break for Emily Dickinson without raising the boss’s suspicions. While at the same time, those people who’ve all but given up books and literature and prefer to get all their content online might actually read Emily Dickinson in transposition from page to .ppt. I rather liked the jarring effect the folks at Colenso BBDO Auckland created by putting her lines into a deck. I read the poem very differently, saw new things in it, this way.
5) Say we can type about as fast as we can think. I’ve heard people give this as a reason why they only type their thoughts and correspondence. Whether out of convenience, habit, or socialization, it’s growing rarer that I pick up a pen in order to express myself, particularly to communicate to other. I suspect others would report this as well One of the commenters on danah boyd’s post about writing longhand calls handwriting “an archaic form of communication”. Do our thoughts come out differently if we type rather than write them? Would our mental development be hindered if we didn’t learn to write by hand? Is teaching kids handwriting today just the means to teach basic motor skills?