Learning to type, when I learned to type, meant learning to become a typist. The premise on which typing was taught will, for some of you reading this, be foreign; there was a time when typing was a kind of suit that writers put on when it was time to go out into the world. One wrote in long hand and had work typed as a matter of course, and only at the end.
It’s important enough to repeat: there was once an end to writing, an outside to the writer’s inside, or at least we were taught there was. Typing was the end of writing. To type was to focus on something already written, to lock onto it with your eyes, letter by letter, to finger each letter at the keyboard, and to know, more through sound than sight (of course you didn’t look), that you’d faithfully reproduced it on paper. Typing required all your senses to be engaged together, and to share the work between them: your gaze focused on the scrawls of pen, your fingers feeling for the key offsets from ‘F’ and ‘J’, your ears detecting the telltale sign of multiple key strikes where only one was expected. I was taught that writing ceased in typing. The typist looked into the past, into what was written, not into what was being produced. Nothing is produced in typing, only reproduced.
Typing today is something quite different. I’m typing even now, as I contemplate this sentence, as I wander through this thought I hope to write. The thing I want to say is not yet available. I have no way to look into it, as though it were somehow solid and approachable. I’m left to pull it out of what is already before me on the screen. I have no access to a past that might comfort or control me. The typewriter has been replaced with the writer. Writing no longer ends in typing; writing no longer ends.
I’m unclear if they still teach typing. Is it simply the great prerequisite for all writing today? I grew up at a time where it still made sense to have both a computer and a typewriter in our house. They weren’t the same thing, and you’d want both for different tasks. It wasn’t yet clear, when I learned to type, that only one would be needed going forward. I learned to type and to write, and it wasn’t yet clear that only one would be needed going forward.
6 Comments
Because typewriter
Hi, David.
I’ve never encountered your blog before, but I just wanted to write you a small note and let you know that I absolutely got sucked into it and it’s a pleasure to read. It’s a funny circumstance, coming upon this post: at lunch today, I was encouraging some colleagues to have a typing-test tourney, to which several of us boasted “I’m a pretty good typist.” We spoke a lot about the evolution of technology at that lunch. And it’s not that I went and googled ‘typing’ and found your post — I discovered it in a roundabout way, thru another Mozilla employee’s blog (toolness), while being totally distracted at work.
Anyway, you have made my friday afternoon that much more pleasant and surprising and fun, and I look forward to future posts. Cheers.
This is an interesting take on the issue. I am just (but really only just) old enough to remember the time you sketch. Born in 1987, while I was in primary school I wrote and then typed up history reviews about Michiel de Ruyter and other Dutch naval “heroes” [1], which fascinated me at the time. Only towards the end of primary school did I switch to using computers and a printer.
Fast forward to today and I mostly use a computer, but I do still write. Particularly cards (for Christmas, to foreign friends, and back home when I am abroad) and sometimes letters. I do wonder whether this system will ever really go away. Recently the Dutch postal service has started offering the ability to send a ‘real’ card based on web input. To me, this seems absurd; I’m sure the aim is to reduce the necessary effort, but it seems to me like it also removes the genuineness that makes cards and letters so worthwhile still. That is, I cannot see why one wouldn’t just write an email if one thought using such a service was an option.
In any case, the point of this comment was going to be the question: do you not write at all anymore? Or am I misinterpreting the final words of your post?
[1] Now that I’m
olderless young and more politically correct, I tend to look back on my country’s naval heritage with more mixed feelings. Our participation in the slave trade and the incessant wars between the seafaring nations of Europe are not necessarily something to be proud of.I always wonder, when I read an old book, how it was written and edited. But it must have been much like it is now: people would write, and they would write, and then they would peer into what they had written to find structure, thoughts, and words worth preserving.
Not much has changed maybe. Writing is finished when I push a Send or Post button. Like a git commit, once it’s shared, there is a reason to be a bit reserved about changing it.
I can’t find the exact quote, but Emily Short tweeted something to the effect of “I can always tell I am not yet done with a work in progress when I do not yet hate it with the fire of a thousand suns.”
I took typing in high school and came out of it still not able to touch type. Ironically, about two years later I suddenly realized I was touch typing finally. It just sort of happened with practice over time. Now I can type without even thinking about it; it just happens.
This just reminds me of a documentary about Prof. Edsger Dijkstra.
He would write the operating system software while the hardware is still being designed and build on which it would run.
So he first did a lot of thinking how it would needed to work, then he would write down the program at all ones with his fountain pen. At the end when the hardware and software were done, they came together. Only then would the software run.
That is what programming is to him.
Here is it:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EL97C8C53ZM