In the first decade of its existence, the mobile telephone has already created a youth culture. Following No Future, the Lo-Tech amateurs with their message scraps made up of headlines, and Generation X, the culture of over-qualified media specialists, we are now experiencing a third wave of strenuous otiosity: the »thumb generation.«

Everyone knows the »thumbers«: their gaze rigidly fixed on a tiny screen in their hand, the SMS-junkies drift through public spaces as if on remote control, tapping out their cryptogrammes with their thickest digit. They are »textperts,« as Sadie Plant puts it. They have brought about profound changes in words at an incredibly rapid rate. What share does their tool, the mobile keyboard, have in this linguistic mutation?

[b]Triumph of technology[/b]

Geniuses are allowed to be radical. In 1969, the German author Rolf Dieter Brinkmann outed himself as a cultural pessimist: »Once I saw an advertisement for electric typewriters ... a little comic picture showed someone hammering symbols into a stone slab, and a photograph showed a typewriter. I was amazed. Where is the difference, I wondered. Aren't they wanting to show me that there is a difference?«

Without wanting to give a decisive answer to this author's cynical question about whether there is a qualitative difference between the chisel and the stylus, between Foucault's »Raphigraph« of 1855 and a 4-colour »Communicator« from Nokia, one can join with Brinkmann in taking one thing as read: everything »carries on.« Word-processing systems carry on because the economy carries on. Tools become flat or thinner or wider, computer keyboards are equipped with side keypads with cursors and numbers, keyboards get smaller and smaller, so small that you need a little rod to press the tiny buttons with the characters. At the moment when saving a text comes before the act of writing, the daisy wheels disappear. Even linguistically speaking, these were reminders of the mechanical age: ballast collected around a hemisphere that had to be cast off at the transition into the era of immateriality.

Many devices, called »palmtops« after the place they are most often employed, have only a membrane upon which the user scribbles as if on a magic slate, and a simple, clever machine transforms the lines into typographical units. It is a general tendency of technology, its prosthetic heart, to nestle up to the body, to deposit itself in it.

[b]The other ego[/b]

For some time now, in the everyday laboratory of culture, telephones have been crossed with typewriters. These days, people needing help from a lawyer no longer type telephone numbers into their mobile phone, but the letters »M-U-R-D-E-R.«

The next step is controlling language. Nowadays, where once an »intricate« system of bolts, wires, ratchets, racks, carriages, rollers, levers and cylinders used to do their work, there is an »interface.« The word »interface« also clearly refers to the desired effect: the writing device becomes a respondent, has a »face« that is interposed between thought and communication. This closes a circle that producers in past epochs had begun to draw with product names like »Erika« and »Gabriele«: your companion in textual matters becomes your alter ego.

[b]Slowing down the writer[/b]

In the mid-seventies, an article with the lovely title »Dvorak's Simplified keyboard: 40 Years of Frustration« appeared in the magazine »Computers and Automation.« The Dr. August Dvorak from Seattle mentioned in it is considered as the Don Quixote of the keyboard. Dvorak worked with Frank Gilbreth, who, with his phenomenological analyses of the effectivity of labour process - which he called »time and motion« studies -, has inscribed himself on the cultural history of the office like almost no other.

Dvorak's studies were concerned with the arrangement of keys. In 1873 Christopher Latham Sholes invented a keyboard for Remington Arms. It was named QWERTY because of the arrangement of the letters in the top row. Its declared purpose was to slow down the typist. There were two reasons for this. Firstly, Sholes' machine had no return springs on its typebars. The bars had to fall back into their starting position with their own weight. If the operator of a machine like this wrote too quickly, the complex mechanics jammed. Secondly, when this mechanical writing aid was invented, no one was thinking of competing with handwriting, which, at 20 wpm (words per minute), was considered too fast to beat.

Sholes combatted the jamming of the typebars not as an engineer, but as an anti-ergonomist. He arranged the more frequent two-letter combinations in the English language in such a complicated way that the typist had problems finding them quickly. There is a nice picture taken from nature to describe this process: in those days, typing meant using the »hunt-and-peck« method - hunting and pecking letters like a bird of prey.

Faced with this terrible state of affairs, Dvorak, that knight of rationalisation, slaved away unceasingly at developing a programme of optimisation. From the thirties on, he trained with typists and soldiers, and finally, almost 100 years to the day after the invention of the »slowing-down machine,« he presented his ASK (»American Simplified Keyboard«) to the American National Standards Institute.

Anyone trying today to put together a text on their »1AD« telephone keypad with its multiple-letter keys may have the impression of riding the donkey of Sancho Panza, the loyal squire who is still waiting for his Don Quixote to finally knock the vanes off Remington's windmill.

[b]The keys[/b]

The first keyboards were found in machines designed to help blind people write (and read). This illustrates the common root of »Tasten« [Eng.: keys. Trans.] and »Ertasten« [Eng: feel. Trans.]. At the same time, it casts light on the transition from stylus [Ger.: »Griffel,« from »greifen« (Eng.: to grasp) Trans.] to an arrangement of letters that is pressed by hand in order to write. Early typewriter manufacturers often advertised using the idea of setting type evenly like a Gutenberg press. A second play on words with a deeper meaning comes strongly to mind. Placing the letters in the boxes of the press provides an image for a bigger achievement, technically speaking: the translation of the hand movement that designs the letter in »beautiful writing« into the reproduction device, which guarantees the success of the calligraphic effort, standardises the picture, and puts machine writing before machine readability. At the same time, the hand is given the role of operator, and loses its job as the forming element.

One early writing aid was made by Kempelen, the inventor of speaking machines, for a blind countess. Here, there was not yet a keyboard in the narrower sense; the device guided the lady's hand like a partial exoskeleton. This anecdote clearly shows the transition. The cultural explosion had not yet taken place. The ink-soaked extension of the index finger, the quill (a converted flying machine extracted from the pelican's outer skeleton) did not become a set of keys in one fell swoop. What is more amazing is the speed at which the groups of printed buttons now seem to be disappearing, only a few centuries after their invention.

Today we are witnesses to another transition: the agile fingers of typists are being put out of work by the introduction of speech-recognition software. Their tool, the keyboard, is redundant. In this regard, the probably best-known keyboard extension of our times, the »mouse« - named after the usual shape of its design - plays an important interim role. As a side effect of the transfer of the act of writing to the mouth, the hands are condemned to idleness. The quality of writing is thus changed once more, not only because of the reduction in the distance between the accepted location of thought and the interface through which this thought reaches the outside world.

[b]The Tangora effect[/b]

»Recently, speech-recognition systems have made huge progress and have now become input tools on a par with mouse and keyboard,« writes J. Hoepelman. The microphone now serves as an additional method, besides the mouse and the keyboard, for reading data into a computer. The first commercially employed audio-response device (not yet language-recognition) was already a development from IBM. The »Model 7772« came onto the market in 1962. In 1984, a language-recognition system was presented that could recognise around 5,000 English words with the help of a mainframe computer carrying out a calculation lasting several minutes. In 1986, scientists at the IBM research laboratories in Yorktown Heights, USA, developed the prototype TANGORA 4 for English. The name was chosen in memory of the world record-holder for typing, Alberto Tangora.

[b]Social gestures[/b]

Entering data = administration: the fact that writing is power is demonstrated by the »Typewriter Weeding-Out Programme« of 1941. In H. G. Adler's monumental work »Der verwaltete Mensch« (Mankind Administered) he notes that the then German government was requisitioning typewriters »in private hands« and making them available to the authorities. The effect was twofold. The concentration of all available machines in the hands of state institutions meant that citizens, particularly Jews, had no opportunity to create formal texts, that is, to have a controlling or opposing influence on the administration. These days, everyone has a cheap typewriter in their pocket. So where did the power diffuse to?

Microwaves: the »Sendermann« [Eng.: Transmitter-man. Trans.] was someone who felt the communications pathways in the ether, prophesying that »this is how citizens are made powerless« - with hot transmission rays. For this reason, he led a life opposed to this »torture.«

A familiar sight in Berlin in the winter of 73/74, the »Sendermann« wandered through the city, writing his short messages in capitals on the walls: »The counterespionage service works physically politically with transmitters,« »The government makes texted speeches,« »Cold War with transmitters,« or, more personally, revealing his source: »I hear secret services speaking over the ether in my head, I am being attacked.« That is 79 signs including spaces, half of an SMS. How much you can say in such a short space! The »Sendermann« wrote on abandoned sewerage pipes, on the fences of building sites, or in authentic style on telephone cell walls. Sometimes he wrote underneath the posters of others. He carried gigantic banners through bustling crowds of shoppers. The fact that he was paranoid does not say much more than that he constructed connections.

Text brigades: the cell phone has an enormous socio-political potential that has so far barely been appreciated. The resistance in the Philippines, the struggle of the Zapatistas, prison revolts in Turkey and Brazil, anti-capitalistic activities in Seattle, Genoa, Prague - SMS is used all over the place for arranging things, for the exchange of essential information without surveillance. The press has invented the expression »text brigades.«

Textperanto: introduced at the start of the nineties as an internal communications system for Mannesmann customers in Germany, SMS has begun to conquer the world. The content is the same as ever: sex, jokes, business agreements. Since its introduction, secret arrangements during meetings are no longer made by means of notes passed under the table. People »SMS« each other: the communicator mafia »textperanto« is created in the »message« memory, a mixture of English, numbers and abbreviations that only reveal their meaning when spoken, through homophony.

We have to pay serious attention to the question of whether »the electronic instant connection kills the realm of thought,« as Aby Warburg remarked a whole eighty years ago with regard to the telephone. Or have we invented the »smart« realm of thought? When, with WAP and SMS, central functions of screen and typewriter »go into the mobile net, « will we have reached another stage of the media revolution? Have we invented a »common,« a scattered keyboard that allows the »collective projector« (Peter Weibel) to speak?

 

Translated by Tim Jones

 

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