[b]Alessandro Ludovico:[/b] Is writing with a pen/pencil simply out-of-date?
[b]Nat Muller:[/b] As I read these words, I remember how unfamiliar the pen feels in my hand when scribbling shopping lists, or taking notes (old school style) at conferences and festivals. My haptic writing memory seems to fail me in speed, accurateness and as a means of producing thought. We have become accustomed to a condition of delete and copy/paste; a continuous restructuring of thought where nothing is really lost or wasted, except perhaps a bit of electricity keeping the juices of our laptops running. Our words are not etched onto paper that much anymore: the idea of drafting a text has changed. We draft as we go along…not necessarily accumulating pages of smudged pen or pencil-written texts, to be reshuffled and discarded till our fingers feel stiff. Have you noticed how the physicality of writing has moved from a cramp in the fingers (from holding our pens and pencils) and inked lips (from chewing on pens) to an ache in the wrists and elbows (from RSI) or multiple digit pain, where both hands flying over keys and keyboards bear the brunt of our textual labour, instead of our one writing hand?
[b]Ludovico:[/b] True, but there’s no device quicker than pencil and paper for taking notes on the road. Aren’t we supposed to be »connected nomads«? And what about the »mobile revolution«? I think that historically no technology has substituted a substantial part of the human writing process yet We’re stuck to our screens because they are the ultimate production tool (also with the physical consequences you mentioned), but we are still far from working in a true »electronic environment«.

[b]Ludovico:[/b] Will the multitude of Moleskine fancy notepads survive the iPhones and their virtual keyboard invasion?
[b]Muller:[/b] In effect the question should perhaps be posed differently: is it fair to compare the bulk of notepads, the space they take up, and their distinct physicality with an electronic device? Isn’t it exactly their »objectness« and their inherent difference per notepad – signified by page creases, ink used or differences and variations in handwriting – which differentiates them from electronically stored data? Notebooks function at a blink of the eye as an indicator of labour: a shelf lined with notebooks measures quantity visibly. In that sense, paper »works« on a visible and spatial level, while electronic data takes up non-tangible space and non-visible disk space.
[b]Ludovico:[/b] This is still an unsolved problem with interfaces (effectively representing physical quantity), and it’s also the promise of the electronic book (to save shelf space). But I’d say that a stack of filled notebooks is a fetish for self-gratification. Notes should be sorted out, so paper can be recycled to make more blank (visible) paper.
[b]Muller:[/b] But isn’t it exactly the fetish and the idea of self-gratification that bestows added value onto any physical object imbued with labour? Isn’t it true that we long to see the hard proof of our labour? Our sweat and tears materialized? Isn’t it the case that – at times against all odds – we »believe« hard copy? In other words, we tend to attribute some kind of truth value to it precisely because it is materially real.

[b]Ludovico:[/b] The availability of electricity (required to charge the electronic mobile revolution) is not the only issue involved here. Our habit of using screens and software for almost every writing task and printed production is a more important one. It’s a matter of fact that we are almost always producing texts through pixels. So how much are these - relatively new - methods of production affecting the content we produce? It would be fair to say that for starters they significantly alter the way we write. For many people the long-awaited freedom of instantly deleting or correcting words and phrases without re-writing them is an under-advertised motivation for buying a computer. Yet the availability of real-time spell checkers, for example, is drastically diminishing our grammatical skills. Furthermore the possibility of reverting to the web for references and quotes (often ignoring the reliability of sources) is another side of the coin. We are witnessing a way of writing geared towards speeding up content production to a maximum.
[b]Muller:[/b] This brings us back to the high-capitalist realm of consumption: produce more cost-effectively, more quickly: consume more. I would call it conveyor belt authorship if I were a sceptic…

[b]Ludovico:[/b] The Italian artist Paolo Cirio wrote a software art piece (»...people quote people... «) questioning the author’s role in the hurried web writing environment, seamlessly mixing famous quotes and their authors till everything is perfectly plausible and totally wrong. Relying on electronic sources and tools, and the ease with which the plastic keyboard has become our only input method, has forced our way of »writerly« thinking into something more accelerated, more abstract and more perfected, if you will. Arguably, this constitutes a historical evolution of writing. But, as with every evolution, there is something missing and something gained. We are missing a.o. calligraphy, quick notes, small drawings, and obscure or just decorative signs, which contribute to deciphering the mood of what was scribbled on paper. We have gained, instead, correctness and heterogeneity thanks to online (or offline) dictionary software. So the often more concise and machine-driven new styles include layout templates when produced on paper.
[b]Muller:[/b] Heterogeneity perhaps, correctness, I would contest that. Sure, we have dictionaries, spell-checks and thesauri readily available online, but typing allows for much more errors. The word »typo« indicates that already. And in casual email conversation we tend to discard rules of grammar and spelling. In addition, we are losing another skill; the one of physically leafing through reference books, remembering our alphabets whilst trying to retrieve a word, without just typing the word into the search engine. This act is similar to browsing through bookshelves in a physical library, where there’s always a surprise element of discovering unexpected gems.
[b]Ludovico:[/b] I totally agree: this is another risk. It’s our faith in the responding machine that makes us lose our research abilities, and hence we neglect to consult different (off-line) sources. I don’t know if this is a forced evolution or simply a loss. But we miss out on something anyway.

[b]Ludovico:[/b] The printed paper we handle now is quite different from the paper we handled ten years ago. The nature of paper has changed through digital technology, and its digital counterpart (the web). The change is bigger nowadays than compared to experiments with early versions of Wordstar in the offline Eighties. Now the changes are tangible on paper. Paper maintains intact its fascinating physicality: a sort of added-value to the unpredictable volatility of screen content. It represents a static frame of an electronically always mutable and correctable text environment. Its smell (of burned toner or just dried chemical ink) and its feel vary in texture (slippery for colour Xeroxes, raw for newspapers, or glossy for magazines like the one you’re reading now). It’s the »objectness« of paper that can’t be avoided.
[b]Muller:[/b] And it’s specifically this quality of »objectness« that renders the consumption of it more conspicuous than the consumption of pixels. Pixels lack the singular aura of hard copy. Conversely though, the inertia or sedentariness of paper has definitely turned pixels into the winner in a global economy. The movement of paper is slow and cumbersome, whereas the mobility of electronic data is immediate and far more reliable. Speed, immediacy, and a small error margin are prime demands nowadays.
[b]Ludovico:[/b] But what happens if an (even small) error margin all of a sudden becomes crucial for the sense of the text? Our culture has been built on the richness of difference, not on the machine’s average fault-tolerance...

Produced using: Skype, Mac Mail, Eudora, Microsoft Word, TextEdit, Uni-Ball Eye Micro Pen – black, Bur-o-class notebook, a pencil and a rubber
Compiled in-between: Taipei, Rotterdam, Bari, Beirut

 

 

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