IAH 206 sec 001
Final draft due: 12 Nov 2001
Essay 4
Source: school/arts/iah206/essay1.wpd
The most intrusive change in the new technology is so close that it is hard to notice it: the keyboard. In general, the finite set of patterns I can produce in a written document is governed by the order in which I choose from the fifty-or-so symbols in front of me, and not by the quantum chemistry of the paper or the visual acuity of the reader. It is true that the earliest typeset documents had the same limitation: Gutenberg's boys had 100 or so sorts. With more-advanced technology, this becomes more of a philosophical difference than a literal one. All software systems are being brought into compliance with the Unicode standard, which includes every symbol that has ever been used to express human language in printed communication. Man y word-processing systems have some support for user-designed fonts and literal graphics, and the better ones have ways to build complex macros out of short sequences of keystrokes. For instance, on the system I am using to type this essay, I reconfigured things so that the keys Control-F9 would display as 'é' (Spanish e-acute). On a SPARCstation, one would type the key-sequence AltGr-'-e to get the same character, and some old typewriters had it as an alternate function of one of the number-keys. The advantage to this is that, once a document has been typed, it is a set of clear, unambigous symbols. When I was in elementary school, sometimes I would play at "writing" with my little brothers and sisters; we would just make meaningless scribbles on a piece of paper. When I was preparing to take the essay portions of the AP tests, my fellow students and I discussed the advantages of different styles of writing and of just filling part of the paper with unreadable scribble. Typing may put a slightly higher burden on the author, but it makes thisgs a lot easier for the reader.
Typing documents with a computer-system also makes it easier to go back and refer to them later. I still have a copy of a short story I wrote in the seventh grade, because I typed it. I have saved old drawings in paper format, but I do not worry as much about written stuff; I just save the computer-file. A newer program I use ten years later may not duplicate all the formatting exactly, but I can still read the text, and plagiarize myself if I so desire. Of course, in ten years I've often learned and changed enough that I want to rewrite the document anyway. Someone else might learn from my previous self, and that is why I sometimes post such old documents on the web.
The third notable difference about my computer-system is that it requires more space than I would need for just a notebook and a pen. I can see that this is not a neccessary feature of the technology; laptop computers are already made that will fit comfortably inside a backpack. My computers require power as well, but they consume less than a medium-sized light fixture. It would not be terribly complicated to build a computer-system that used solar energy as its power-source.
While these are the most obvious influences of tecnology on my personal writing-process, they do not help nor hinder me directly in expressing my imagination, being more creative, or expressing myself in general. It is the social acceptance of technology and distributes systems, such as the Web, that have had any impact on my ability to express myself. I do not say that I have not tried to start writing a victorian novel (Kaplan 12), but the things I have written that others have read have been mostly computer-program documentation, short essays for academic purposes, and personal letters about things to which I had been a firsthand witness. In all of these cases, the computer makes it much easier for me to organize subjects in their proper formal order, to correct mistakes during the writing process, and to distribute multiple copies of a document if more than one person needs to read it.
As Wendy Lesser noted, personal letters can be a very useful and fun method of self-expression, as long as one has some excuse to compose them (122). What a computer can take away from the personal letter is that very excuse: "I'm writing to you because I don't have any friends closer than you in this town. Please excuse my grammar/spelling/penmanship -- the light is bad and the train-tracks make this desk jiggle every so often. I'm having a lot of fun in this town -- let me tell you what I saw last night..." I agree with her conclusion that E-mail allows the same sort of self-expression (127). It also allows the sort of archival and reconsideration that businesses once achieved with carbon-paper and careful secretaries.
I'm afraid that this essay displays a lack of creativity. I can point to many ways in which technology can allow me to be more creative, but it seems contradictory to be able to make myself create. My conclusion is exactly that.