The Opposition In Technology Wars

By Author: rdfgdr
Total Articles: 105
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Mr. Mitsuyasu Ota, the Mayor of Harare, in western Japan, made this week's news columns after imposing a one-day-a-week ban on the use of computer equipment in the town's municipal offices. The step was taken on the grounds that young staff "mistakenly think they are working" when sitting raptly at their computer screens. At the same time, Mr. Ota lamented that "young people are not in the habit of writing by hand any more".
One of the favorite arguments brought out by the opposition in technology wars is the notion that a technical short cut is simultaneously a kind of mental impoverishment, and that the man with the pen will think and write more effectively than the man with the Compaq.
Leaving aside the question of whether advanced technology makes you think less dynamically, the idea that there should be recognizable stylistic discrepancies between the work of pen-pushers and key-tappers shouldn't in the least surprise us. Historically, literary styles have always borne a strong relationship to the available technology. The quill pen, most obviously, allowed its owner only a certain number of words between refills, ...
... thereby encouraging all those lengthy (ribbon a sentences bristling with subordinate clauses. The fountain pen — which allowed you to write as many words as you wanted — and the manual typewriter wrought further revolutions. It is not particularly far-fetched, for example, to suggest that the staccato, elliptical prose of early-20th-century Modernist masters such as Hemingway derives in part from its having been typed, rather than written down.
But what about the computer screen? What effect does that have on the elemental pat-terns by which the writer downloads the words in his or her head? Without wanting to sound like Mayor Ota, I suspect that to a certain kind of writer it is as much a hindrance as a help. A single glance at the average bookshop will demonstrate that novels are getting longer. There are excellent aesthetic reasons for that, of course, but there is also a technical explanation. Which is to say that computers allow you to write more words and to write them more quickly, without the restraint of having to alter everything by hand and then rewrite.
Every so often, as a reviewer, one stumbles with a sinking heart across one of these enormous rambling affairs, which, however assiduous the attentions of its editor, betrays its origin as a screen-abetted mental show-off. Perhaps, like the municipal employees of Mayor Ota's Hirate, we should all try banning computers one day a week.