Читать книгу Message Not Received - Simon Phil - Страница 13

I’m no Renaissance man, but I fancy myself a student of history, particularly with respect to technology and language.16 The creative use and misuse of language predates the modern-day corporation by centuries. It is anything but a new phenomenon, and neither is our complicated relationship between communication and technology.

Think about gadgets such as the computer, the smartphone, the Kindle, and the iPad. Compare them with the clay tablet, the printing press, the pencil, the telegraph, the typewriter, and other critical innovations from previous centuries. The former contain much more sophisticated technology than the latter, but the two groups have more in common than many people realize. Every one of these tools has faced highly influential detractors.

Dennis Baron makes this point in his impeccably researched 2009 book A Better Pencil: Readers, Writers, and the Digital Revolution. Baron examines the craft of writing via a fascinating historical lens. As he writes:

The World Wide Web wasn’t the first innovation in communication to draw some initial skepticism. Writing itself was the target of one early critic. Plato warned that writing would weaken memory, but he was more concerned that written words – mere shadows of speech – couldn’t adequately represent meaning. His objections paled as more and more people began to structure their lives around handwritten documents. Centuries later, the innovative output of Gutenberg’s printing press was faulted for disrupting the natural, almost spiritual connection between the writer and the page. Eventually, we got used to printing, but Henry David Thoreau scorned the telegraph when it was invented in 1840s because this technology for quickly transporting words across vast distances was useless for people who had nothing to say to one another. The typewriter wasn’t universally embraced as a writing tool when it appeared in the 1870s because its texts were impersonal, it weakened handwriting skills, and it made too much noise. And computers, now the writer’s tool of choice, are still blamed by skeptics for a variety of ills, including destroying the English language, slowing down the writing process, speeding up writing to the point of recklessness, complicating it, trivializing it, and encouraging people to write who may, as Thoreau might put it, have nothing to say.

I hope to avoid the latter criticism in this book.

It turns out that, at least conceptually, writing with a pencil has a great deal in common with texting on a smartphone. Each has profound effects on how people process information and how they communicate with one another.