A Better Pencil: Readers, Writers, and the Digital Revolution
Dennis Baron
Language: English
Pages: 280
ISBN: 0199914001
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Computers, now the writer's tool of choice, are still blamed by skeptics for a variety of ills, from speeding writing up to the point of recklessness, to complicating or trivializing the writing process, to destroying the English language itself.
A Better Pencil puts our complex, still-evolving hate-love relationship with computers and the internet into perspective, describing how the digital revolution influences our reading and writing practices, and how the latest technologies differ from what came before. The book explores our use of computers as writing tools in light of the history of communication technology, a history of how we love, fear, and actually use our writing technologies--not just computers, but also typewriters, pencils, and clay tablets. Dennis Baron shows that virtually all writing implements--and even writing itself--were greeted at first with anxiety and outrage: the printing press disrupted the "almost spiritual connection" between the writer and the page; the typewriter was "impersonal and noisy" and would "destroy the art of handwriting." Both pencils and computers were created for tasks that had nothing to do with writing. Pencils, crafted by woodworkers for marking up their boards, were quickly repurposed by writers and artists. The computer crunched numbers, not words, until writers saw it as the next writing machine. Baron also explores the new genres that the computer has launched: email, the instant message, the web page, the blog, social-networking pages like MySpace and Facebook, and communally-generated texts like Wikipedia and the Urban Dictionary, not to mention YouTube.
Here then is a fascinating history of our tangled dealings with a wide range of writing instruments, from ancient papyrus to the modern laptop. With dozens of illustrations and many colorful anecdotes, the book will enthrall anyone interested in language, literacy, or writing.
archeologists, historians, and students of literature and harmless things like that. They mean to do the right thing; but the Ted Kaczynskis of this world should not underestimate their impact. ■ ■ ■ THE POWER OF THE PRESS Humanists have dangerous minds, and they are also as heavily involved in technology as scientists and engineers and even mathematicians like the Unabomber himself. That’s because writing is technology. TeknoFear ■ 23 The texts that writers write are the products of
personal touch that only longhand could provide (“Of Lead Pencils” 1938). While the Times editor may have scrawled this lament about the increased mechanization of writing on a pad of narrow-lined, yellow paper, reporters in the newsroom were most likely clacking away at their typewriters, pouring their souls into their words, trying to meet their deadlines. Any metro editor suggesting that their work would be more honest and direct if it was handwritten would be facing a revolt. Complaints that
one that counters the frontier spirit we associate with computers, that reins in the linguistic freewheeling of virtual text. As discourse communities form themselves in cyberspace, we see a clear, self-regulating pressure to establish standards for virtual writing and to police and correct those who violate the emerging norms. It turns out that spelling counts online, just as it counts on the page. The post-Gutenberg explosion of print also brought censorship to the fore: increasing the amount
the pencil as a paradigm of writing technology. Initially created by woodworkers for woodworkers, pencils quickly achieved widespread popularity among writers and artists, particularly as pencil technology improved. More pencils continue to be made and xvi ■ Preface: Technologies of the Word sold today than any other writing implement, and even though the computer has become the instrument of choice for the vast number of writers who have access to digital technology, pencils retain an
the computer the eventual death of handwriting, and it’s undeniable that writers who use computers write less and less with pen or pencil. Chapter 5 considers what happens when a twenty-first-century writer tries out a writing technology that actually has become obsolete—writing on clay. It turns out that writing in an antique and unfamiliar medium forces us to pay attention to aspects of writing that we take for granted when we use more familiar writing tools. This in turn leads us to consider