Tabwriting and the future of writing technology

Foreword

Recently I got my hands on an ipad. And, as many others, justify the ownership of this item of luxury by trying to incorporate it into acts of productivity. Reading and annotating PDFs have so far met my expectations. I have also tried some ipad notes taking apps and quite easily arrived at the conclusion that handwriting on ipad is currently not yet a perfect replacement for pen and paper. The experiment has however become a point of departure for further inquiries that are more theoretical in nature. This paper is about these inquiries and in particular about the effort to situate this experiment in the history of writing technologies. It is organized as follows: first I will give a brief report of what is currently available to ipad users equipped with stylus, which is indicative of the status quo of technological availability in winter 2011. I have chosen to call the implementation of handwriting on tablet computer tabwriting, as an intentional parallel to typewriting. Retrospectively I identify tabwriting as the origin of writing technology which was perfected in the form of pen and paper. The advent of print press and later typewriter initiates a conquest that reaches its apex in the form of computer keyboard. Having partly established this history I then go on to discuss what exactly constitute the difference between tabwriting and typewriting experience… I have always believed that it is at least a legitimate method of essay writing to provide suspense and surprise for its reader. Therefore I would not divulge from the outset what exactly are the spins that I put on in the later part of the essay. Read on to find out!

The Perverse pleasure of Polygraph

Thomas Jefferson would have been thrilled to have an iPad, except that Apple Inc. didn’t exist two hundred years ago. But, as many early-adoption geeks would be glad to know, they are not alone in this perennial desperate need of ever newer technology. If a great statesman can solemnly proclaim, “I could not, now therefore, live without the Polygraph,”¹ could writing on iPad not be a legitimate topic in an academic paper?

Nevertheless, admitting one’s fondness for gadgets is one thing —euphemized here as an interest in writing technologies—to find a way to discuss them that does not become obsolete in three months is another. When the World Wide Web was still in its infancy, hypertext was championed by Jay David Bolter and became the main subject of his book titled Writing Space. Nine years later, he admitted he had to revise the book since what matters is no longer the hypertext, but something bigger, in which the hypertext is only a part². Lev Manovich may have made a similar blunder championing virtual reality, the one messiah that never really came. The lesson seems clear: there is a great danger in talking about things that are still in the forming.

If I had followed these lessons closely, I would have to wait for a hundred years, when the apps that I have reviewed had become historical artifacts worthy of the Getty museum and “my iPad” sounds as reverent as “my Remington”. Rejecting this option, I have resolved to minimize the risk by focusing on the nature of the problems that such a task now faces in general.

In a nutshell, what is available is at once impressive and painfully lacking: impressive in that it finally points to a way to massively incorporate handwriting into the world of digital computing; lacking if we ask it to do what pen and paper already did so well. Yes, it is possible to use your handwriting. No, the multi-touch technology built into iPad now is not envisioned for writing, but rather, for the effective recognition of brief gestures. To be more precise: two of these gestures are prioritized: point and swipe. The system has built-in capacities to recognize multiple pointing and swiping, which can be regarded as emulating the role played by the mouse in HCI, now assigned to our fingers. Pointing and swiping, however, are not by any means the entirety of movements that constitute writing. They are rather inherited from navigational needs in a GUI: it is simply the equivalent to clicking and dragging. Points and swipes need to be converted into strokes before writing can be accomplished. And this kind of work is currently not rendered in the system level.

Under the current generation of capacitive touch screen technology being used on tablet pc, the writing resolution is already sufficient for playful writing, such as when young children learn to draw and write (the so-called notes taking college students do still preserve a flavor of it). But serious writing will need a higher resolution which I believe will be provided once the needs consolidate. In fact, currently the technology is already available in a different market (Wacom Cintiq); only the price remains prohibitive. For iPad³ users the resolution problem has provoked an interesting solution. Several apps have opted to use a smaller writing area of the screen (called close-up window) where your writing is magnified. The software then shrinks this to a smaller scale so that you end up filling more on a page. This solution, no doubt borrowed from the experience of reading under magnifier, is certainly an ingenious one. But it adds an unnatural element that one needs to adapt to and, for this very reason, feels less ideal and will perhaps be superseded in the future.

Perhaps more difficult to resolve is a design decision. Although the multi-touch represents a steady advancement in terms of HCI, it does not bring any good to writing. Unless you practice Chinese ink writing/painting, your palm rests on the paper when you write. The system interprets the palm as another touch. To overcome this problem some apps have implemented a palm rest area which you can move up and down. Also, if you situate the close-up writing area at the bottom, your palm will rest outside the writing surface thus automatically resolves the problem.

Tabwriting: the short story

IPad as a writing tool exhibits a peculiar set of characteristics. It saves the life of some of us (real estate agents, medical professionals and certain college students who want to share what they draw on the class); and it proves insufficient for many others. But for those who are fundamentally skeptical of writing on a slate (as compared to pen and paper), let them be reminded that our writing culture begins exactly this way—using a roughly shaped stick on a hard surface of approximately the size of an iPad. Oracle Bone Script The earliest known form of writing, the cuneiform, existed from 3000 BC, uses wedge shaped stylus on clay tablet. The earliest form of Chinese characters (circa 1000BC) is found written on animal bones or the turtle shells. The so-called oracle bone script, as I understand it, is a technology of inscription that chooses shell/bone because of four reasons: 1) it is readily available and even staple; 2) it is soft enough to allow a sharp tip to easily make legible strokes on; 3) it is solid enough to keep its integrity and endure a certain period of time; 4) it is light enough to carry around should the need arise (as compared to slates made of clay or bamboo as they are used almost contemporaneously).

By laying out these four criterions I believe I have demonstrated the so-called primitive people’s immense ingenuity. An ancient technology can be perfect without the kind of complexities that some of their modern counterparts boast. I trust if Thomas Edison were able to go back in time with all his intelligence and persistence untouched he won’t be able to find a better solution. I rank the weigh factor the last because it was the least important at this stage. Later on however this factor proves to be a decisive one that catalyses a series of innovations that aim to overcome the burden when writing is widely adopted and becomes much more copious. With papyrus, cloth or parchment, not only the weight of a single page (a central notion in previous writing technologies that remains unchallenged until today) is reduced, the writing surface actually allows an increased density. This period also champions a particular variance of the notion of page: the page becomes of variable length, anticipating the HTML format that we use today. The scroll as a binding technology was widely used all over the world until the print press introduced an alternative: the spine binding. A scroll is necessarily read in linear order; but a book certainly does not. It has the definitive advantage of allowing quick access to any part of the text in any order (a notion akin to RAM compared to the tape in storage technology). The Chinese bamboo/wooden scroll (called JianDu) is a hybrid of slate surface and scroll binding, which threads long, narrow strips which carry single line of text. Papyrus, too, is constructed with thin strips of about 40cm long pressed together. In both cases, the notion of line is highlighted by its material support.

The practice of writing on a slate is preserved in our writing education system. When ready to learn to write, young children are often offered the starter kit, a combination of slate and chalk (or a slate pencil). It is not only the fragility of the advanced kit (quill and parchment) does not fit into children’s whimsical and destructive temper, but writing in ink requires much delicacy of the hand, a certain degree of sensory-motoric control of the hand that the children have yet to acquire. The primitive people who first picked up their writing tools faced the same problem. But the precision of the tool somewhat matched their awkward hand movement, which is initially only suitable for gripping⁴. The insufficiency we feel facing the modern tabwriting tool, consequently, is the result of our overdeveloped hand skill mismatching a technology that currently lacks precision.

When I say skill I meant to say technique. Insomuch as it is traditional and effective, handwriting fits Marcel Mauss’s definition of body technique⁵, just like swimming, digging, marching, running (these curiously masculine examples are those Mauss had the best chance to observe first hand and is certainly befitting his exclusively male audience) or every attitude of the human body. By traditional Mauss meant to suggest that, in order for a skill to qualify as technique of the body, there must exist a system of transmission of the technique, in other words, education. Handwriting is the perfect case in point (I am most bewildered that Mauss did not mention handwriting in his article). It is a technique handed down from generation to generation with the greatest care and pride. This transmission involves material aspects (pen-hold, copy books) as well as mental aspect (teaching school and human guidance).

In the age of quill or metal nib, the western writing posture is similar to the Chinese: the palm cannot but rest lightly on the desk and the quill has the danger of blotting so it should not be oversaturated. Also, stop in the middle of the sentence usually results a blot. This has demanded writing as premeditated and smooth as possible. The fountain pen and later the ball point pen, along with many other inventions, continuously diminish the importance of trained postures and movements. With the advancing steps of technology the hand gradually disowns the controls it once so painfully acquires. This is a universal phenomenon that occurs at every single surface where human and technology make contact. But even in the 20th century, where typewriting ascended to its dominance, the presence of an institutional mode of transmission for handwriting is far from negligible⁶.

From typewriter to keyboard

As the parallel to tabwriting, there exists a history of typewriting (including print press and typewriter), which is shorter, but much better documented (See Eisenstein, Kaufer and Carley, Wershler-Henry). Various predecessors of typewriter can be traced back as early as 1647, in which year William Petty was granted a patent for a machine which “might be learnt in a hour’s time, and of great advantage to lawyers, scriveners, merchants, scholars, registrars, clerks, etcetera; it saving the labour of examination, discovering or preventing falsification, and performing the business of writing—as with ease and speed—so with privacy.”⁷ A description so befitting of our modern typewriter actually corresponds to a device called pantograph⁸, which duplicates one’s handwriting through linked arms. Like the idea of cinema finds its humble origin in the 18^th century optical toys and embarks on it path of glory recently, typewriter in its definitive form was invented only a little more than a hundred years ago and begun its penetration of the business world as well as the world of intimate writing since the end of the nineteenth century⁹. But what has made this penetration decisive and thorough is the last three decades in which typewriting as inscription technology has been adopted as the major word input method for human-computer interface. In this section I will briefly trace this period where the spirit of typewriting, mutatis mutandis, incarnates in another body: the computer keyboard.

The naming of typewriter obviously borrows from the Gutenberg industry and analogizes inscription as a type-setting process. The computer input device, however, shares its name with a musical instrument. In abandoning the language of the press, the computer jargon seems to make a distinction about its ephemeral nature: the type that leaves an indelible imprint which is preserved by default, compared to traceless keystrokes that are as formless as the acoustic impression they created in our minds. This is probably a good hint that the computer keyboard of our day doesn’t appear simply as a copy of its ancestor typewriter. The brief yet not exactly straightforward lineage between the two is worth outlining here.

In the pre-computer dark ages typewriting as inscription technology was first adopted by telegraph industry, the result of which became the teletype machine, or teletyperwriter, or teleprinter. The uncertainty of nomination here shows clearly the already blurred boundary between typesetting, writing and printing. In the 1920s, a vast telex network was established to facilitate business communication, which is still in operation today in some areas of the world and business (e.g., airline industry). UNIX programmers are all familiar with its acronym, TTY, as its legacy in the computer language, which refers to any text based terminal that is functionally equivalent to the teletype for the OS.

IBM card punch station 029

Typewriting was also married to the punch card system to form a two-tier machine called keypunch, which brought fortune to IBM in the 1930s, and like typewriter, contributed to form a descent job opportunity for young women. Similar to what telephone and phonograph does to sound, the difference between teletype and keypunch is a matter of transmission or local recording. It is perhaps through this usage that the notion of typesetting is further alienated (because what eventually got imprinted are holes) and the notion of “key” acquires more prominence.

The first computer, the famous ENIAC, does without typewriting at all. Because of the lack of notion of storage in its design (which Von Neumann quickly remedied when he got involved), punch cards are the exclusive means of both input and output. It is only in 1948’s BINAC that an electromechanic typewriter was first incorporated into the system to enable direct control¹⁰. With the development of multi-user time sharing systems, teletype became the standard interface; it also has the additional benefit of allowing remote connection when computers are scarce and often not located locally. The so-called video display terminal (VDT), when appeared in 1964, was an unabashed imitation of the teletype machine. The Datapoint 3300, one of the first commercially available VDT, openly emulated (as we nowadays say compatible) an ASR-33 Teletype (which was a popular model and Bill Gates’s first computer experience in his Lakeside school). Retrospectively these are called glass TTYs or dumb terminals for its commitment to a rather inflexible display model that inherits directly from typing on a page of paper.

Datapoint 3300

An observant reader may have wondered if there is anything else that is missing, just like storage is missing in ENIAC. This is the notion of display, which was initially an undistinguishable part of the typewriter itself. Datapoint 3300 is a display and a keyboard integrated as one unit. This means that what typewriting brings into computer interface is not only a method of input, but a specific notion of display and a text-line-based interactivity. Meanwhile, Ivan Sutherland’s Sketchpad developed the notion of display along an altogether different line. Paired with the light pen, this display is vector based and anticipates the kind of tabwriting that will emerge decades later.

With the elimination of punch cards, for a long time the keyboard remains the only way to interact/command the computer and the HCI reflects this as being completely text based. In terms of its layout, computer keyboard duplicates the QWERTY configuration invented by Sholes. This has made the transition of typewriting experience on these two radically different platforms as smooth as possible. If a modern computer word processor does resemble a typewriter in a historical sense, on a smaller scale it differs from it considerably¹¹. When photography took over from 19^th century realist painting the perennial task of verisimilitude, painting is free to pursue the abstract, the impressionistic, and the chaotic “inner reality”. Similarly, as technologies were developed with deeper and stronger set of data manipulability, the humanoid that sits in front of the machine is increasingly less demanded in terms of speedy data entry. Not long ago girls were going to typing school before they can get a secretary job because training is needed to type words beyond a certain amount (say 60 words per minute) considered efficient. What is now asked for them is rather a vague notion of “familiarity” of a range of office software. This familiarity generally means the ability to format business or administrative documents (which turns out to be an intimidating task that goes way beyond choosing the right font), a skill that is nonexistent in the typewriter age.

The computer keyboard also does add more keys to the QWERTY layout as well as assign new roles to some of the keys already there. The Datapoint 3300 for instance introduced keys to move the cursor around the screen (up, down, left and right), or to the end of the current line. The carriage return, too, has been assigned new role (and it still functions the same in the editing mode) in response to the command line mode that does not exist in typewriters. In this imperative mode, hitting the key signifies the transmission of command. These expansion and reconfiguration reflect what is fundamentally changed despite the similar appearance. Although in colloquial usage it is allowable to say that one takes command of the typewriter as of any machine, in reality one simply does typesetting through the machine which has no cognizance of what is being given to it. This has made the term, typewriter, appropriate and inappropriate if the computer counterpart were to adopt the same term.

Another difference between typewriting on a computer and on a typewriter is the platform-specific content. Typewriter generally deals with poetry and prose, whereas computer has been used by a massive community of programmers who writes codes. In codes not only the arithmetic operators appear more frequently, but the naming convention of variables suggests a strange use of capitalized letters. This sort of text will certainly baffle even the most experienced typist.

Thanks to the proliferation of computer in both business and personal settings, typewriting as an inscription technology has achieved its deepest penetration to human technoculture. Granted, pen and paper is still widely used and maintains its status as the prerequisite of literacy and serves as the foundation of education. But professions that require extensive writing have all adopted the new technology. These include writing in its traditional sense, that is, as a word-making practice, for example a novelist drafting a story, a student his/her term paper, or a corporate secretary business letters¹². Another category, which has always existed¹³ but submerged beneath the prestigious word-making practice, is writing as data entry. Here the destination of writing takes ideally the form of database, which was unfortunately restricted by the technology to manifest instead in the form of pages or books (account books, library indices, social security records). It is this form of writing that benefits the most from the combination of typewriting (which provides the precision) and the infinite flexibility and manipulability enabled by computer.

Tabwriting as cool technology

Because tabwriting had been a formative force in human literacy and had occupied such a dominating seat ever since, the hand, the word and the man seem to form, at least to Heidegger, a holy trinity (meaning: unquestionable) that is intruded upon by the advent of typewriter.

Man does not “have” hands, but the hand holds the essence of man, because the word as the essential realm of the hand is the ground of the essence of man. The word as what is inscribed and what appears to the regard is the written word, i.e., script. And the word as script is handwriting.¹⁴

Although I do believe tabwriting restores something that is deprived of the hand by typewriting, I will not pronounce this something (which I simply call the tabwriting experience) as the essence of anything, least of man. For essentially I believe both writing technologies are but entr’actes (borrowing from Zielinski) of the history of verbal communication that will ultimately be restored to orality (a point that I will not elaborate in this paper).

Instead of the clichéd dichotomy between man and machine (human vs. inhuman), as well as the age of Goethe (as if automata didn’t flourish throughout Europe in his lifetime) vs. the age of modern man (Kittler’s contribution), what makes more sense to me is to treat the tabwriting and the typewriting as two parallel technologies that one has chronological precedence over the other, but not necessarily more essential than the other. By juxtaposing the two on an equal basis one gets to understand what really constitutes their differences and why tabwriting represents an idiosyncratic mode of expressing thoughts that is worthy of any preservation effort.

First, what tabwriting offers is a unified interface where the hand is free to cross into different categories of signs, be it word, graphic shapes or anything in between (ideogram). This unification is present from the very initiative moves of this technique, in the evolution from pictogram, ideogram, logogram (where phonetic elements constantly gain territory). Writing largely retains this mode of presentation in ancient relics, beautiful medieval scripts that survived to this day, or any incunabula that closely imitates the appearance of a good scribe’s work, including the Gutenberg bible. In fact, in accepting this freedom of the medium we commit implicitly to an understanding of words as a subset of shapes, or as in the case of Chinese, words as world pictures. Given a blank sheet of paper, what follows is essentially a drawing experience, even if only linguistic signs are involved. Intuitively we use different size to convey the degree of importance, which requires but a slight adjustment of the hand that magnifies the same movement.

Typewriting, however, denies this unity. Whereas this fragmentation of the elements of writing (e.g., pictorial and linguistic) is somewhat unheard of in the previous technological condition, the advent of the Gutenberg technology made it necessary (from now on linguistic signs are prioritized). Typewriting merely reinforces this irreversible movement. The technology disables all signs but the linguistic ones to achieve its maximum efficiency; and it disables all alphabets except one. Although specialized hardware¹⁵ and later computer software seem to have come to its rescue by enabling multiple input languages the ontological status of the technology remains monoalphabetic. Moreover, in its mechanical implementation the typewriter allows only one font and one size. This rigidity is in sharp contrast to tabwriting’s infinitely amorphous dimensionality. Having looked at the notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, reading a manuscript produced by typewriter becomes an inhuman experience (as I recollect from reading PhD dissertation written in the 1970s).

Tabwriting, with its continuous movement where letters are connected through strokes, is an ambulatory adventure, where a sense of purpose is needed but not strictly prescribed. Typewriting, on the other hand, resembles a guided tour where a strict itinerary is composed of various highlights connected by shuttle buses with closed windows. Each discrete stroke is separated with the other—pressing two keys at the same time is technically undesirable and prohibited—and no digression, even the slightest one, is allowed. Leonardo's Notebook

Essentially, tabwriting is a tracing exercise where an image of the word is visually presented to the writer. This naturally describes the experience of writing hieroglyphic scripts, but even for alphabetic ones, the notion is not without its applicability. Adult handwriting, at its most efficient, will seldom include every single letter in a long word. Letters and whole strings of them are often only indicated, yet the words are still recognizable. Once the first part of the word is clear, word endings can tail off into a barely legible scribble—providing the height differentials are retained to give the word a shape. In effect the word itself becomes an instantly recognizable hieroglyph or symbol.¹⁶

Word in its visual form has the advantage of being flexible, tolerating minor misconfigurations. Typewriting, on the other hand, is more exact and demands perfect spelling. Whereas formerly people can rely heavily on the acoustic clue to write down a word, in typewriting the acoustic clue seems to be insufficient in many cases as McLuhan once made the observation that “Typewriters caused an enormous expansion in the sales of dictionaries.”¹⁷ For other languages where the words themselves are not alphabetized, but their pronunciations are, such as Chinese, the interface to technology has necessarily forced a shift from the visual domain to the acoustic domain. For in order to know what to type in Chinese, you need to know how to pronounce the word. This has created immense difficulties, some of which inherently unsolvable¹⁸. In the context of Chinese education, writing is primarily a memorization of the visual shape and to a lesser extent the specific order of strokes in order to execute it. In fact, for Chinese, since the meaning of a word is so innervated in its visual form as well as the hand movement to “write” through this form, the alphabetic input method is akin to asking the feet to do the job of writing. It is certainly not infeasible; but decidedly unnatural and inconvenient. This explains why a handwriting option for Chinese input has always been necessary. It certainly helps the older generation to adapt to this brave new world of computer dominance. For the new generation, who will probably learn to type before they learn to write, the ability to write Chinese (not writing in Chinese) can be forever lost if it is met with a technologically inferior realization.

Second, the chirographic tool records rather faithfully the movement of the hand. This has allowed much subtlety of writing that is also called handwriting. The term thus has a triple meaning: it refers to an act of writing, the result of this act, and the individuality embedded within this result. The style can be further developed into an art that is calligraphy, which functions beyond the domain of linguistics. Typewriting, however, filters out this part of the hand movement¹⁹. The strength and rhythm of typing are simply not registered in the result; they are discarded as irrelevant by the tool.

For a technique such as handwriting, a considerable range of performances can result from a single instantiation. Within the realm of a given style legibility and speed, or beauty and practicality need to be balanced. Writing in this form always entails implicit decisions that sometimes amplify as stylistic differences (the Chinese cursive script, for example, is obviously developed with the extreme speed and maximum beauty in mind, disregarding legibility and practicality). This kind of delicacy stands in contrast with machine’s rigorousness, whose logic finds its ultimate manifestation in computer algorithm. Bogost argues that the procedure logic of computer is often perceived as simplistic only because they are programmed to execute simplistic processes²⁰. This implies that the exhibited behavior of computer programs can be complex if programmed accordingly²¹ . Even if that is true, the complexity of the behavior of a computer program is always in proportion to its programmed complexity. The situation is thus unfortunate: the program is often too complex already to understand, but its behavior still lacks genuine complexity. On the other hand, how can a simple technique such as writing with pen and paper beget complex results? Following McLuhan, and being fully aware of the fact that this following is playful at best, I would like to name tabwriting “cool” technology for its invitation of the user to create variance of meaning in a simple context; whereas “hot” technology to describe typewriting for its limitation of the performance, its precision of delivery and lastly, an ever increasingly complex implementation.

So far I have proposed, if my arguments followed, that tabwriting is a cool technology. I would like now to make a slight digression on what is a seemingly cool technology but eventually just not cool enough—the printed book. Hayles has made the following observation, that book technology,

for all of its sophistication in content and production, remains remarkably simple to use. Book lovers frequently evoke this quality of print, emphasizing that they enjoy books precisely because books do not interpolate them into the speed, obsolescence, and constant breakdown of electronic culture.

The context of this observation is made when she compares electronic literature to the print literature. To be fair to Hayles, when she is making a point of the intuitiveness of usage of printed book, she has not seen a ninety-year-old lady reading kindle (for the simple reason that it is so much lighter than an average book). But what is potentially dangerous in this type of argument is that it takes too much of what we conceive as intuitiveness for granted. The intuitive validity of the point masks the unfair condition under which the comparison is made: the two systems in the hand of an adult who has been technically conditioned by and emotionally attached to the former. On the other hand, a child has to be taught how to read a book. Although he/she intuitively knows pages are to be turned, the physical turning of a page does not have to be more intuitive than the pressing of a button. Children know instinctively a button is to be pressed and the act is definitively a pleasurable one for they seek to repeat it. For a child that will grow up with facetime calls and iPad readings, these technologies could be as natural as telephone and print book for our generation. There are already a considerable amount of children literature published on iPad which affords superior multimedia capacity (have you ever owned in your splendid childhood a fable book that can read itself in five different languages?) and interactivity—those exact media specificities hailed by Hayles in the case of electronic literature. I can confidently expect more (and for the teenage market, comic books) children’s literature with the rapid adoption of tablet. For the economic reason alone—every parent knows children’s book are expensive as the cost of color printing is much higher than black and white printing; such a distinction no longer exists in electronic printing[^{22]—it deserves a place in the market and many other genres will follow suite (e.g., coffee table books). Some might lament on the potential negative effect if the Gutenberg technology is eliminated at such an early stage in our educational system. But what if the following stages are all adapted to electronic publishing already? As of Jan 2011, Webb School, a private grade and high school in Knoxville, Tennessee, is already mandating (not recommending, as some others do) iPad for all 4th through 12}th^ grade students[^23]. College students, who have always suffered from the heavy burden (in weight and price) and speedy obsolescence (publishing houses make every effort to revise them unnecessarily so as to maximize their profit) of textbooks will have no problem accepting e-textbooks once they are made available.

The printed book is not a cool technology in my definition. Contrarily, it is a hot technology in that it dictates the most exact replication of its manifestation. What I find instead the most enduring and endearing quality of book technology is its idiosyncratic way of organizing thoughts (which is easily imitable in digital form). When a variety of digital formats are made available, I find myself constantly opting for PDF. This notoriously bad example of digital information (for its lack of scalability and reflowability) and the intransigent agent of print culture, do I love it because it is the format that maintains the most of what a book should look like in the print form? Why should I care how words look like? Should not the ideas themselves be my sole concern? The moment I reflect on this, I discover that the visual and to some extent the haptic aspects are instrumental in helping me grasping the ideas behind those words. In other words, the structure of their presentation influences the way ideas take root and grow in my mind. And if the ideas are worthy of a book, ideally they should be presented in the book form, with beginning and end, TOC and footnotes, instead of a pile of text messages on the cell phone.

What this means is that while cell phone may be extremely instrumental to a certain kind of verbal communication, there are ideas that take a substantial amount of space to unfold and unpack its subtlety and critical importance. For these ideas, the book as a form of organizing ideas (not the physical form) remains irreplaceable and will not in a foreseeable future go in obsolescence. It is for this very reason that, although what the book represents is only a tiny fraction of what verbal communication entails, it has been a most prestigious part of it, one that is chosen to carry the weight of cultural heritage. In Hayles account, however, the physical form is the real thing that fascinates book lovers. This fetishization of the appearance is probably characteristic of human perception. To think of the book as a form of organization is just too abstract than to conjure up, for instance, an image (and haptic memory) of the printed book. But as Walter Ong reminds us that great civilizations had existed before any speech was written down, literacy is just a form of technologizing the words. What is so exciting about tabwriting, then, is that it points to a new form of technologizing. This new form has, for a start, an unprecedented and all-encompassing hybridity. It is certainly a writing-enabled technology, where pointless graffiti as well as serious literary endeavors are equally welcomed; but it is also a display device (like a book is) which has mass transmission capacities built in. Beyond mere imitation or reimplementation of what the older technologies are capable of—they are often less ideal here—the tabwriting platform expands the writing experience into new horizons with, among other things, a potential for non-physical instantaneous or asynchronous collaboration. Both writing and reading may be redefined in the next century as essentially a collective experience.

Vampiric technology or, Wo/Man: the extension of technologies

My other reading of McLuhan is even more perverse in nature. In his chapter on typewriter, he tells how Henry James thoroughly enjoyed his new method of composing. Instead of writing it, he now dictates it to his secretary, a Miss Theodora Bosanquet. The disadvantages of typewriting, as I describe above, are circumvented by a simple trick: let somebody else do the job. And thus, “it all seems to be so much more effectively and unceasingly pulled out of me in speech than in writing.”²²

There is certainly a social/gender aspect in this anecdote. And that’s probably the original intention of McLuhan to recount it, for he calls for such a history to be written. I thoroughly enjoyed this intention reading the companion of James’s confession, which is to be found on the previous page: “women refused to be dictated to and went out and became stenographers.”²³

Being a McLuhanist (in terms of technological determinism) Fredric Kittler has also made a pithy remark worthy of reproducing here. Typewriter, as Kittler notes, is the “convergence of a profession, a machine, and a sex.”²⁴ The notion of convergence offers a vivid visualization what we perceive as forces from various sources gravitating towards an inevitable end. Yet this depiction has the potential to mislead us into retrospectively fitting historical data into a preconceived, ahistorical destination (which I admit is what Kittler is especially good at). I find it hardly convincing for instance that the dominance of clerks, poet-assistants and male secretaries is ended overnight because “writing as keystrokes, spacing, and the automatics of discrete block letters bypassed a whole system of education.”²⁵ Perhaps Kittler is confounding the act of writing (which involves education) with the technology of writing (which involves training). We hardly need to be reminded that how the technology was initially conceived for male users and they were its first adopters.

My interest in this anecdote lies elsewhere. I ask, is Henry James still writing? In other words, is dictating a writing technology? In the sense that words become materialized, there is certainly a technology (if I define technology as the enabling process in which words are materialized). But what is most intriguing in this technology is the fact that human being forms a part of it. And this part is called amanuensis, from servus a manu “hand servant” + -ensis “belonging to”. A classical example of this role is Miss Mina Murray in Dracula, who is obsessed with typing as a form of transmedia re-encoding. In fact, as Jennifer Wicke so brilliantly reveals to us, all the media technologies involved in the novel correspond to a particular ability of Dracula.

Consider all the media technologies the novel so incessantly displays and names: the telegraph that figures so largely in the communicative strategies that allow the band to defeat Dracula is an equivalent to the telepathic, telekinetic communication Dracula is able to have with Mina after sealing her into his race with her enforced drinking of his blood. The phonographic records Dr. Seward uses are the reproduction of a voice, of a being, without any body needing to be present, just as Dracula can insinuate himself as a voice into the heads of his followers, or call them from afar. The Kodak camera captures an image and then allows it to be moved elsewhere, freezing a moment of temporality and sending it across space, in a parallel to Dracula's insubstantiality and his vitiation of temporality.²⁶

Apart from the revelation that media technologies are perceived as well as conceived as supernatural abilities, an important observation can be made from the fact that these supernatural powers need to function through a human body (aptly recalls the definition of medium), that human being has always been a constituting part of technology. A turn-of-the-century advertisement for typewriter (which Kittler should have liked) reads,

“The type-writer is especially adapted to feminine fingers. They seem to be made for type-writing. The type-writing involves no hard labor, and no more skill than playing the piano. “²⁷

The sexist tone, echoing the McLuhan quote above, must have necessarily infuriated feminists²⁸. However there is more to ruminate on this strategic binding of the female sex to a certain type of machine than simple condemnation. For example, Wershler-Henry suggests that “the merging of the two novelties together into one entity in the popular imagination alleviated the suspicion that either on their own might have elicited.”²⁹ In fact, the idea of young female operator does not belong exclusively to the history of typewriter. Any machinery that requires a higher than average manual dexterity and the capacity to adapt to training usually finds its operator in the second sex. Joseph Faber’s talking machine “Euphonia”, shown in London in 1846, was operated by a young woman. 1939 World’s Fair in New York and San Francisco also saw a machine known as the Voder (Voice Operation DEmonstratoR) operated by a young woman, who is specially trained to manipulate the rather complex system of keys, knobs and foot-pedals in order to produce a voice. Again, six women were instrumental as programmers of the first computer ENIAC³⁰.

Faber's Euphonia The more I read the above ads the more I begin to perceive it as a plain statement, in a blunt language typical of the occasion, of how natural the mutual adaptation between machine and man has always been. Far from resulting condemnation, this form of symbiosis is celebrated without any sense of degradation: a hand looks for a tool; and a tool looks for a hand. Walter Ong has made a similar statement: Technology, properly interiorized, does not degrade human life but on the contrary enhances it.³¹

Although I would rather avoid the use of such Christian phrases (those in italics), I basically understand and agree with its meaning, which is, in my neutralized formulation, if the internalization of a certain technology open up new possibilities of human expression, then this is a technology that will be regarded as natural, human; and it will stay and become part of our life.

Writing technology is a subject that has been brought up in many contexts. This paper cannot hope but to refer to a small fraction of this literature. But what is common in this fraction is the explicit admission of writing as technology, a revelation that we only come to possess with the threat of other more alienating technologies on the horizon, waiting to be internalized just as writing technology was. In the sense that writing calls for a carefully designed set of tools and painfully acquired skills, it is completely artificial. But in the sense that it answers our communicative needs and can be successfully internalized, it is completely human. Isn’t the ability to use tool, to shape it to our needs, to learn skills involving artificially constructed tools a deciding criterion of what it means to be human, as opposed to mere animals? Such is the double thinking we need on the matter of writing as technology. In other words, one’s rapport to technology is never either natural or unnatural. Speaking, writing, and the ability to use computer (should we invent a new meaning for computing as the ability to interact with computer?) are all learned. And anything that requires learning is not natural in the absolute sense of the word. What matters is rather the degree of internalization that a technology can afford. Speaking is entirely body technique that functions without the aid of external object. Writing is partially so (you can always use your finger to write on sand). But computing is decidedly not so.

This is why the development of technological world seems to follow two directions. On the one hand, technology has its own logic to grow into a mammoth construction that is beyond human comprehension (think of the massively inhuman codes written for Microsoft Windows); on the other, technology also grows in closely watched human needs (think of all major technologies of the 19^th century). We need to do without the naïve century-old dichotomy that there exists a boundary between human and machine and that this boundary is located at the human skin. To think of technology conceptually requires us to see technology inside the human skin, to penetrate the human body.

The future of writing technologies

Perhaps the most famous—and certainly the most curious—typewriter in its entire history is the one invented and made by a Dane, the principal of the Royal Institute for the deaf-mutes in Copenhagen, Rasmus Malling-Hansen. This typewriter, called the Hansen writing ball, was well known due to one of its early adopter, Friedrich Nietzsche, who used the machine to resume his writing in near blindness. The anecdote is well documented by Kittler³² and a popular version can be found in Nicolas Carr’s well received Shallows. One starts by, and the other ends with the same quote “our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.”³³

Far from our image of the typewriter as a technologically mature and utilitarian product, the Malling Hansen writing ball resembles nothing less than a piece of art installation whose functions can be best described as curious. The ball shaped keys give the machine the overall appearance of a hedgehog, which quietly perches on a piece of arc shaped frame on which paper is held. The impression occurs directly beneath the half sphere, therefore for the typist the text will remain largely invisible (let us not forget the typewriter is originally conceived for blind fathers in need of epistolarilly educating their sons!). Finally, the ribbon is extremely susceptible to humidity, which eventually led Nietzsche to abandon it in favor of a beautiful woman—why women constantly appear in this discussion of writing technology is beyond me—as Kittler perversely remarks, “with the collapse of his machine, Nietzsche became a man again”.³⁴

Man’s perception of technology has never been a stable one. If I regard the Hansen writing ball today as a non-functioning museum piece, for Nietzsche, it is probably a technological wonder, a 19^th century iPad. But the technology doesn’t even have to be that old. One thing that constantly strikes me the prominent status accorded to panels, levers, knobs, switches and buttons in many sci-fi films and literatures of the mid-20^th century. Frederic Brown’s short piece, Answer, is a classical example of how our imagination of the future is often painfully contained by the technologies available to our generation. According to Deleuze’s theorization, these decidedly mechanical operations (for Brown, the abstract yet sublime notion of fusion is translated literally into soldering) belong to the sovereign society and were dated before Napoleon³⁵. Apparently they persist not only in the 20^th century, but also somehow, via the form of popular imagination of the 1960s, into the future (not only theirs but also ours). While the overall achievement behind Ivan Sutherland’s Sketchpad remain as impressive today as ever, one cannot help not to notice the awkwardness of the combination: on the one hand an advanced technology (light pen); on the other what we currently perceive as a backwardness, or at least a retrograde element (notice how Sutherland relies heavily on knobs). The kinds of analog and physical interface elements that fail to conform to the ever higher demand for precision is now relegated to consumer electronics, often perceived as requiring less beforehand training. Consequently they are less universal and less flexible in terms of functionalities. A hierarchy thus exists between codes running on a virtual machine (which often does not have a hardware implementation yet but is simulated), codes on a specific hardware, and pure hardware. This last one, the bottom of the hierarchy, is where code loses its virtuality—consider virtuality as virtuosity or virtue—and becomes ossified.

The persistence of physical elements in the man-computer symbiosis runs against the dominate trend of interface evolution, which seeks a universal and seamless integration of human sensorial faculties and the code. These physical elements, although familiar to human and in a sense easy³⁶ to manipulate, linger in the third world (other than man and machine). Virtual reality, or other forms of highly developed interface technology, has the sole aim to suture the two worlds and make disappear the one that is between them. The last generation of machine, therefore, is one that not only blocks our direct access to the physical world but either makes us believe it is disgusting (in E. M. Forster’s The Machine Stops) or the virtual is the real (The Matrix).

Perhaps a future audience will be shocked to see a keyboard in their video archive of the primitive people, recognizing it as a famous pre-21^st century relic. Will writing technologies evolve to the extent that none of the physical elements we recognize today will remain? If so what would be the materiality of that technology? Will a highly successful and at the moment seemingly invincible technology that is the typewriting one day become such a curious and non-functioning object just like the writing ball made by Malling Hansen?

Notes

Works Cited

Bedini, Silvio A. Thomas Jefferson and his copying machines. University Press of Virginia, 1984.
Bogost, Ian. Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames. The MIT Press, 2007.
Bolter, Jay David. Writing space: computers, hypertext, and the remediation of print. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2001.
Carr, Nicholas. The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. W. W. Norton & Company, 2010.
Deleuze, Gilles. “Postscripts on the societies of control.” October 59 (winter 1992): 3-7.
Heidegger, Martin. Parmenides. Translated by André Schuwer. Indiana University Press, 1998.
Kittler, Friedrich A. Gramophone, film, typewriter. Stanford University Press, 1999.
Light, Jennifer. “When Computers Were Women.” Technology and Culture 40, no. 3 (July 1999): 455-483.
Mauss, Marcel. Techniques, technology and civilisation. Edited by Nathan Schlanger. Berghahn Books, 2006.
McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man : Critical Edition. Edited by W. Terrence Gordon. Critical. Gingko Press, 2003.
Ong, Walter J. Orality and literacy: the technologizing of the word. Routledge, 2004.
Sassoon, Rosemary. Handwriting of the Twentieth Century. Intellect Books, 2007.
Wershler-Henry, Darren Sean. The iron whim: a fragmented history of typewriting. Cornell University Press, 2007.
Wicke, Jennifer. “Vampiric Typewriting: Dracula and Its Media.” ELH 59, no. 2 (July 1, 1992): 467-493.
Williams, Robin. The Mac is not a typewriter: a style manual for creating professional-level type on your Macintosh. Peachpit, 2003.`