Whenever I find myself delving into a deep article or text, I usually jot down a note or two with a pencil. Always a Ticonderoga 2, with the lead head sharpened to just the right length and angle. It’s been a tradition for me ever since… second grade or so? And somehow, through thick and thin, that routine of a pencil within arms reach has stuck along with me.
So fast forward to late high school and early college. By then a lot of my assignments had moved to the computer, with much of my classmates’ note-taking being pigeonholed on word documents that we’d send to one another with fury before the night of our next exam. I didn’t think too much of things until, one day in honors lit, it became apparent to me that everything that I knew to be right and true about the world was antiquated. We were assigned to recount Chaucer in an essay, and somewhere between the lines I thought that it would be only fair to write an essay on Chaucer by hand. And of course, I looked like a fool when I was the only person out of 60 who brought in an essay scribbled on college-ruled notebook paper. I got some odd side-eye glances from the rest of my classmates but, aside from that, nothing substantial happened. I got a good grade and the rest of our class went along with being dumbfounded by the origins of English literature in Medieval Europe.
I was an old-timer in a new world, at least for one paper. But through all of the emotional anguish that I sent myself through, it didn’t make a darn difference in the world. The words still resonated in their own intellectually budding way, whether they were typed in Times New Roman 12 or scribbled in chicken-scratch. And, as most of my personal and professional writing has evolved from the physical to the cloud, I can’t help but think about that day when everything that I thought about the nature of technology and writing changed.
Every weekend I stop by my local Starbucks and plop down at a wood table for an hour or so, with my kindle in hand. I dive into whatever literary thing has caught my fancy. Inadvertently I’ll get the judgmental look from a person or two who sit with their noses buried into a leather-bound novel, fading away at the seams. It’s like their glances are telling me that, for some reason, the way in which I read isn’t conventional. Reading Shakespeare just needs to be experienced in a physical book, you know? I hear all of the variations of this sentiment, and cringe a little bit every time that I hear it.
Apparently for a lot of people, the words are different when you can touch them versus when you can only see them. I’m not too sure that I buy this. Is it really possible that somewhere, from transit between vellum texts and e-readers, that the words and the essence of these texts have changed?
This brings me back to the subject of our last reading and the golden nugget of jeopardy knowledge that is Thoreau’s pencil manufactory. How could one of America’s most prominent ‘traditionalists’, a writer who emphasized returning to nature and the past, quite literally make his living off of creating new technology? It’s an irony for some, but for me it made a little bit of sense. As people who enjoy writing and literature in our ways, I think we come to grips every day with the crossroads of technology and the world of old. And, in our own unique ways, we both love and fear the advent of these new technological advancements. We long for the smell of a physical book in our hands, but are damn thankful that we don’t have to write ten page essay’s by hand.
I feel a sort of humbled resignation at times to the forces of change and literature. I love what the future has in store for the art of writing, but another part of me is also stuck in an old world, a world that, more often than not, survives in the writings of our idols.
My question to the class is this: what is your personal relationship to the intersections of technology and writing? Do you feel nostalgia for traditional ways of writing, or are you as a student (and possibly writer) situated entirely within the realm of the now?
