The technology of writing

Sometimes everything changed, sometimes it didn’t.

The question of handwriting, good or bad, came up last week and we have thought more about it.  Up until the Renaissance, writing meant a particular person taking an instrument adapted to the purpose and making marks on a surface.  It was very much a minority occupation, but by no means unimportant.  And the details could be unexpectedly political: whether the monks in your abbey wrote the Carolingian or Italic or Celtic hand was a reflection of their childhood training and their (Church) political affiliation, not a choice to be made lightly.  But the standard of writing itself was high.  Medieval Latin was often barbaric and sometimes bordered on the illiterate, but it was always highly legible.

With the invention of printing that standard fell precipitously.  We have good friends who have studied manuscripts of Medieval and following eras, and they agree that the Early Modern period, say the sixteenth century, saw the worst handwriting.  We can blame printing for much of it: when your book is made mechanically, the imperative to write legibly declines.  But also there was far more that was hand-written, formal court documents, letters, legal papers; and not every literate person was a monk.  Perhaps some of the decline came from the sheer increase in volume, as well as that technological advance.

The next change in writing technology was the typewriter.  At a stroke, the far-away arcane business of printing was brought to one’s own desk.  It didn’t matter (within limits) how you hit the key, the letter “r” would look the same.  So we’d expect the standard of handwriting to plummet.  But it didn’t happen; in a previous post, we explored some ideas about this lack of social change in the face of new technology.

Much did change, however, with the next step: the computer as word-processor.  At a stroke, the whole process was much easier.  The mistakes one made in hitting the keys could be erased without trace, indeed whole sentences could be rearranged.  And making copies!  Few now remember the process of carefully lining up two sheets of stationery with carbon paper between, giving one good and one smudged copy of the novel.  Later there was the Xerox, which produced its own clearly second-rate version (though in quantity, and much improved over the years).  Now one need only fill in how many versions of the document one wanted from the printer, and there they were.  (If the printer was working, and properly set up, not necessarily true.)

There was much social change.  The typist-secretary disappeared.  With the concurrent appearance of email, the paper letter all but vanished.  And, we contend, the standard of handwriting fell, to the place that we found last week.

Why didn’t the typewriter have the same effect on handwriting as the word-processor?  Well, each bit of technology appears in its own place, so tracing the interactions can be very complex.  But we see perhaps three major reasons.  First, the typewriter made writing more legible, but not necessarily any easier.  Setting up the machine was slightly more troublesome than getting out a piece of letter-paper and pen, and only after dedicated training could someone type faster than write by hand.  Second, the output was, in essence, the same: a single (most often) written document.  Third, a typewriter was rare and expensive for long after its invention, certainly so when compared to a pen.

If you’re going to change the world with your invention, you need to think of all aspects.