I always find a grudging bit of consolation when I run across articles which attempt to show that many of the tools we use in modern life have a dual character. Something as ubiquitous as Microsoft Word (or any other word processor for that matter) brings many new ways to accomplish traditional tasks (i.e. to write something…), but at the same time it slowly extinguished many hard won skills from previous incarnations of what the latest technology is.
The mere action of cutting and pasting may be the biggest bugaboo of traditional education in that this seemingly simple and commonplace action has created a continuing tempest in some education circles (i.e. the plague of plagiarism).
Being able to manipulate text on a page (once again via cutting, copying, and pasting) has fundamentally changed how we write…and by implication how we think (at least when composing a written piece). The immediacy of being able to refine the ‘raw ore’ of one’s thoughts (after the fact, and after having already types them up) has plenty of practical value…when taken in the short term. But there are some emergent aspects of these wonderful new tools which might not be what we were wishing for…
This ability to edit one’s thoughts in such a manner implies that one doesn’t have to have thoughts held in as cogent a manner as when we lived with manual typewriters, or a pen and paper.
As with the slow loss of our ability to read and write cursively (as a society), there are some similar losses in that writing is a different means of communicating that speaking…it just seems that modern technology is pushing us ever closer to minimizing the differences…
Is word making us dumb
http://www.digitizd.com/2011/06/06/is-word-making-us-dumb
This one’s a few months old, but as I spend more and more of my time typing into word processors, I’ve wondered how it affects the way I think and write. Clive Thompson, who’s been writing a lot longer than I have, remembers how the world felt when Word processors came out:
It’s hard to remember now, but many people back in the 80s totally freaked out about word processing. I recall professors worrying that it would make students write more sloppily, and even think more sloppily. The fluidity of cutting and pasting seemed intellectually suspicious. I even remember one of my TAs arguing — in a lovely foreshadowing of today’s fears that “the Internet is making us stupid” — that cutting and pasting would render our generation unable to craft a coherent argument, because the sheer slipperiness of digital prose, its slithy rearrangeability, would render our ideas and prose rootless, nonsequential, and flighty.
Conor Friedersdorf, closer to my point on the digital vs. analog timeline, differs a bit:
In high school, I always hated “in class” essays: accustom to writing on a word processor, the different process of longhand composition always made me feel incapable of producing my best work, even if I adjusted capably enough to get a good grade.
I’m more in line with Conor here. I’ve written on computers as long as I can remember, and I feel his pain in the difficulty of writing on paper. I write out of order, edit constantly, and move things around so much that having to write A, then B, then C, and then D just doesn’t work for me. I don’t know that it’s a bad thing, either. Everyone has a different process, and that’s been the case for a long time. Aren’t Word and other tools just making it easier to work, no matter your process? If you still want to write linearly, from beginning to end, you of course can. But you don’t have to.
