Baron - From pencils to pixels: reading, writing, and the digital revolution

A Better Pencil

Readers, Writers, and the Digital Revolution

DENNIS BARON

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Baron, Dennis E.
A better pencil : readers, writers, and the digital revolution / Dennis Baron.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-19-538844-2
1. WritingMaterials and instrumentsHistory. 2. Written communicationTechnological innovations. I. Title.
Z45.B37 2009
302.2244dc22
2008055214

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

for Iryce, Rachel, and Jonathon, to whom all my work is dedicated

In the past twenty years, our attitude toward computers and the internet has moved from suspicion or curiosity to dependency. When the World Wide Web was young, people used to find something online and ask, How do I know if its any good? Now we think, If its not online, its probably not worth looking for.

In what seems from a historical perspective like the blink of an eye, weve shifted our focus from distrusting the internet to embracing it. Computer technology has taken control over our words in ways and at a speed that no previous technology of literacy ever did before. Some of us approached the computer revolution with optimism, others with suspicion, and many with caution. But most of the people reading this book by now own a PC, or use one regularly at work, at school, or in a public library. In the decades between the 1980s and the present, the personal computer has gone from an expensive and forbidding, and far from personal, curiosity to a near necessity. The 2000 census reported that more than half of Americas 105 million households had a computer. That percentage is a lot higher today.

Not everyone celebrates our increasing dependence on digitized words, and a few staunch critics see the computer destroying life as we know it. But for most Americans, and for more and more people elsewhere in the world, the computer is becoming the tool of choice for writing, whether for work, for school, or for what we do when were not working or studying, and while not too many people are reading electronic books yet, more and more of us are gradually shifting the rest of our reading from the page to the screen.

Computer users regularly shop online, bank online, meet online, read online, and write online, not just in America, but elsewhere in the world as well. Even so, there are always trust issues with text, and even the most wired users have some internet activity that they shun: they may choose to have their paycheck deposited electronically, but they wont pay bills online; they may embrace virtual shopping but draw the line at online dating services; they may have found their soul mate on JDate but balk at the idea of citing Wikipedia in a research paper.

Worse yet, theres a lot of dark matter in cyberspace: fraud, hate, and exploitation abound online, not to mention inconsistency and inaccuracy and a whole lot of cyberjunk. Were still in the process of sorting the good from the bad online, the useful from the spam. Were still in the process of figuring out just what to use the internet for. And were still learning to trust the web, even as we become ever more dependent on it for the things that we need to do every day.

A Better Pencil puts our complex and still-evolving hate-love relationship with computers and the internet into perspective. Its a book about how the digital revolution is impacting our reading and writing practices, and how the latest technologies of the word differ from what came before. It looks at 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 machinesnot just computers, but also typewriters, pencils, and clay tablets; how we deploy these technologies to replicate the old ways of doing things while actively generating new modes of expression; how we learn to trust a new technology and the new and strange sorts of texts that it produces; how we expand the notion of who can write and who cant; and how we free our readers and writers while at the same time trying to regulate their activities.

The World Wide Web wasnt the first innovation in communication to draw some initial skepticism. Writing itself was the target of one early critic. Plato warned that writing would weaken memory, but he was more concerned that written wordsmere shadows of speechcouldnt adequately represent meaning. His objections paled as more and more people began to structure their lives around handwritten documents. Centuries later, the innovative output of Gutenbergs printing press was faulted for disrupting the natural, almost spiritual connection between the writer and the page. Eventually we got used to printing, but Henry David Thoreau scorned the telegraph when it was invented in the 1840s because this technology for quickly transporting words across vast distances was useless for people who had nothing to say to one another. The typewriter wasnt universally embraced as a writing tool when it appeared in the 1870s because its texts were impersonal, it weakened handwriting skills, and it made too much noise. And computers, now the writers tool of choice, are still blamed by skeptics for a variety of ills, including destroying the English language, slowing down the writing process, speeding writing up to the point of recklessness, complicating it, trivializing it, and encouraging people to write who may, as Thoreau might put it, have nothing to say.

Despite Platos warning, we have come to value writing, sometimes even more than speech. But at the dawn of letters, few people could read, and fewer still could write. People greeted the first written texts with distrust: How do I know that Philoflatus really wrote this? theyd ask suspiciously when they received a letter, or, looking at a deed, a royal decree, or a set of directions for turning lead into gold, theyd wonder, How do I know its not all a pack of lies? Before writing became an ordinary activity, any words not delivered in person, directly from the horses mouth, not only lacked the personal touch; they could also be some kind of trick.

Not all writing technologies begin with communication in mind. Writing, the first and most basic communication technology, was conceived initially as more of a memory device than a medium for transmitting words across time and space. Archaeological evidence suggests that it arose in the ancient Mediterranean to track inventory, not to record speech. Had writing remained just a storage device, we probably wouldnt be considering how computers shape reading and writing today.