Technology’s Legacy

Some years back one of my favorite pastimes was people watching in places with a steady flow of different faces and types. It started out as something to do on Tokyo trains and buses, a way of observing the manner and habits of a people new to my daily life. At the time there was something interesting in every other person my eyes happened to fall upon. Talking on the telephone with a friend recently, he mentioned that a couple of years ago he had stopped going to the corner café to chat over coffee with people from the neighborhood, explaining that it was now a different scene. His explanation could have been taken from my own mouth and described exactly what had ruined my pleasure in people watching on trains.

We could all quickly list the benefits that technology has brought us in recent years, and my own list would be lengthy—the last person on the block who could be labeled a Luddite. But there’s another side to the story. Look at the person over there; she’s face down in her phone texting someone. Look at the guy in the car next to you at a red light; he has a phone in his left hand and is gesturing to someone miles away. Watch out for the student on the bike, the one bobbing his head to music from his iPod and neither hearing nor seeing the traffic around him. Look at the four kids in the park all hunched on a bench hopelessly locked onto their Gameboys. Dinner with friends? Better repeat what you just said; Lisa is on her phone talking to someone at a different restaurant across town. A visitor from Mars might think the local Starbucks is a showroom for laptops and Bluetooth devices. You get the picture.

Staying connected is today’s top priority, and underneath that seems to lie an actual fear of suddenly being disconnected, of having to face the reality of a present tangible moment, to be however briefly completely on your own without cell towers, WiFi and Bluetooth. Is this condition a part of technology’s legacy? In fact, technology in the sense of a legacy has already had a profound effect on education and the process of ‘learning’ in schools and universities, and we who went through the process before the coming of Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg need to take a careful look at how profoundly technology has changed education.

The minds of our technologically inclined younger generation work differently. With students today computer use and social networking are daily activities that have created an evolution in how they think. Like it or not, using a computer daily alters brain functions and thought processes. According to Gary Small in his book iBrain, a UCLA study shows that using online search engines trains the brain to create shortcuts for acquiring information. Does this mean that young students accustomed to finding information instantly are now less capable of storing that information in longterm memory? Doesn’t longterm memory come close to being the very definition of learning? Sounds like Google and their band of brothers are programming brains to acquire and store information on an ‘as needed’ basis only.

Back to the wildfire popularity of texting, consider how for young people today the understanding of written language is strikingly different. Brevity and abbreviation have become the operative mode, the 140 character post the standard form. Communication in the texting format has become a written form of the quick-cut editing prevalent in rock and hip hop music videos, fast being everything. Does this imply that schools and universities will soon be faced with the problem of finding ways to accommodate students with ever shrinking attention spans? With students whose habit has become communication via abbreviated texts, the idea of even a 500 word essay might seem gargantuan.

‘Textspeak’ has lately become common currency in papers handed in by university students, and there are students who use Facebook to communicate with teachers about class assignments. Many seem to think that examples like LOL, 4ever, the Gr8 Wall of China and 411 (for ‘information’) are acceptable forms in formal writing. In one study The Pew Research Center in Washington D.C. found that twenty-five percent of American teens use emoticons in schoolwork and that thirty-eight percent use texting short forms. One elementary school teacher reported that whenever one of his students heard something funny, he shouted out “LOL” as though it were a word—instead of laughing, vocalizing the idea with an abbreviation.

There is this however from the Pew Research Center: ‘Social media activities are associated with several beneficial social activities, including having discussion networks that are more likely to contain people from different backgrounds. For instance, frequent internet users, and those who maintain a blog are much more likely to confide in someone of another race. Those sharing photos online are more likely to discuss important matters with someone who is a member of another political party.’

Like it or not, technology is shaping a new kind of thought process in the minds of young people.

Fingerprint of the Heart

Likely there are many in the world today who take no cognizance of the sad state that letter writing has come to. The US Postal Service is losing money hand over fist while email works just fine to keep the wheels and cogs turning and to help people stay in touch. Of course, email has created the desire for further abbreviation and additional shortcuts, anything to make it happen NOW, to bring ever faster gratification. Then we come to text messaging which has made of ‘written’ communication an ugly half-breed type of expression. Yeah, say what you have to say in 140 characters. Do you suppose such practices are leading people (especially the young) to think in short bursts of half-language? Finally we have the gradual loss of cursive writing in schools, prompting visions of a future where people can read only printed words and like computers, everything is a matter of communication by ones and zeroes. How does that old line go? They’ll have to pry my fountain pen from my cold dead fingers.

Spent part of this Wednesday reading and looking over a short book on the art of letter writing, one sent by a friend who knows my fondness for the handwritten word. My impressions of the book are not all glowing however, since the overall mark of Writing Letters with Pen & Ink is a tad too Victorian for my own ideas on letter writing. Modern letter writing can be a vibrant experience without struggling to making your letters look like something from the writing desk of Mrs Hemphill-McPherson-Fitch. Relevant to the notion of a well-rounded ‘O’ and other graceful handwriting tips, consider this quote from modern novelist Jeffrey Deaver:

‘Handwriting is a part of a human being. It’s like our sense of humor or imagination. It’s one of the only things about people that survives their death. Writing can last for hundreds of years. Thousands. It’s about as close to immortality as we can get. Whatever somebody wrote is a reflection of who they are. It doesn’t matter how the words are made or what they say; it doesn’t matter if you made a mistake, or if the words you wrote are nonsense. Just the fact that someone thought of the words and their hands put those thoughts on paper is what counts. Your handwriting is a fingerprint of your heart and mind.’

On each of the pages in Writing Letters with Pen & Ink are quotes from prominent writers and others who have or had a few telling ideas on the art of letter writing…

Writing by hand, mouthing by mouth: in each case you get a very strong physical sense of the emergence of language…print obliterates it, type has no drawl. — William Gass, writer

Life would splinter asunder without letters. — Virginia Woolf

More than kisses, letters mingle souls;

For, thus friends absent speak. — John Donne

Machines have no grace. It cannot make a flourish, vary the thickness of a line, or tantalize the reader with a lapse into an indecipherable but lovely style. A good penman can make rivers that race to the sea, rivers as wild and dizzy as a flume in the Alps, as choppy as the Isarco, as wide and smooth as the Tiber at Ostia, or as deep as the Po where it rolls into the Adriatic. — Mark Helprin, writer

Like their modern counterparts, ancient envelopes were intended to protect the documents they contained and to ensure confidentiality. Most materials used for the document itself—papyrus or parchment, for example—were also physically suitable for its wrapper, and would have been close at hand. The Babylonians even encased their cumbersome clay tablets in thin sheets of clay that were crimped shut and then baked…the custom eventually developed of simply folding and sealing a letter in such a way that no outer wrapper was necessary. This was especially practical when paper was relatively expensive…the use of envelopes was discouraged in England before 1840 by the fact that postal costs were assessed by the sheet. Any form of wrapper, therefore, “would have resulted in double postage being charged.” — Joe Nickell, historical document consultant

If letters did not exist, what dark depressions would come over one! When one has been worrying about something and wants to tell a certain person about it, what a relief it is to put it all down in a letter! Still greater is one’s joy when a reply arrives. At that moment a letter really seems like an elixir of life. — from The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon

The two quotes below are favorites of mine not found in Writing Letters with Pen & Ink:

MILLIMANT: O ay, letters—I had letters—I am persecuted with letters—I hate letters—no body knows how to write letters; and yet one has ’em, one does not know why—They serve one to pin up one’s hair.

WITWOUD: Pray, Madam, do you pin up your hair with all your letters: I find I must keep copies.

MILLIMANT: Only with those in verse, Mr Witwoud. I never pin up my hair with Prose. — from Act II, Scene 2 of William Congreve’s play, The Way of the World (1700)

An odd thought strikes me: — we shall receive no letters in the grave. — from The Life of Samuel Johnson