From Today's New York Times...

[Michigan]

Orthostylos has his finger on something important.

 

Handwriting on paper and other media has the ability to travel through long periods of time and provide value deep into the future. I would posit the Dead Sea Scrolls and cuneiform as important examples.

 

I write with a pen and paper because all of my essays written at university are now on disks I cannot access. Nobody has a 3.5 inch disk reader anymore, but people with two arms and two functioning eyeballs are still quite common. Should anyone care to, my A4 Leuchtturms will be available for my descendants' perusal long after I am gone.

 

Lastly, I do not kid myself that I write anything amazing. But I have nothing written from a single relative of their lives. We had a picture of my great-grandfather wearing epaulets in the French Army. We have no idea what decade he served, let alone what he thought. I would be ecstatic even to have an old letter from family of that era.

[TinkerTailor]

While I love my pens and enjoy writing by hand, it seems to be a mistake to anxiously bemoan the shift in writing technologies. As another New York Times article recently noted, Socrates, apparently, was hostile to the spread of writing. He correctly noted that if thoughts could be easily recorded on a permanent, material format it would both "create forgetfulness in the learners' souls" and more profoundly will deprive knowledge of its soul: "they [who write] will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality." (Phaedrus, Jowett translation).

 

It seems fair to say that writing has not been a total disaster for humanity. Advantages and evolutions have arisen that were unimaginable in 370BC. Was something irrevocably lost, damaged, and destroyed when writing became a central part of human culture? Yes. Was something gained? Yes, certainly. Those gains and losses happened at the level of human history and very likely on the level of human cognition.

 

Handwriting will fade, no doubt. And with it certain aspects of culture. Others will arise to replace it that we cannot anticipate. Just as Socrates was wrong to only recognize the loss and not the gain, so too are those today who don't recognize that their inability to see the benefits of a handwriting-less world are merely because of how they were raised.

 

The arguments about longevity of documents are dubious at best and they often simplify history. The vast, overwhelming majority of paper documents are gone and erased from history. And the transition of data from one source to another is quite streamlined today. I recently had documents on a floppy disk transferred to another format. Wasn't difficult, and indeed the scalability of data storage is often quite elegant. Will archives take a different form? Yes.

 

All change includes loss. I just feel very lucky to live in such a rich and transformative time.

Edited August 29, 2016 by TinkerTailor

[amberleadavis]

Interesting, thank you.

[PS104]

Totally agree. Letterslike that are voices from a distant past

Lastly, I do not kid myself that I write anything amazing. But I have nothing written from a single relative of their lives. We had a picture of my great-grandfather wearing epaulets in the French Army. We have no idea what decade he served, let alone what he thought. I would be ecstatic even to have an old letter from family of that era.

Totally agree. Letters like that are truly voices from a distant past telling us what it was like then and what they thought. We now have all these gadgets that are constantly updating their formats and if don't follow in lockstep and update all your formats thus falling behind a technological generation or two you're out of luck. To wit, the demise of the 3.5 floppy and the anguish of people who have lost their whole family history thinking they were set in 'stone' for its preservation. Technology marches on. Excelsior!