TECHNO BEAT 1
by Daren Foster

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TECHNO BEAT 1
By Daren Foster

I’ve been flipping through TV channels in the vain search for something (anything) to watch in between weekly installments of Mad Men which, btw, has been ably assuaging any post-The Wire doldrums I’ve been enduring, making me wonder how it is that television, having achieved some of its greatest feats in the past decade (in addition to the two shows mentioned above let’s include The Sopranos, Deadwood, Arrested Development) can be so devoid of viewable content for so much of the time? It’s enough to drive one to distraction.

Now, where was I? (Ha, ha).

Right. Channel-surfing. I settled on a short documentary, David McCullough: Painting with Words. McCullough is an historian, writer and television host. His 2002 Pulitzer Prize winning biography of John Adams, the second President of the United States among other career achievements, was recently adapted into an HBO miniseries and one might safely assume that it precipitated the documentary. What caught the attention of the writer in me wasn’t so much the extraordinarily productive life McCullough has led but the fact that the man still puts words on paper using a typewriter. A typewriter!

For the young folks out there, skimming along, who haven’t the slightest idea what I’m talking about when I use the word ‘typewriter’ let me quote the Wikipedia definition, including hyperlinks so you can get a full sense of what I’m talking about: “A typewriter is a mechanical or electromechanical device with a set of "keys" that, when pressed, cause characters to be printed on a medium, usually paper.”

And before that we had to string words together in longhand, using myriad primitive artefacts like ink and plastic, lead and wood, bird feathers. Earlier still, our ancestors had to legibly carve in stone. It’s enough to make you wonder how we could’ve possibly evolved into the semi-literate, mostly sentient beings that we are.

At this point, let me make a frank admission. Without the personal computer revolution of the last 20 years or so, I would not be here today, writing out my thoughts for you to read. While this may elicit loud cheers from an infinitesimally tiny portion of the internet audience, great sadness in an even smaller segment and go absolutely unnoticed by all the rest of the vast, overwhelming numbers of humanity, it bears stating. The typewriter was anathema to me. The whole mechanics of rolling a piece of paper into the beast, aligning the page just right, responding in a timely fashion to the ‘ding’ of the Hard Return reminder, the whole package just served to freeze me up. After all that work, the thought of making a mistake and having to start all over again just chased me back to pen and paper. No amount of Wite-Out (a trademark for a line of correction fluid, originally created for use with photo-copies, and manufactured by the French corporation BIC) or interchangeable correction cartridges (which invariably ended up in pieces on the floor) could free me.

Or to put it more concisely: Yu[rtetoyrd divl/

One simple misplacement of your hands on the keyboard and you were tearing the page from the typewriter and starting the whole labour-intensive process all over again. Who needs that kind of aggravation, especially if there’s a 1000+ page opus inside you, just waiting to burst out? Computers make the process of writing, or at least the mechanics of it, easier.

For some, this is cause for serious hand-wringing. Who said writing should be easier? You write because you have to not because it’s easy, which is not what I said at all, and suddenly I find myself arguing with myself, something that never would’ve happened in the old days on a typewriter or with pen and paper or chisel and stone, serving only to prove a point I never made in the first place.

Is Google Making Us Stoopid? asks the front page story of the most recent issue of The Atlantic. (Didn’t it used to be called The Atlantic Monthly? Why the change? Did it think a 3 word title would be too much for our depleted attention span to ingest)? Acknowledging that technological advances, especially when in it comes to literacy and learning, have always met with resistance in establishment circles -- apparently Socrates himself dismissed the advent of writing -- the article dwells on the possibly bad influences the computer and internet are having on our intellectual capabilities. It seems the author and his friends are having trouble reading War and Peace due to the fact that they spend so much time at the computer, re-wiring their brain circuitry. The takeaway message from the piece is that there are pros and cons to all technology, leaving me to wonder if such a simple-minded conclusion is the product of a pre or post-computer mind.

Advances in technology tend to increase accessibility for a wider swath of a population. The invention of the printing press (“a mechanical device for applying pressure to an inked surface resting upon a medium [such as paper or cloth], thereby transferring an image. The systems involved were first assembled in Germany by the goldsmith Johann Gutenberg in ca. 1439.[1]”) is credited with helping spread literacy throughout Europe. The upside to that? Just about everything. The downside? Oprah’s Book Club and People magazine. If technology serves an overall positive purpose, it’ll stick around.

Computer and software programs have made the act of writing easier, just as the digital revolution has made making a film easier or the steam engine (a heat engine that performs mechanical work using steam as its working fluid.[1]) made producing widgets and superfluous workers easier. There will be more people trying their hand at crafting a novel or screenplay; more people turning that screenplay into a movie. The numbers will soar and the overall quality will suffer because no matter how good and beneficial technology becomes, it can’t enhance the intrinsic quality of the writing or filmmaking. That has to be learned in a place where technology has not yet penetrated. Let’s call it the ineffable, and all your MRIs and CT brain scans have so far been unable to crack the code.