Word up

A Better Pencil looks at writing’s
future through its past

by JULIET WATERS

People who argue that technology is destroying writing often forget that writing itself is actually a technology.

In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates warns about the dangers of this new gimmick, writing: “This invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practise their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them.”

There is truth to this dire prophecy, but we wouldn’t remember it if Plato hadn’t written it down. According to Dennis Baron’s A Better Pencil: Readers, Writers, and the Digital Revolution, it would be a good two millennia before it started to come true. It wasn’t until the 19th century that Europeans reached the literacy tipping point. At the time of the American Revolution, the literacy rate in England still hovered between 30 and 40 per cent.

Obviously, technological adaptation is happening at a faster pace than it used to. One has only to look at a picture of the first Apple desktop computer, screwed together from wooden furniture components, to realize that 1976 is now ancient times. The words Apple Computer are actually carved into the wooden frame, although you can see the first sparks of quirky design in the nifty way you can pick the computer up with the two finger holes carved out of the Ps in Apple.

For anyone who grew up as the PC was just entering homes, A Better Pencil is a wondrous and sometimes uncomfortable trip down memory lane. If you can still remember WordStar, the very first word processing program, you’re guaranteed to feel about 100.

When it comes to writing, the last few years have seemed like the best and worst of times. Everyone’s an author now, as teens and baby boomers stake their spot in the blogosphere. But Baron does a masterful job of examining how dark and complex privacy issues have become in the era of social networking. Meanwhile magazines and newspapers are bleeding money like nothing we’ve ever seen before. And journalists are seriously beginning to wonder if their profession will still be around five years from now.

It’s worth remembering, however, that writers have predicted the destruction of writing every time a new technology has been introduced. As Baron explains, the printing press was going to destroy the “almost spiritual connection between the author and the page.” The typewriter was “impersonal and noisy” and would “destroy the art of handwriting.” About the only technology that has never deeply upset anyone is the pencil. And it’s worth pointing out that it will probably still be around long after whatever you’re writing on right now has become obsolete.

A Better Pencil is for the most part a detailed and compelling journey into the history of writing technology and its recurring issues. But there are some weak spots. Baron ignores any discussion of class. Was the relatively low literacy rate in England because people were “skeptical or simply indifferent about the uses of reading and writing,” or was it because they were substantially poorer and the middle class substantially smaller?

The way Baron skips over the 18th century, you’d think very little writing took place. But this was the age of monster-sized novels and dictionaries and crazily prolific writers who habitually wrote under numerous secret identities as libel laws were still in transition. It was a time eerily similar to our own, and we have a lot to learn from it.

But one problem with this book is unavoidably built into its design. I kept waiting for a discussion on how the rumoured and possibly mythical Apple Tablet might renew the magazine and newspaper market. Then I realized that this discussion really only started to get serious three months ago. Making this otherwise wonderful book, which just came out, already feel a tad dated.

A BETTER PENCIL: READERS, WRITERS,
AND THE DIGITAL REVOLUTION BY
DENNIS BARON, OXFORD UNIVERSITY
PRESS. HC, 258 PP., $24.95