Context and Writing
or how I fell in love with my typewriter
When the first version of the IBM Selectric typewriter was released in 1961 the Beatles were not yet an internationally known name in the world. The cold war was ramping up, and Eisenhower’s warning about the military industrial complex perhaps fell on somewhat deaf ears, as fear dominated the social landscape. General anxiety at humanity’s newfound new nuclear capability, of the supposed threat of communism, of ‘massive change’ if one were to put it into the overt terminology of Bruce Mau, was already in the works.
The idea that humanity evolves and progresses in its capabilities has long been touted by some, as a culturally evolutionary process evoked by terms such as “epi-genetics” or the idea our environment has direct and difficult to understand effects on our physiology and psychology down to the level of our genome. While an understanding of this thread of research is still evolving (and I’m no scientist) there are certainly effects felt environmentally, and perhaps esoterically, as we are more sensitive than ever to changes in our environment given the capabilities of new tools extending sensing into the world… pick a Mars rover or the James Webb telescope perhaps as being the most dramatic examples.
What we are faced with now, with the extrapolation of digital technologies into every aspect of our lives, from communication to thinking itself, (not to mention the larger societal effects surrounding mental health) is supplying us with an altogether new anxiety. An anxiety of truth. Perhaps the narrative that in some imagined ‘past’ there were ‘facts’ and that we have devolved from this placid era, is false, and should be questioned. Machine learning commonly referred to as Artificial Intelligence presents us new challenges that do get to the level of our very emotional processing capacities as beings. Does the implementation of this technological capacity fundamentally change our thinking feeling capacities as humans? We may be about to find out, if this technology is not regulated in an informed fashion and used in an ethical way. So what actually might be needed is a re-examination of ethics, being the core of the evolution of our believes and values.
Back to the typewriter. I purchased my IBM Selectric typewriter from a Goodwill in October 2023. I had it repaired by a skilled typewriter repairman, and with a vague story in my mind of how complex a mechanism it is. Having seen them in movies, TV shows, and online I dug deeper. The history of this object is a fascinating one, and I see using it to write as an objective response to a digital era obsessed with the ‘connectome’. The Selectric exists on the boundary of the pre-digital. Ultimately writing with it is generative as a direct experience, but it connects to the larger sphere of writing, still, as I often digitize and forward things I’ve written on it. So some might see it as merely an interface to the writing process.
This article I’ve written on my laptop, and there is the ability to move faster in this sense, correcting errors, using autocorrect, and rearranging themes and the like. But there is none of the original raw experience of struggling with a machine to make a certain deliverable salient. Nor is there care and consideration for the dexterity required to be accurate on such a machine. So in effect, a typewriter might make one a better writer!
The age we find ourselves in is a complex one, perhaps it is most defined by that complexity in essence. Situational understandings become paramount to our navigation in the world. Doubt, free thinking, explanations, and stories all amount to our experiences of reality in this new world. One in which we should take it on ourselves to question what we know, and not assume to know everything.
