The little bell that struck when you reached the end of a line… The sssseeeeech of the carriage being rolled back after a line… The kreek-kreek-kreek of the roller being rotated to adjust the alignment of paper… The ink-stains on the fingers while replacing the ribbons…
The clickety-clack of typewriters is long gone from our newsrooms. As indeed are the monsters who evoked awe with their sheer typing speed. And the composers whose typewriters sounded as if they were composing songs on their machines, not paragraphs of prose.
But to a generation brought up on the typewriter and its close cousin, the teleprinter, the sight, noise and magic of striking type on paper—furiously if the head was bobbing with ideas, slowly if the boss was hovering around—is a memory that no new technology can erase.
In The Iron Whim: The Fragmented History of the Typewriter, Darren Wershler-Henry, a professor of communication studies in Ontario, says the typewriter has been invented at least 52 times. Mark Twain was the first major writer to deliver a typewritten manuscript.
Reviewing the book in The New Yorker, Joan Acocella writes:
Something else to think about is the effect that the computer, with its astonishing capabilities, has had on us as writers. Take just one example: the ease of moving a block of text. Highlight, hit control X, move cursor, hit control V, and, presto, that paragraph is in a new place. Of course, we were able to move things in typewritten text, too, but all that business with the scissors and the tape made us think twice, and maybe it was wise for us to hesitate before changing the order in which our brains produced our thoughts. In recent years, I have read a lot of writings that seemed to say, “This paragraph is here because it seemed an O.K. place to shove it in.”
The advent of PCs has made journalism easier, but has it made better? Do we write too much, too carelessly, without too much thought? Did the typewriter slow us, slow our thoughts, allow us to compose our thoughts with care? Did we write much better before tech happened, or is it all nostalgia?
Read the full review here: The typing life
5 April 2007 at 7:09 pm
PC may have made a reporter’s work easier, but those who were used to a type-writer might miss the romance of working on a copy. I happened have been a journalist who belonged to, what i would call, a sandwich-generation. Half way down my career PC began to show up in reporters’ room, though typewriters had not yet been banished altogather. A few of us wouldn’t give up our machine till the day the office physically removed all typewriters from the news-room.
When I retired, nearly a decade back, the Internet was not accessible to everyone in our office in Chennai. In my earlier posting, at Chandigarh, in late 70s, reporting was still about working your calf muscles, and phone, trying to get the basics of a story from reticent news sources. Today, the basics are on the Internet, telecast on 24/7 news channels. A print media journalist today is focused on giving his spin on a story. Reporting is not about news gathering, but its packaging.
Would like to share with you a piece – A Misfit in Today’s Media World – http://mymysore500.blogspot.com/2006/08/misfit-in-todays-media-world.html
6 April 2007 at 5:10 pm
Yes. Computers and the advent of the internet have in fact made lazy louts out of journalists. Today, even a fool ends up quoting Wilde in his writings. How? Google Search!
The spell check is another reason why imbeciles get away with so much, despite being capable of very little writing.