Why typewriters beat computers, BBC news article.
"The Japanese multinational Brother sold 12,000 electronic typewriters last year [2007] in the UK"
Twelve thousand? I'll be durned, I thought they were dead. But then I thought the same about vinyl records.
We'll see how it goes with film. I've no doubt a minority will keep using it, but one issue is, I've been told, that running a film factory is difficult and very, very expensive, so it requires a pretty good-sized market to make money.
Update: Jeff R points to this guy who is attempting to make his own photographic film. Ambitious!
Update: the article also said: "Typewriters are much more straightforward to use than computers as they only have one function - typing,"
Yes, fair enough. Personally I prefer a "typewriter" like the Alphasmart Neo. Barely more expensive, it has a better keyboard (to my taste), is much more compact, and it's much easier to edit the text and get it to the Net or to print (it does not have to be scanned or typed in again).
I got the link from this post. I like the first comment by "Hookmt".
It is this historical, emotional pull which draws a particular kind of student or aspiring writer to the typewriter.
I don't know why, but they usually seem to be men, and their heroes are hard, brilliant men from the last century. Posing on their blogs with an antique machine, all that separates them from Hemingway are two dozen cocktails and his ability to write.
LOL. I'm often dithering about simple-tech movements, because they have a point. But also, there is usually an air of romance which feeds the whole thing, it seems to me. Often coupled with a touch of simple technophobia.
And an interesting historical note:
Typing classes mushroomed at the end of the 19th Century, and this helped many women to enter paid work for the first time. By 1901, Britain had 166,000 female clerks, up from 2,000 half a century before.
It was a limited emancipation. The new employees (often called "type-writers" themselves) were accused of stealing jobs from men, depressing wages and sexually tempting the boss, and their chance of career progression was often nil. But for women to have any job outside the home was revolutionary.
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14 comments:
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Have you seen the Flickr set by this otherwise-apparently-sane chap who is making his own Kodachrome?
Hookmt seems to be trying too hard, but has a point about those guys posing on their blogs. I have no idea if Hemingway used a typewriter, though. He strikes me as a long hand kind of guy, who would then give it to a typist. As for whether he could write, that depends on who you ask.
I could never go back to using a typewriter. When I was in high school we had to learn to type of electronic typewriters and the freedom of a computer - to be able to erase an error so easily - can't be beat. I wonder if it might be worth keeping an old, heavy, manual typewriter around simply as a typing training tool. Learn to type on one of those things and you would appreciate the computer a lot more, or something like the Neo.
Indeed opinions on Hemingway's writing vary widely, from Tim Powers listing him amongst the classics you should read, to Dave Sim (by funny coincidence) classifying his writing as "typing" rather than Writing. :-)
I only read The Old Man And the Sea, and that was decades ago and in translation, so I dunno.
... and the freedom of a computer - to be able to erase an error so easily - can't be beat.
I think you may be missing the point here. For not having that freedom is specifically why some people use a typewriter. It forces the mind to function very differently than it does when you have the option of easily erasing what you just typed.
For some people this means all the difference. Like whether a book actually gets written or not.
The same phenomenon can also be observed in other fields. For example, I know one guy who video blogs using a camera that automatically sends the clip to YouTube after he hits stop. So, once he starts the camera, for the next 10 mins whatever the camera records gets published to the world at large no matter what. He has resolved to never delete anything from his YouTube account.
This, he says, has the same mental effect as performing to a live audience, and thus greately adds to the emotional intensity of his video bloggings.
I also appreciate great editing facilities when working in words, images or audio. But I have made a startling observation: I am not aware of a single artist in any field of artistic expression (myself included) whose work would have improved after digitalization.
Without an exception, it seems, artists who started in the analog age made their best work in those days, and whatever they've created using digital tools pales in comparison.
Mmm, it *could* be just artists loosing their freshness with age, it's common.
But I admit that it takes discipline to not use ease-of-editing to over-polish or water down a work.
I appreciate the effect you are talking about. For me personally though, having the work frozen tends to freeze *me* with anxiety.
And I tend to do very little editing even when it's easy, I'm just too lazy, or I lose interest when I feel it's done.
Mmm, it *could* be just artists loosing their freshness with age, it's common.
I thought about this too, but how come this losing of freshness wasn't as evident in those artists who worked all their life on analog? Yes, some individuals peaked early, but there was no general drop in emotional quality that would have applied to everyone at the same time, as there has been when the industry switched to digital.
The artistical quality of Kate Bush's albums took a sudden drop the moment she switched to recording digitally, i.e. from Red Shoes onwards. Same for Michael Jackson, and pretty much everyone. And those artists who started in the digital age seem to produce crap from the outset! ;-)
yeah, there's some truth to that, I'm sure.
I think it's the factor that they keep fiddling with it after it's done.
Al Jourgenson (Ministry) has done a lot of excellent work, and I think he was digital from early nineties or earlier. (In fact he pioneered combining raw guitars with samplings.)
I think it's the factor that they keep fiddling with it after it's done.
Yes, but also, if this theory holds water, it's not whether you actually end up editing your work (or not, as the case may be). But rather, it's enough to know that you have the ability to edit (if only by selecting from a large number of takes which you can cheaply produce) that makes your brain operate in a different, less intensive, mode.
Recording on film/analog tape/typewriter makes you think “it's now or never”, whereas when recording digitally you tend to think about technical details related to your equipment, how your gonna frame your next shot, whether you are hungry, need to pee, etc. :-)
Al Jourgenson (Ministry) has done a lot of excellent work, and I think he was digital from early nineties or earlier.
Recording studios switched to hard disk based digital recording around 1994–1995. That's when all of a sudden everything became possible to redo and fix very cheaply (emotionally speaking, not in terms of $).
(In fact he pioneered combining raw guitars with samplings.)
Sampling, when used as an instrument, is a different subject. It was invented in the late1960s and first used in pop/rock in the 1970s. Samplers were originally implemented using analog technology.
You may well be right.
For me, knowing I can correct any error tends to free me up creatively. In a drawing/painting, when it's half done, I will *not* make a big sweeping gesture when it's on paper or canvas, since if it's bad, I've fucked up everything.
At one time, you've got it, and then you lose it, and it's gone forever. All walks of life. I'm not sure that can be blamed on going digital.
Recording on film/analog tape/typewriter makes you think “it's now or never”, whereas when recording digitally you tend to think about technical details related to your equipment, how your gonna frame your next shot, whether you are hungry, need to pee, etc. :-)
The old "we'll fix it in post" mentality.
Funny I should get a comment on this post now, because Joe Dick just alerted me to a couple of sites which sell restored old typewriters. They are expensive and I don't have so much space, but damn, some of them are so beautiful...
I had an old Remington Rand. Big, heavy, and man...did you ever see that Seinfeld where he dated the woman with "man hands"? She tore apart her lobster with her bare hands. Well, typing on a manual typewriter would give you hands like that.
I would have kept it but the ribbon kept popping out. It wasn't an expensive, restored machine though. The ones you're talking about would probably work better.
The one I eventually ordered (a huge Remington) is labelled "not for extensive use", which is fine with me, I like typing on a digital machine better, I'm just getting the Remington because it's boooootiful.
Using a manual typewriter definitely makes you appreciate computers more. :-)
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