[rp1]

I don’t think this is a good analogy. Cars can get you long distances quickly. Having this ability means you can have suburbs outside of city centers, travel between cities in a day thus necessitating highways, etc. Cars make possible all sorts of huge, life-altering changes because of how they impact travel.

In terms of long-form writing, word processors make spelling and grammar easier to fix. They also make editing easier, and the internet can be used to reference facts while writing. This comes with a few trade offs, like easily being distracted. Does this impact really seem equivalent to the impact of a car to you?

[romwell]

TL;DR: do you really think I'd have written the wall of text below with a pen? :)

=============================

Yes and no.

As a musician, I can tell you that interfaces definitely matter. Everything, from color to tactile feel and weight affect the way you use any tool. You can get a perfect software emulator of, say, a Yamaha DX-7, and yet you will be surprised to see how different you sound when you play the actual thing.

Same with typing. I don't write with a pen, period. I can; I take notes, I doodle, I do math with pen and paper. But I can't write large amounts of text with a pen. It comes out differently because the interface of moving a stylus is different from typing.

There's a reason writers used to be obsessed with their typewriters (and still are). There's a reason why George R. R. Martin writes his books on a DOS machine[1]. Those reasons have to do with why the OP has a point.

I think differently when I type; the brain-finger interface works differently than speech. Sometimes I look away from the screen, and see that my fingers typed things that I didn't intend to type. Apparently, I am typing at the level of words, not keystrokes, and when I look away from the screen, sometimes my brain cheats and misspells words. Not typos; the letters would be far apart. I couldn't possibly do the same thing with a pen, because I can't write legibly without looking at what I'm writing; and generally, it's not a thing that people are trained to do.

But with typing, you can do it.

The computer keyboard and the typewriter are not that much different in that respect; but the ability to undo and delete most certainly has an effect on the writing process. That's because you don't have to pause anymore before writing a sentence; you can type it as it forms in your brain, and you can backtrack easily. Yes, paper is cheap, and you can cross things out; but it adds friction, and it doesn't really feel nice (if I were writing this, half a page would be crossed out already - as even with the pauses, my mind jumps around enough).

You can also add text into previous passages without rewriting it. You can even restructure text on the fly. Of course you can do it with paper, too; and you can even plan in advance and leave enough spacing to be able to make corrections if needed, but it's not the default thing people do with paper, and defaults matter.

Film photography vs. digital photography vs. cellphone photography vs. instant photography would be a better comparison, I feel. All devices that can produce photographs have their strengths and weaknesses, but it's not about that. It's about what the device is optimal for when you pick it up and use without tweaking and putting much thoughts into it. Self-portraits existed since cameras were around, but selfies needed a cell phone to take off.

The car analogy has merit. Look back 100 years ago; literacy was a struggle. People didn't generally didn't have a need to write, and writing used to cost you, in terms of tools, paper, time, and effort required to do it.

Do you really believe writing like this very comment that you are reading was commonplace back then? Disputes, discussions, discourses all existed; but having a public discourse in written correspondence required a space on the newspaper page at the very least. Craigslist's "Missed Connections" and rants about absurd listings ("RE: Antique sofa, needs TLC, $1750" - "The HELL is wrong with someone who's listing this? You've been doing it for three months now, pal, nobody wants this crap") are reminiscent of what it used to be before mail/comment threads came around.

Speaking of written communication, look how SMS texting affected writing culture ("ok thx by cya l8r"), and how it all but disappeared after swipe-typing and autocomplete became the norm.

So you have to take it in context. A car analogy isn't perfect, but it's not that far off. The tools that we use for communicating affect the communication that flows through them.

Personally, I've been using "distraction-free" devices for a while now, but I just called it "taking a laptop to the park" (where there's no WiFi), or, God forbid, turning off WiFi or communication apps when I don't need them.

Coming back to music, even with a good DAW, field recorders, 4-tracks, and even straight up recording on a cell phone all have their use. The potato quality of a cell phone video vs. running line-in through the mixer + FX + DSP chain + DAW is a feature, not a bug. I just know that if I record through a DAW, I'll end up doing dozens (...hundreds) of takes to get it just right. A tool that is imperfect by default liberates one from that.

So while I am not someone to get too excited about the devices in the paper, I can understand the appeal.

As for me, I end up having the opposite problem: once I started typing, I end up hitting the character limit more often than I'd like to admit (it's 8000 characters on Facebook, in case you were wondering; I've hit it on all platforms). Even the cellphone's distractions aren't strong enough to pull me away from writing out a long thought, and the whole world can wait. The devices from the article enable what is already easy for me to do (and when I want to write, I still take to trusty notepad.exe, the best text editor I've ever had for that purpose).

For myself, I found that TikTok had a transformative effect with the way it limits comments. I've been forced to be brief for the first time in my life. And as they say, limitation breeds creativity. This limitation forces me to step back.

A Kickstarter idea for people like me: a digital typewriter that punishes verbosity. Sorry, you can only type 300 words a day, and it locks you out after that. Use your characters wisely.

Anyone down to make one?

[1]https://time.com/99432/george-rr-martin-game-of-thrones-comp...

[marginalia_nu]

Some fairly hefty books have been written with a pen. Consider something like The City of God, or The Enneads, or the Essais of Montaigne.

If anything, I think they were better for it. A slow writing medium means a lot more thought went into each page. Nobody in their right mind would spend hours arduously writing a buzzfeed listicle with a goose feather, such low-effort writing is only possible when writing is effortless. The fact that effort went into the actual writing usually means that effort also went into considering what was to be written.

[romwell]

My point wasn't that any writing tool is better than the other; I was expanding in the GP comment's observation that it very much does affect writing (as you also seem to agree).

And my remark was specifically that I wouldn't find it enjoyable to write that long comment with a pen. Maybe it'd be better for it, maybe worse, maybe I'd go and play piano instead; the point is, it'd be very different.

[rp1]

You could write the above easily with a typewriter. The point isn't to use the most primitive method of writing possible. Rather, it's to acknowledge that writing on a computer has a certain set of drawbacks in addition to its benefits.

[romwell]

The drawbacks of writing on a computer are obvious (I'm not representative in that regard).

What I'm trying to say is that the parent comment has merits comparing it to a car.

>You could write the above easily with a typewriter

No I couldn't. I know, since I own two typewriters.

They are hella fun, and I absolutely love typing letters on them (the snail mail kind). But it's an entirely different flow. Kinda like you can get on a bike pretty much anywhere you could drive, but you wiuldn't (or maybe you would, but I'm surely cycling far less often after starting a job 20 miles from where I live vs. 4 miles of the previous job).

Same with the cell phone: if I had to either get off my bed to fetch a laptop, or had I not had swype-like typing, you wouldn't be reading this.

What I'm saying is that it's not about advantages vs. drawbacks, it's about the kind of writing that you get in the end.

Which is why I still use my to typewriters. I can just use a typewriter font and send it to the printer from the word processor, but it would still read like an email, because it would be.