Another thing that is passé: handwriting

**I'm taking an online music theory class where the instructor urged me to not use digital tools to do the assignments but to get out manuscript paper and a sharp pencil. It was awful  A mess. And didn't really solve the problem I was having. He said that if I did it often enough I would produce better looking pieces. He compared it to "cursive" handwriting, as though getting more proficient at it would somehow make me a better person. Or something.

At that moment it occurred to me that I have seldom used cursive, or any kind of handwriting, in several years. For the most part anything I do write is in a digital format. Yet, there are lots of scraps of paper cluttering up my desk with my scrawl on them. For the most part they are sticky notes and the "handwriting" is mostly block, non-cursive, letters and numbers. Am I a lesser person for this? No. Am I a better person? No. It's just the way I do things, and I suspect the way many, if not most, people "write" these days.

The last bit of cursive writing I did was about 7 years ago when I took up the practice of stream-of-consciousness journaling. Three pages first thing in the morning, per Julia Cameron. What's most interesting about that experience is that many events and thoughts that were occuring to me at that critical crossroads in my life (I had recenty left the Christian Science church and was coping with the idea of being "retired") got recorded along with random ideas for songs or poems. After that exercise was over - almost a year later – I didn't look at those notebooks for another year or two.

When I finally made my break from all things religious, spiritual or supernatural, I thought about those notebooks and realized they were a unique look into a mind that was in the process of changing. I had no intention of making such a chronicle at the time, just fulfilling an exercise. But it's a treasure trove of verbal snapshots of a mind in flux.

However, the task of just looking at those pages was daunting, almost dizzying. The handwriting was atrocious. How could I extract the nuggets of priceless insights from those notebooks?

Enter Dragon Dicate, or whatever it was called at the time. This speech-to-text application enabled me to read aloud my hen scratchings and they would be transformed into readable printed text (digital). I was able to transcribe many of these notations this way – and I still have more to do to complete the project. But that was the last time I wrote anything extensive in cursive. And probably the last time I will write anything that way.

The point is that technology changes us, not necessarily for the better, but also not necessarily for the worse. Change happens and one of the saddest things for me to see is someone lamenting the passing of an old technology. They forget that there was a time when their canonized technology was itself revolutionary and displaced other mainstream technologies. To me it is the sign of someone acquiescing to death. They seem to be saying: "let me be comfortable as I slowly expire." So far I haven't succumbed to that temptation, though I can feel its pull increasing.

RIP paper books

**Paper books have been pretty much absent from my life for the past five or six years. Before e-readers I regularly used audio books because they were a lot easier to use while on the move. But with e-readers, like my Kindle, I’ve even left audio books behind. Granted they’re not useable in as many situations as audio books, but audio often puts me to sleep and continues playing so that I lose my place. With an ebook I can search the book and recover my place if I should happen to lose it.

Reading on an  iPad is less comfortable than with a Kindle, although the iPad Mini could obviate that difficulty. And iPad books can show color and illustrations better than monochrome ebooks. I like highlighting things I find interesting and you can’t do that with an audio book, and even with a paper book there’s no easy way to compile those notes and highlights. With an ebook, on the other hand, I can not only highlight but I can also make a note, send a correction to the publisher (surprising how many times I have to do that) and get a definition of an unfamiliar word. I also like seeing which passages have been highlighted by others (popular highlights).

Paper books can also give you the illusion that you are amassing a huge vault of information that you can tap into, but in reality that seldom happens with me. I tend not to go back and read old books. And they do pile up around the house (giving the illusion, perhaps, that I’m some kind of intellectual.)

I recently read a paper book for the first time in years (it was a gift.) I can’t say I enjoyed the experience just because I was handling the pages (and glad I didn’t have to shake out the detritus of someone else’s personal life). It takes up as much physical room as my entire library of ebooks. I’ve given away almost all of my paper books (most of which were connected with the religious delusion I was under for several decades), retaining technical manuals and the like that I sometimes need to use for reference. And BTW, I haven’t used a library in decades. They’re just too slow, fussy and never have what I want when I want it. I'm glad they fill the needs of others, but so far a library is just a place to hide out where no one would think of finding me.

So, I’m afraid the paper book industry and those industries that have symbiotic relationships with it, will slide into the dustbin of history, like crystal radios, tube TVs, rotary telephones and other matter-based artifacts. But the need to share information persists, and at the moment, and for the foreseeable future, ebooks and e-readers are the standard.