Editor's Note: Earlier in the spring, Alan Jacobs drew up his 79 Theses on Technology, a provocative document that has drawn much commentary from our readers. John Durham Peters joins the fray here, commenting on Theses 64 through 70.
64. Everyone should sometimes write by hand, to recall what it’s like to have second thoughts before the first ones are completely recorded.
65. Everyone should sometimes write by hand, to revisit and refresh certain synaptic connections between mind and body.
66. To shift from typing to (hand)writing to speaking is to be instructed in the relations among minds, bodies, and technologies.
67. It’s fine to say “use the simplest technology that will do the job,” but in fact you’ll use the one you most enjoy using.
68. A modern school of psychoanalysis should be created that focuses on interpreting personality on the basis of the tools that one finds enjoyable to use.
69. Thinking of a technology as a means of pleasure may be ethically limited, but it’s much healthier than turning it into an idol.
70. The always-connected forget the pleasures of disconnection, then become impervious to them.
No doubt, writing is an intensely physical bio-mechanical activity. The back hurts, the neck cranes, the eyes sting, the head aches, the view out the window is consulted for the thousandth time. The inscription of words exacts a tax of muscular and nervous exertion. And no doubt, the most minute choices in writing technique make worlds of difference. Nietzsche thought writing while seated a sin against the Holy Ghost: only in strolling did words have for him truth.
But let us not confuse technology and technique. Technology once meant the study of the productive arts and sciences (as in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology); now, the term has been inflated not only into material devices of all kinds but also into a gas-bag for intellectuals to punch. Techniques are humble acts we do with hands, voices, eyes, feet, spine, and other embodied parts that bring forth mind into the world. We humans never do anything without technique, so we shouldn’t pretend there is any ontological difference between writing by hand, keyboarding, and speaking, or that one of them is more original or pure than the other. We are technical all the way down in body and mind.
The age of ubiquitous computing has yielded, among other things, a florid genre of opt-out narratives, and I hope I do not espy in these theses another such tendency. Only by the orchestration of technologies can you catch a glimpse of a technology-free world. The more intensely made our environment is, the more actively its designers supply us with shock absorbers. The default images for the background of my desktop computer are all resolutely pastoral—not a sign of infrastructure, globalization, coltan, carbon, or human labor among them. I find tulips, a rising moon, cloudscapes, seascapes, and windblown desert sands, but no data, email, calendars, and bills, and certainly no human presence. Just how did this blue flower happen to sprout amid all the silicon? With heartfelt pleas that I “just have to watch,” my students send me YouTube videos that explain why we need to unplug, go outside, and seek real human contact. If you listen to the machine telling you how to get out of it, you only get sucked into it more, like a con artist who lulls you into a sense of trust by telling you that he is conning you. The promised liberation from technology is usually just another technology that you don’t recognize as such. This is one reason why a fuller appreciation of our diverse techniques is so vital.
Tools are all we have, but each one sets us in a very different horizon. Technology only risks being an idol because we don’t appreciate our techniques well enough. Writing with two hands on a keyboard, dictating to a person or a machine, writing with chalk, quill, pencil, or pen—each embody mind in different ways. Blessed be the back pain, as it reminds us that we are not immaterial beings flying through cyberspace.
I don’t understand the term “simplest” applied to a tool. Tools interact with mind and body. Compass and square could build gothic cathedrals. Piano and notepaper could yield symphonies. The more basic the tool, the harder it is to master. Who among us has yet learned how to speak, or walk, or think? The real challenges lie in the most basic acts. Some day, I’d like to write a really good sentence. Some day, I’d like to play a beautiful scale in C major. Some day, I’d like to say the right word to another person. The more basic the task, the more fundamental the challenge and difficult the tool.
John Durham Peters is the A. Craig Baird Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Iowa. His most recent book The Marvelous Clouds: Towards a Philosophy of Elemental Media has just been released by the University of Chicago Press.