Today I read an interesting article about handwriting and its possible future (or lack of it).
The most fascinating aspect of handwriting to me is the suddenness with which it has lost its centrality as a means of communication for so many of us. I rarely even print, except to jot down vocabulary as students ask for help or to update my lists of things to do. Cursive handwriting is obviously even more rarely used. The saddest thing about this change is connection we will lose to our past (as noted by the article as well).
If we don't learn to write in cursive, it's likely we won't learn to read it either. The huge amount of history recorded with pen and ink in cursive will be inaccessible to most of the population. Ironically, it's at the very same time that millions of original documents are now available and distributed online.
There is precedent for this type of fundamental shift in communication and it would be interesting to see how societies have coped (or not) with these transitions. Were hundreds or thousands of years worth of history rendered illegible to subsequent generations? The French replaced Chinese characters in Vietnam, Ataturk replaced Arabic script with a brand new Latin-derived alphabet in 1928 and the list could go on. In part, the new Turkish state sought to accommodate the revolutionary technology of the typewriter, seeing the new alphabet as more suitable to a keyboard than Arabic.
I wonder if the many societies that have made such changes planned on how to deal with their history.
Interesting article, James. Some language alphabets are arts forms as well, such as Chinese script. Things have changed a little I think, but when I was living in Japan earlier in the 2000s, the fax machine was still king....why? Because it was very difficult to write a note or letter on the computer using Chinese characters.
ReplyDeleteon another note, i think we're seeing a bit ov evolution in typing on the computer as well. now that i'm using google docs more and more, i notice mistakes like the ones i nthis paragraph--something world would have automatically fixed. i often find myself not bother to capitalize the first letter of a new sentence or the pronoun "I" because I know world will do it for me.
Perhaps right there is the crux of the issue with technology. I know why the "I" should be capitalized, but if the next generation of kids doesn't need to know because it's done for them, why bother learning it. And the logical extension of that is, "Why bother questioning what the computer does." Just like many of our students simply pick the first recommended word when spell checking, even if it's a completely different word than what they're looking for.
Your post made me think of Egyptian hieroglyphics or Sumerian Cuneiform. I wonder if this is just something societies go through time and time again. As we develop our forms of communication change - an "it's happened before and it will happen again" thing. Maybe this is just the next step and it's more difficult for us because we're living through the change, but years from now it will just be another societal shift?
ReplyDelete