Cat Tech

I am in the midst (during all of my free time...) of writing a proposal to present at the premier international Educational Technology conference, and so it is fortuitous that Dennis E Baron's A Better Pencil: Readers, writers, and the digital revolution was recently published.

The book explores our use of computers as writing tools in light of the history of communication technology, a history of how we love, fear, and actually use our writing technologies--not just computers, but also typewriters, pencils, and clay tablets. Dennis Baron shows that virtually all writing implements--and even writing itself--were greeted at first with anxiety and outrage: the printing press disrupted the "almost spiritual connection" between the writer and the page; the typewriter was "impersonal and noisy" and would "destroy the art of handwriting." Both pencils and computers were created for tasks that had nothing to do with writing. Pencils, crafted by woodworkers for marking up their boards, were quickly repurposed by writers and artists. The computer crunched numbers, not words, until writers saw it as the next writing machine.

The focus of my proposed presentation is how faith-based schools maintain their distinctive character while integrating technology. Having recently (and finally) read The First Jesuits, I was struck by how Ignatius himself struggled with the introduction of the printing press into the Curia Generalizia. The arguments for and against that first printing press are echoed in A Better Pencil, summarized by Baron in a recent interview with Salon:

Historically, when the new communication device comes out, the reaction tends to be divided. Some people think it's the best thing since sliced bread; other people fear it as the end of civilization as we know it. And most people take a wait and see attitude. And if it does something that they're interested in, they pick up on it, if it doesn't, they don't buy into it.

I start with Plato's critique of writing where he says that if we depend on writing, we will lose the ability to remember things. Our memory will become weak. And he also criticizes writing because the written text is not interactive in the way spoken communication is. He also says that written words are essentially shadows of the things they represent. They're not the thing itself. Of course we remember all this because Plato wrote it down -- the ultimate irony.

We hear a thousand objections of this sort throughout history: Thoreau objecting to the telegraph, because even though it speeds things up, people won't have anything to say to one another. Then we have Samuel Morse, who invents the telegraph, objecting to the telephone because nothing important is ever going to be done over the telephone because there's no way to preserve or record a phone conversation. There were complaints about typewriters making writing too mechanical, too distant -- it disconnects the author from the words. That a pen and pencil connects you more directly with the page. And then with the computer, you have the whole range of "this is going to revolutionize everything" versus "this is going to destroy everything."

I think properly integrating technology into the various aspects of our lives is about, first, an openness to growth, and, second, intentionality. As I continue thinking about my presentation, I'm wondering what others think about the fears often associated with cultural acceptance of new technologies. If you have any thoughts, I'd be very interested in hearing them.