Lewis (2011) – I never saw the older typewriter designs before, so seeing their evolution was extremely interesting. The early computer model, Pegasus, was also interesting. To connect it to the course and the module, it seems to be the transition point between paper and digital, with the code on rolls of narrow paper strips in the forms of punched holes. That said, prior to this “writing,” that is, the storage of information, is already stored on non-paper devices such as vinyl records. Similar concepts are used for magnetic storage later. Reminds me of various articles I read previously of engineers exploring the idea of DNA as a storage medium.
Seeing the process of a typewriter-like device punching the code onto the paper stripes connects back to my previous task about the permanency of manual writing as opposed to digital typing.
To briefly connect the bit about freezing computers and people losing progress on a word processor, I recall back to my days as a secondary student working at my school’s computer lab. The computer froze, so I went to the power bar to unplug the computer to restart it. Unfortunately, what I unplugged wasn’t the computer I was working on, but the computer next to me, which had someone working on an essay. It’s been two decades and I’m still apologetic about that. Compare that to modern technology that I just experienced this morning, where although I have a tendency to leave my computer running (with word documents unsaved), even if my computer restarts itself to install an update, progress isn’t lost through various forms of storage.
Zaltzman (2019) – The initial conversation of how our writing reflects our oral habits, using the period as an example (“we don’t talk in full sentences,”) reminds me of various personal experiences of when writing does, and does not, reflect speech. I watched the movie, Guardians of the Galaxy 2 in Hong Kong with English audio and Chinese subtitles. Cantonese used to be the predominant language in Hong Kong, which is orally intellectually unintelligible from Mandarin, though both use the same writing system. While I mostly relied on listening for the movie, the person I went to see the movie with, a Mandarin speaker, wasn’t fully fluent in English and relied on subtitles. She pointed out that the subtitles for the protagonists were done with Cantonese syntax and is difficult for a Mandarin speaker to understand, while the other characters followed Mandarin syntax. Similar to this experience, when I venture to message boards based in Hong Kong, I can read approximately 50% of the posts, but going to a Hong Kong based news website I’m able to read 90% of the text.
That discussion of utterances, specially evolution from emails where it wasn’t socially acceptable to constantly send a separate message for each utterance, highlight how as technology constraints shift, both how we write, as well as the culture of writing, also shifts as well. There’s a contrast between formal emails that has a specific structure with various sections, to instant messaging where message lengths, grammar, and spelling reflect how we speak. Looking at my message history on instant messaging devices such as Discord, Signal, and Whatsapp, I noticed that I too have stopped using periods and just send a message when an utterance is complete. All that said, my initially reactions to the idea that adding a period to a sentence is considered rude was surprise as I felt I have not been in a social group that believes it, but the further elaborations and examples such as “fine.” or “good.” drove home the message for me. Personally, exclamation marks and emojis have replaced the period in various contexts to better convey my intentions through text, and lo and behold, emojis were discussed soon afterwards on the podcast.
The second half of the podcast about the shifting of language and that there’s not really a “correct way” of language led to some reflection. In my introductory epistemology class, I often discuss the four truth tests in my introduction: correspondence, coherence, consensus, and pragmatic. While there’s a physical world that we can test various scientific observations and hypotheses (correspondence), or mathematical rules allow one to evaluate of a solution to a math problem is correct (coherence), language is a social construct and requires consensus. That said, consensus doesn’t necessarily mean everyone, and there can be consensus about language use reached about subcultures or other such groups (for some reason secret handshakes come to mind), making changes to a language “legitimate.” These small shifts of language culture can then influence the overall public perceptions, or, remain in their small subgroups for pluralism of “correct” language. This too ties in to the pragmatic truth test, where the emphasis is less on truth, but on usability. The conversation around autocorrect can be tied to this analysis, with autocorrect influencing public perception on “correct language” that essentially overwrote previous notions of correct spelling in British English.
Finally, an anecdote about autocorrect, and people being too lazy to remove what it produces. Five years ago in my teaching career, I received an email addressed to “Mr. Guangdong” from a student. Sure, G and H are right now to each other on a QWERTY keyboard, and I understand the inclusion of Guangdong in autocomplete/autocorrect. While I never pointed out this mistake to the student, years later I still use this incident to discuss email etiquette in my first lesson for each course as I go through my syllabus.
References
Lewis, C. (2011, September 24). Secret life of machines – The word processor (full length). [Video]. YouTube.
Zaltzman, H. (Host). (2019, July 13). New rules (No. 102). [Audio podcast episode]. In The allusionist.