(Warning – rambling, fairly unstructured and inconclusive thoughts ahead.)
I was recently reminded of a thought that’s been knocking around in my head for a while: when will we stop learning to write? When will children stop being taught to write with a pen? Will, in the not-too-distant future, pens and pencils become quaint antiques, as we see cassette tapes or non-digital cameras? If you where a toddler today why would you bother learning to write? It’s hard, messy, frustrating, slow and largely irrelevant to everyday life. Signing my name is about the only time I write anything now. If I have to write something longer it takes a few lines for my fingers to remember what they’re doing—it’s surprisingly easy for us to forget even skills we take for granted.
I’d guess everyone is more or less happy with the idea (if not reality) of a paperless office but less so the corollary of a penless office. But if (when?) people stop learning to write, it’d follow that they’d stop buying pens. There’d be no more desk draws full of half used ballpoints.
I still draw and sketch (for work and occasionally fun), but with touch screens undoubtedly becoming ubiquitous, will our children be given a iPad and drawing app instead paper and crayons? If so will we forget how to make any kind of physical mark in the world? The death of physical mark-making would be a pretty significant moment in our culture. It’s what humans have been doing since we settled down in caves, probably before. At least 32,000 years of leaving marks behind in the world would end. We often think of digital as being more permanent than the physical, but really what will be left in 20,000 years? 30,000 years? I could go and carve my name on a remote, sheltered, rock face and have reasonable expectations that my writing would out survive our culture. I think it’d be a safe bet that anything written on this blog won’t be around for those time-scales.
