Typecasting

Having been reading a bit of Derrida and Kittler on the ways in which the technologies we use to inscribe our thoughts also shape them (i.e. "Our writing tools are also working on our thoughts" as Nietzsche had it), I was intrigued to come across the blogging phenomena called typecasting, where writers compose on typewriters before scanning their work and uploading it (example).

Is it the case that the mechanisation of the production of the word might also produce an experientially different relationship with language, both for author and reader, and thus change the way language is used? If so, this has obvious implications for blogging. As I compose this I find myself typing fluidly, I'm trying to get the words out and down (down where? the screen?) as quickly as possible, and to keep up a flow of thoughts. I can do this because I know I write in a revisionist medium, always above the safety-net of the delete key. Were I writing on a typewriter (assuming I didn't have any tip-ex), or by hand, would I be so cavalier in spitting the words out? Would it not be more deliberative, and how would this affect the content and the style of this writing?

Phenomenologically, each (handwritten/typewritten/digitally written) word affects us in different ways. The handwritten word, a self-evident testimony of effort, the proof of a body pressing the pen to the page. The handwritten word is taken to denote identity. It signifies at once authenticity (the autograph) and personality (graphology) and is presumed to represent (portray/betray) the person, link us intimately to them.

The typewriter, in comparison, bangs the words to into the paper with mechanistic anonymity. As Kittler would have it, a mid-point between creation and publication. Heidegger once questioned whether one would countenance writing a love-letter on a typewriter, and that underlying tension still seems valid. We privilege the personal.

Except that the typewriter itself is now a relic; in comparison to word processors, it demands an unnecessary expenditure of effort. The performative aspect, where revisions (crossing-out, or using tip-ex) will remain visible, stands in contrast to this digital writing, where a wrong key stroke is easily erased by a dab of the delete key, where revision is a central part of the act of writing (for me, at least). If forced to write in a performative manner, would my psychological processes be different? Would each word have to pass through the hands of some internal censor before being committed to the page? How would what I am now writing be different? More structured? More coherent? But then, this blog identifies itself as a notebook anyway, would I strive for coherence in a notebook? What if that notebook would be visible to others? Hmmm ...