Journal daniil's Journal: Call me old-fashioned 11
Now, I'm sure that Shakespeare would have produced Hamlet even if he had used a tpyewriter instead of a quill. Would it have turned out the same, I'm not so sure of (for Marshall McLuhan or someone else believing in the mantra The Medium is the Message, the answer would be a definite "No").
Which one is more important then, the Shakespeare or the quill? Yeah, it's a rhetorical question, one that I don't even need to answer myself (I hope). Yet, there is still something about the instrument, the medium used for writing that makes a difference -- if not for the writer, then for the reader.
Let's take electronic mail, for example (for the purpose of this JE, let JEs and comments also count as electronic mail). While I, or someone else, will put the same effort into writing an email as writing a letter on paper, there's still some things that email lacks. First off, there's no handwriting. The writing style may be the same, but the shape of the words is...different (at the same time, it's always the same -- due to standard fonts used).
Then there's the things you can't do with an electronic "letter". You can read it over and over, but there will never be a mark on the letter of you reading it. The letters (err, characters) never wear off. As memory, it is perfect, as it never forgets anything. But such a perfect memory is also quite useless, as it creates nothing new. No information about the reader.
An illustration:
To resume: The long, typewritten, four-year-old letter that Zooey had checked into the bathtub with, on this Monday morning in November, 1955, had obviously been taken out of its envelope and unfolded and refolded on too many private occasions during the four years, so that now it not only had an over-all unappetitlich appearance but was actually torn in several places, mostly along the creases. [...]
Curiously enough, the same description more or less also applies to the book this passage is taken from. The edges of the covers are torn and tattered. The corners of the pages have been worn round; some of them also dyed orange by a leaking text marker. But the pages still smell of incense -- just like they did four years ago when I picked this book up in a small bookstore.
This small book is as second-hand as a book can be. It seems to have had at least three owners before me: someone bought it new sometime round 1970, but then sold it/gave it away. Then someone called Peggy bought it (second-hand), and sent it to a Finn called Terjo (it's a guy's name if I'm not mistaken). After that, the book somehow wound up in this small bookstore in Estonia, and I find it very unlikely that this Finnish guy had brought it there. All these people, that little book "remembers" -- and it doesn't even matter to me if these "memories" are false.
Call me old-fashioned, but I like dead trees.
Hm , strange list (Score:2)
Well , slashdot doesn't yet have a million
Re:Hm , strange list (Score:2)
Yeah. It's not even close :p
It is official; daniil confirms it: Slashdot is dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
Slashdot leader CmdrTaco states that there are 914,000 users of Slashdot. How many users of Slashdot are there? Let's see. The total number of Slashdot posts is currently 13,545,370. The total number of comments posted by me (I have three Slashdot accounts) is 2421 -- 807 per account. Therefore there are about 13,545,370/807 = 16785
Re:Hm , strange list (Score:2)
it's possible that you have it backwards (Score:2)
We don't have a modern shakespeare because our shakespeares are writing other things. I think shakespeare would take one look at the hip-hop scene, and while he wouldn't call it literature, he'd get it, in a way that the rest of us don't. It plays to the masses, and makes money- two out of three.
What would shakespeare really love? I think he'd be a star wars geek. I'm not saying they're comparable... just that the medium and the mes
Re:it's possible that you have it backwards (Score:1)
And as for me, I prefer my internet printed out. I have a room filled with printed pages of the whole internet. Then to give it some spice I go through them and hand-write each page. I do it both for the text, then I go through them again and hand-write the html version.
Re:it's possible that you have it backwards (Score:2)
The next logical step would be to play Quake on paper, going through the source code step by step, memorizing the colors of all the pixels on the screen to visualize what you see (or maybe plotting them on paper), maybe throwing dice to generate random numbers.
Re: it's possible that you have it backwards (Score:2)
I did have it backwards, but it was mostly intentional. I was trying to imagine what would have happened if someone had given Shakespeare a typewriter back in his time.
And I wrote this JE backwards as well. A letter I got today made me think of a Salinger book (the one I quoted), then the difference between electronic and real mail, then monkeys on typewriters, and finally of Shakespeare and the quill he must have used.
As for wha
Monkeys (Score:2)
The monkeys will never produce Hamlet because they don't behave in the way that the person who coined the phrase expected. They don't sit and push individual keys in random order -- never once did they do this. Their favourite thing to do was to hold down one key and watch the screen fill with hundreds of H's (for example) in a row.
Re:Monkeys (Score:2)
*tongue in cheek* I bet Shakespeare would have acted the same.
Hi, Old-Fashioned (Score:2)
BUT the medium greatly influences the message. Quill pens, inkwells, EXPENSIVE paper, and the physical effort/time involved all contribute to a greater amount of forethought and planning before pen is put to paper. Thus, first (and subsequent) drafts tend to be of higher caliber. Also, the higher costs involved, the amount of time needed, and literacy being confined to a smaller subset of the population (t
Re:Hi, Old-Fashioned (Score:2)
My relationship with computers is a bit strange, though. On one hand, while I always carry a notebook with me, it is only for taking notes. I do the bulk of my writing on a computer. On the other hand, I'm a bit suspicious of reading stuff in electronic format. It's si