JOHN HOFMEISTER COPYWRITER
  • Home
  • CONSUMER
    • Articulation
  • Pharma
  • BRANDING
  • Contact
  • Musings

Digit Disenfranchisement and the Rise of Thumbing

4/11/2017

0 Comments

 
There is a certain pleasure that comes with hunt-and-peck typing. For someone like me this is hard to admit since I can bang out sentences in qwerty faster than I could write or at least knock out in longhand that I might be able to interpret tomorrow.  My longhand has deteriorated steadily since 5th grade, and my cursive devolved into a mixture of printed letters and curlicues that paid experts would be unable to decipher in Federal Court. And with my introduction to the typewriter, anything I scratched out today with a pencil just goes straight to runic inscrutability.
 
Hunt-and-peck forces you to slow down a bit. In this way it’s a bit like writing in longhand — the effort to compose is knocked back a smidge by searching for keys that your 10 digits know well but your thumbs need to coordinate with your eyes and poke upon. Eventually, if not already, there will be novels whacked out by thumbs. I imagine the plasticity involved in human brain evolution has already yielded an entire generation of thumbsters whose attention spans have adapted to the digital syncopation. I still fight with spell check and those damn algorithms always guessing at my next word choice. I know which ones I want, thank you very much.
 
Anyway, slowing down some means considering the words on the page, screen actually, and what might follow them.  And typing with thumbs makes it a bit more difficult to edit, something that’s easy enough when you can see a window of type and rely on your every god-given digit. But reducing the entry points from 10 to two — well Proust would have gone bananas. Poor Willy Faulkner and Jimmy Joyce would have gone for whiskey, rum cake, and Irish coffee. And we’d be out an awful lot of incredible sentences. But those fellas wrote in longhand. Joyce would spend a day looking for a single word. Really.
 
So now at night, before the TV programming that leaves me bored and listless, I pick up my iPhone and poke out some words. A handful that I can save and mail to myself and then embellish on a keyboard that spans the width of my hands, rendering posts such as this. Don’t get me wrong, I love my opposable thumbs, but at heart I am an equal opportunity deployer.
 
©2017 John Hofmeister. Find more posts at jhofmeister.com/musings.
0 Comments

Your comment will be posted after it is approved.


Leave a Reply.


    Picture

    John Hofmeister

    When I'm not writing for clients, I write about things that interest me. Quite of bit of satire, a genre that has become increasingly difficult to work in since reality has become such a farce.

    Archives

    February 2023
    May 2022
    March 2022
    January 2022
    December 2021
    April 2021
    May 2020
    March 2020
    January 2020
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    October 2018
    August 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    November 2017
    October 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    December 2016
    October 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    January 2016

    Categories

    All

    RSS Feed

Picture
Copyright © 2020 John Hofmeister • Freelance Copywriter • Creative Director • Columbus, Ohio. All materials on this website are presented exclusively for viewing by John Hofmeister clients and prospects. ​Any use of this website will constitute your agreement not to copy, modify, reformat, rebroadcast, ​or otherwise reproduce the work displayed here. Thank you.

  • Home
  • CONSUMER
    • Articulation
  • Pharma
  • BRANDING
  • Contact
  • Musings