Robert Montgomery on advertising
Huxley vs Orwell via Postman
I just got turned on to this excellent cartoon by Stuart McMillen. It’s a comic strip retelling of/homage to Neil Postman’s work in his famous book Amusing Ourselves to Death.
http://www.recombinantrecords.net/docs/2009-05-Amusing-Ourselves-to-Death.html
high tech = low typography = less expression
There was a great piece in Slate by Farhad Manjoo a short while ago on the grammatical incorrectness of two spaces after a period. Apparently it used to be customary to add two spaces when typewriters used monospaced type - where each letter is the same width - because typewriters’ mechanisms were only able to advance a fixed increment after each letter was typed. Two spaces made the break at the end of a sentence easier to read and notice because the two spaces created an obvious break in all that monotony. But the mechanical limitations necessitating monospaced type - and the need for two spaces after a period for clarity - ended in the 70s when typewriters were able to advance in different increments, allowing letters of differing widths. And yet, with nearly everyone on word processors for many years now, many people continue to stick with the double space after a period.
It’s interesting how a vestige from a bygone mechanized era continues, be it as tradition, a misguided idea of correct grammar, or perhaps just inadvertent inertia. I’ve always preferred one space, simply because two seemed unnecessary; the aesthetic notion behind why this is so wasn’t in my conscious mind. It’s nice that my instincts apparently are backed up by the typography establishment, though. As Manjoo notes:
Every major style guide—including the Modern Language Association Style Manual and theChicago Manual of Style—prescribes a single space after a period.
Another story that I view in a kind of tandem with the two-spaces piece is that the keyboard on the forthcoming Google notebook does not sport a Caps Lock key. (It’s replaced by a “search” key.) (Though this development has been reported on innumerable sites, Slate again does a great job providing historical context.) The Caps Lock key too is a vestige from the mechanical era that no longer is practical or appropriate for modern users. (Typewriters of yore used to literally shift the carriage when you pressed the shift key in order to access capital letters. Holding this key repeatedly was a pain so manufacturers created the Caps Lock and Shift keys so one could type caps or symbols freely without having to hold that darn key the whole time.)
Generally we think of Marshall McLuhan’s medium is the message in terms of distinctly different media - TV vs newspapers vs movies etc. - not the nuanced differences within the same medium, in this case the keyboard. (Yes, the typewriter and the computer are different media but they both use - or used, until now - basically the same keyboard.) These two stories bring this point to light.
Further -
Because typewriters had mechanical limits, their users were limited in the extent of typography they could use - basically it was courier or nothin’. Having the ability to regularly choose what font you want to write in - as we all can on our computers - is very recent in the relative scale of print. It’s an extraordinary aesthetic, (hence emotional and communicative) option for every person who writes a Word doc. Though most of us stick with the ubiquitous Times New Roman or a few others, having the ability to scroll through that massive font list is still powerful, perhaps especially so when you’re creating something other than a standard document, such as an outline or presentation where variety in fonts is a plus.
Beyond font choices, the ability to use italics and bold (and underline) at will is equally as important, and just as recent as the font selection. I love italics. Bold is a great emphasis tool too but it’s usually just a little too in-your-face, or, well, bold for me. Compared to bold, italics somehow always looks classy to me. It’s an elegant tip of the fedora to the comely lady across the room, rather than the construction worker calling out a “Hey Baby!” to a unsuspecting woman on the sidewalk. ALL CAPS is usually just gross, unless you’re really going for an over-the-top vibe (which was the case a number of times in my novel). The point is, italics, bold, and the easy implementation of all caps and underlining offers us far more nuance in our ability to communicate with text than the typewriter users of yesteryear. What if the writers of iconic texts over the ages had the tools we have today? Who knows how their texts would have differed, perhaps even been improved upon.
All this gets me to thinking about texting. (Funny - my Firefox auto spell check is red underlining “texting.” You’d think they update their dictionary.) Text messages are more and more becoming the dominant means by which we communicate. We’ve all read about how Gen Z (or whatever they’re called) barely even use email unless they’re applying for a job or something formal like that. The rest of the time they’re on Facebook, or Twitter or texting from mobile devices. But when you text from your phone, even a smart phone like an iPhone,* all those font choices are gone. Of course we think of space - 140 characters with Twitter, or just practical or expected limits on IM, Facebook etc. - as being the main limitation of texting, but I’d argue the loss of font choices is impactful as well.
While parameters often foster the best creativity that’s within us - most great paintings of course were done on relatively small canvases, pop(ular) songs for the ages like Yesterday or With or Without You are almost always under 5 minutes, etc. And yet, we are always seeking more tools to communicate what is in our heads and our hearts. Installation art pieces, “land art” like that of Michael Heizer, twenty-minute epics of bands like Godspeed You! Black Emperor, free jazz or myriad classical pieces, and use of varied typography and graphics in novels such as those of Foer, Eggers, and err this one, all support the notion that sometimes we need those extra tools and space to express whatever it is we want to express. If the dominant means of communicating for young people, and soon everyone, today is texting - rather than meeting in person as most everyone had done for just about all of human history up until around the past 100 years or so, or even rather than talking on the phone where people can hear all sorts of nuance in one’s voice - something will be lost. (Yes, other things can be gained, but something important will be lost.) In the dominance of text messages has there been a deterioration of our expressive capabilities in our main mode of communicating with each other? And if so, what does it mean when the primary means by which we communicate with each other is such a stunted form?
*As far as I was able to figure out from a quick search - bc I don’t own a one - a Blackberry apparently has some ability for italics but it’s not easy to do.
