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As someone who loves to fiddle with computers, I suppose I should be excited by the new developments I read about. However, it's easy to explain why I'm not excited:
· Pen-based computing. In medieval times, monks laboriously copied manuscripts by hand; the chore was often a punishment for such infractions as lustful thoughts or falling asleep at vespers.
With penmanship, you're using perhaps three fingers; a keyboard means you can use all ten. The latter is obviously more efficient. So why are they celebrating this great step backward?
· GUI (Graphical User Interface). Instead of just
typing the name of the program you want to run, you use a
pointing device
to select the icon
of the
procedure
you want to launch.
So instead of remembering commands, you need to learn which little picture does what. If I want to look at funny little pictures, I'll buy a comic book. If I want to interpret them, I'll take up rebus-solving. If want to get some work done, just let me type, okay?
· Voice-recognition. Even obsolete computers like
mine have a limited capacity to recognize spoken words, and
this is useful at times -- say, when you keep getting
parity-violation errors, and you vocally instruct the
machine to Get your @!#$!# in gear, you miserable
%^*@#!
But beyond this, what good is it? Do you want to work in an office, and have your cellmate in the next cubicle tell her machine to enter some confidential data in a spreadsheet, and have your machine overhear and start throwing in corporate secrets when you're running off form letters?
How much noise will you be able to handle when shouting becomes the usual way to communicate with computers? And when they start talking back with voice annotation, you'll probably want to get a job running a jackhammer just so you can enjoy some workplace serenity.
· WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get). What we see are typographical abominations (35 fonts on the same page, none of them legible) from WYSIWIG enthusiasts. They jabber about kerning tables, x-heights, beards, bowls, cups, widows, orphans, hyphenation zones, leading, serifs, gutters, mutton quads and other arcane topics formerly confined to the backshop.
So thrilled are they by these discoveries that they ignore the content of the text which they spend so much time formatting.
The more elegant the piece of desktop-published correspondence, the more likely it will omit something important, like the date on an announcement. Or its syntax will make George Bush sound eloquent -- sentence fragments, dangling modifiers, subject-verb disagreement, and scores of other violations of Official English. The authors seem to have gained computer literacy at the expense of the traditional literacy.
Of course you can't stop progress. But can't we stop it if it's not really progress?
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