Hyperglyphics

I just hand-wrote a thank you note, something that has become increasingly difficult for me to do. No, not because I’m becoming less grateful for the kindnesses done toward me, or less conscious of the strict rules of etiquette I was raised with by my proper Southern mother and grandmother. I mean it has actually become increasingly hard for me to hand-write thank you notes (and notes of all kinds, really) in a literal, physical sense. The note card space is especially daunting to me as it is generally quite small and, thus, forces me to keep my script condensed, controlled. My hand rebels and my writing, though it tends to start off lovely and flowing, quickly becomes halting and error-ridden as I struggle to control the movement of the pen. I start a word and then “miss” a letter, going back to try to alter it as best I can without scratching out the word or throwing the pricey stationary card out altogether and starting over in frustration. The note card I just wrote on can’t be more than 4″x5″  on which I wrote probably 50 words, and yet my right hand now feels cramped and strained and I’m certain that when the recipient of it opens it, she will be unimpressed with the quality of my penmanship, perhaps even thinking that I scratched it off hurriedly and insincerely. Well, perhaps that last part is just me projecting my perfectionist fears, but still…

I’m not really paranoid about what my handwriting says about me so much as I am interested in the question of digital literacy. That’s not a conceptual jump, I promise. It’s just that in thinking about digital literacy, which I do on a daily basis, I’ve been thinking a lot about digitality in its other sense - of digits. The fingers. Attached to the hand. Attached to an arm attached to a whole body. Every time I think about my own relationship to literacy, digital or otherwise, it seems I’m always coming back to the body, my body, and how my own literacies are very much physical experiences of reading, writing, texts, and tools. Since I’ve just assigned my Web writing students the task of writing a digital literacy narrative, I figure it’s high time I write my own and my own starts with physical discomfort and bodily discipline and ends with the same. Somewhere in between, I hope to tease out some ideas about the way literacy - digital or old-fashioned - is always an embodied practice with some interesting implications for our posthuman present and future.

I don’t remember them (them being my teachers and parents) noticing that I wrote “wrong” until I was in the third grade. Perhaps they did - I should ask my Mom. But in the third grade, the year we learned to write script, the fact that I’d been writing wrong for several years came back to slap me in the face pretty hard. I’m not sure how it came to anyone’s attention, but I’m thinking it must’ve been related to the cursive lessons that were part of the third grade curriculum in those days at my elementary school. Memory’s a tricky thing and lots of the details have become blurry in the 34 years that have elapsed since I was 9 years old, but some things still do stand out, more as images or impressions, but I remember the cursive lessons, the lined paper, the worksheets and letter guides we traced before trying out the letters on our own. Two years of learning block lettering and here we had to learn a whole new way of writing. Whether it was my teacher - Mrs. Rollins, I believe - who alerted her or whether she just noticed it as I did homework, my mother realized that I held my pencil wrong. I have the vague impression that this was something she knew already, had had pointed out to her by a previous year’s teacher, but she had chosen, for whatever reason, not to deal with. Perhaps. Like I say, memory’s fuzzy.

It didn’t matter anyway. She noticed it now…then. (Whatever. Narrating the past can also get tricky.) I guess she figured that at this point in my writing life, as a budding cursive writer, I could no longer afford to play fast and loose with the physical rules and she took it upon herself to correct my error through a series of writing lessons focused on forcing my hand to conform to the proper way of holding a pencil. I remember becoming increasingly distraught, angry, tearful. I definitely cried a lot, so much that she finally gave up and my mother is not one to give up easily. I went back to (well, I never left it really) my way of holding my writing instrument and, to this day, I hold my pen wrong.

The question is, what is wrong and why does it matter? Apparently, one is supposed to hold a pen or pencil between the thumb and index fingers, with the instrument resting lightly on the inside of the middle finger, as illustrated in this lovely image I found through the magic of Google image search (accompanied, notice, by stern advice about the importance of teaching kids to hold a pencil “properly” and the adverse consequences of a failure to do so). I held - hold - my pencil with my index and middle finger both, with the instrument resting on the first knuckle of my ring finger. That middle finger - the one I would have given to my mother during those writing lessons had I known what that hand signal meant at the time - apparently increased the pressure on the pencil, causing it to press harder on the poor, benighted ring finger while also forcing the index finger to contract further up the pen. Instead of a nice, relaxed, easy guide, my hand gripped the pencil hard (I’m number five in the incorrect section of this chart).

I certainly understand that there is a reason why kids should be taught to hold a pencil a certain way. If one does so, apparently, it really does make writing more physically comfortable and less a conscious action. Maybe I have sentenced myself to a lifetime of discomfort through my inability to learn this basic literacy skill. But at the time of the great pencil battle between my mother and me, all I could think was that I was being punished and a power that I thought I had successfully acquired, the ability to write, was quite literally slipping out of my grasp. Try as I might, I just could not write when I held the pencil the way my mother so desperately wanted me to. I remember feeling stupid and incompetent. To make matters worse, my mother had the most beautiful cursive handwriting I had - have - ever seen. It’s perfect. It’s even more perfect than those sample worksheets Mrs. Rollins gave us in class. When I tried to hold the pencil the way she said, the way she did, I couldn’t even form basic block letters, much less cursive script. At least when I held it my way I stood a chance. My cursive might never be as beautiful as hers, but at least I could do it. I can be willful and stubborn and, in this battle, I held my ground. It might be wrong, but I was going to hold my pencil my way and no one was going to make me do otherwise.

So I held my pencil wrong, but at a certain point it stopped mattering so much. That point probably came in the very early 90s when I started writing directly on a word processor and then a computer. I was late to the computer table, which I now find extremely ironic considering my current status as a computers and writing specialist. Actually, there may a lot of irony there from a lot of different angles. How did I get from being completely inept at using the tools and tech of writing to this point? Tracing that path highlights the relationship between my hands and the tools they wield in an interesting way. Obviously, I mastered cursive in spite of my disobedient hand and breezed along to the eleventh grade, at which point I learned a new way to write: typing. I took a typing course that year mainly to acquire a skill everyone said was a good and practical one. This was 1984, the year Apple released the Macintosh with that mesmerizing Super Bowl commercial, but I wasn’t interested in computers. I was interested in Prince, but that’s another narrative altogether. I may not have been thinking about computers, but the typing class I took was, in fact, preparing me for a future in which I could break free from shackles of handwriting and its attendant pain and discomfort (for I would be lying if I said that my mother wasn’t right about the physical consequences of holding the pencil wrong - it did and does always hurt when I have to write by hand for any length of time).

Typing class, however, brought its own physical punishments and disciplinary regimen thanks to the fact that I got stuck in old Mrs. Cole’s class instead of the younger and more enlightened business teacher’s section. Mrs. Cole was old school and in her class there would be no fancy electronic typewriter. No. Manuals. I learned to type on a manual typewriter. In 1984. It’s kind of unbelievable to me still since I knew that manual typewriters had long since gone the way of the dodo. My father’s law office was stocked with smoothly efficient electric typewriters, no manual in sight. It’s entirely possible that my mother is to blame for this, too, since she was pretty notorious for going over to my school and insisting that I be put in the hardest teachers’ classes. And it would be in keeping with her M.O. for teaching her kids new skills. Just the year prior she had taught me to drive in her VW convertible, insisting that I could not drive unless I learned to drive a manual transmission. The car I got for my 16th birthday was a stick shift. But back to Mrs. Cole’s class. Manual typewriter keyboards require physical strength to operate. No gentle tapping as I’m doing now on the sensitive keypad of my Macbook Pro. No, you had to strike the keys of those old machines with a good deal of force in order to get them to leave their inky imprint on the typing paper. You had to manipulate a lever on the side of the roller to move to the next line. They were these big, black, metal machines and I felt somewhat like a factory worker, making my repetitive motions on the assembly line.When I tried my new skills on the electric typewriter we had at home, I was amazed at how much easier it was.

My typing skills were probably average, at best, but they were good enough that I could begin to type some assignments and, in college, I used the communal typewriter we kept in a locked closet at the sorority house where I lived to type up my major papers for classes. I resisted the computer throughout my college career even as my peers slowly began to become computer literate by taking the basic computer science courses to satisfy their core “foreign language” requirement. The sorority house had a computer, but I figured it was best to leave that device to the treasurer who often hunched over it reviewing the spreadsheets that told her who had not paid her housebill that month.

I’m not sure why I steered so clear of computers for so long, but I managed to get all the way through college and the first year of my master’s program at NYU without using one. I did buy a word processor that was a kind of midway point between an electric typewriter and a computer as it stored the text I typed into it to a disc and had a small screen that enabled easy formatting and corrections (it looked kind of like this). When I realized that I wanted to stay on in NYC after finishing my degree, I found the job that would finally force me to become a computer user and that would bring yet another physical writing challenge.

My job as an administrative assistant for a tiny research firm required me to use several computer programs and I’d never even sat down at a computer before. As I have a tendency to do, I just threw myself into learning things hands-on. I learn by doing, so I did. It wasn’t easy, though, since the word processing program we used was DOS-based and I didn’t know all the stupid commands. My boss, mistakenly thinking I was just a slow typist and not simply ignorant of the program, insisted that I improve my typing skills and gave me a book of exercises to increase my keying speed. I figured that, even though that wasn’t really the problem, it certainly couldn’t hurt to be a faster typist, so I did the exercises and, once I figured out how to use the damn Xywrite program, was thrilled at my speed and prowess at the keyboard. I worked there for over five years, moving up to become director of research, but because it was such a small company, I always did a ton of writing and data entry myself and, over the years, I suffered from terrible tendinitis in my wrists from all that typing. I’d come full circle. I could write with felicity, but I suffered bodily pain in the process. My literacy - my ability to write, to communicate - came at a cost. My fingers and hands always forced into unnatural acts against which they rebelled.

These days, for some reason, I don’t suffer from the tendinitis anymore. I don’t know if it’s the fact that I use a laptop and my hands rest more naturally and comfortably on it as I type or some other factor. Instead, I have what I call “mouse arm.” My right hand hurts from my hand to my shoulder, my thumb contracting inward as though I’m holding my mouse even when I’m not, my hand cramping up into a claw and sending a dull pain shooting up my arm and into the right side of my neck. It’s not anything horrible, more a constant humming through my arm than anything. Sometimes, after a particularly long day at the computer, it becomes sharper, but I really have gotten good at ignoring it most of the time. Kind of like I got good at ignoring the pain in that ring finger after handwriting a long essay for school. Pain just comes with the territory of writing for me.

I don’t see this as a bad thing. In fact, the more I think about it (and I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately), the more I realize that it’s critical to remember the relationship between the physical body and reading and writing. Literacy is an embodied practice - we discipline our bodies into it and it disciplines us into certain cultural practices and ways of knowing and those practices and knowledge, in turn, discipline our bodies in various ways (see pretty much all of Foucault’s oeuvre). The tools of literacy, our technologies of reading and writing, are not just material themselves, but have material effects. Anyone who’s ever felt eyestrain after a particularly long reading session knows this. But what does this mean in a larger sense and in thinking about the digital/new media literacy that I’m always talking about with my writing students. What kinds of physical practices and embodied knowledge are the newest tools creating?

I’m not sure I have some grand answer for that yet, but I can think about it in relation to my own experience and perhaps that’s a starting point. I know that when I write, it is and always has been a physical act that I have had to discipline my body into, just as I do when I run or swim or take a horse over a jump. In fact, my experience as an equestrian may be revealing here as it similarly places me in a symbiotic relationship with another object (a living one in that case) in order to achieve a particular goal. I have to use my body in specific and highly prescribed ways to get the horse to do what I want and need it to do. If I make a wrong physical movement, I can send the wrong signal and end up somewhere I don’t want to be. Same with writing - one wrong keystroke and the message gets messed up (especially when writing computer code). McLuhan viewed media as “extensions of man.” Following that line of thought, I’d argue it’s a mistake to view our tools as separate and distinct from ourselves. We extend ourselves as humans through our tools and technologies and they become part of who we are. Our bodies are intertwined with our tools and we forget that at our own peril. So I think that is what I would add to the concept of digital or 21st century literacies - that we need to be aware of the embodied practices enabled and constrained by new technologies. The pain, as well as the pleasure, of the text.