The ubiquity of paper takes me back. But I think that there was an academy without screens is the dominant memory for me. At my first academic teaching post, in 1982, our offices had a desk, a phone, and, if you wanted, a typewriter. The university had a computer, but it was in another building. And it is hard for me to explain how, for me, the desktop computer + internet has changed the faculty office, not in terms of less paper or more access to information or much much faster communication, but to where our attention is directed, to the student or colleague who has dropped by (this happens every few weeks or so now, rather than routine) who is now competing with the device in a way that in days of yore they were not competing with something we were reading, or writing in a notepad.
The physicality of knowledge production has changed radically. Some parts of it (chatting on the Internet! universal and cheap dissemination of publications!) are good. Other parts of it (having a full-time distraction engine in one's workplace) rather less so!
When you start to think about the vastness of used-to-be-ordinary things that no one generally bothered to write down because they were ordinary, you begin to see why historians are sometimes so uncertain (or prone to argument) about so many fundamentals of everyday life. Think about your example of essays submitted as typewritten papers. There are so many things that go along with that--the question of whether an unstapled paper could be saved only scratches the surface. Was it ok if there were liquid paper-corrections? How many of those were too many? (And of course, for the unartful who went too quickly after applying it or who clumsily got it on the rest of the paper, a retype almost certain awaited.) What process did you use to write the whole thing? Type the first draft, despite the errors? Turning in physical copies, often unsurveilled or to a box somewhere, opened up a whole raft of lies and excuses--the paper was damaged, the paper was lost, the paper was destroyed; the paper was shoved under the door, honest! And you couldn't just say "well, print another copy"--it wasn't routine to photocopy a paper before submission (that could get expensive if it was a longer paper--in grad school I was responsible for providing copies of my first-year seminar paper to the entire department faculty which would have been $75 to photocopy or some then-absurd amount, so instead I had to sit in the teeny-tiny windowless carbon-copy room and personally run off 35 copies while my head was reeling from the ink. And so on--a vast array of material practices that interlocked cultural practices that interlocked ways of thinking (drafting was just vastly different before cut-and-paste on a word processor), and all of it will be exceptionally hard to describe in only a few more decades, because a lot of the materially important details will never have been described in an enduring way.
One moment like this for me was learning about “paper rooms” at conferences, where you could go and buy copies of papers to take home! And all of these little frictions and affordances tell us a lot about why publishing mattered, the political economy of academia, the habitus of the professional world, etc--and yes imagine then trying to recapture, say, FDR’s understanding of Japan and of US capabilities!
Yeah, exactly. Honestly, that would be a great book--the intimate materiality of the 20th Century state at some very particular point. I don't know that anyone has really done that.
These are the differences that I was too young to see. Even in high school, the word processor (remember the word processor?) had made it expected that you typed your own paper and caught typos with the spellcheck. The hired typist profession mentioned in the main post was long dead before my college days. In fact, I am not sure if I ever heard of it before.
I used to temp in grad school. To get hired by the temp agency, I had to pass a high words-per-minute test with minimum errors on a typewriter, even though at home I was doing my writing already on a personal computer. (And printing on a dot-matrix printer, another lost technology.) The expectation was that you would be sent out to jobs where you were typing for managers and bosses, or maybe doing data entry. (In the end, I did both.)
The ubiquity of paper takes me back. But I think that there was an academy without screens is the dominant memory for me. At my first academic teaching post, in 1982, our offices had a desk, a phone, and, if you wanted, a typewriter. The university had a computer, but it was in another building. And it is hard for me to explain how, for me, the desktop computer + internet has changed the faculty office, not in terms of less paper or more access to information or much much faster communication, but to where our attention is directed, to the student or colleague who has dropped by (this happens every few weeks or so now, rather than routine) who is now competing with the device in a way that in days of yore they were not competing with something we were reading, or writing in a notepad.
The physicality of knowledge production has changed radically. Some parts of it (chatting on the Internet! universal and cheap dissemination of publications!) are good. Other parts of it (having a full-time distraction engine in one's workplace) rather less so!
When you start to think about the vastness of used-to-be-ordinary things that no one generally bothered to write down because they were ordinary, you begin to see why historians are sometimes so uncertain (or prone to argument) about so many fundamentals of everyday life. Think about your example of essays submitted as typewritten papers. There are so many things that go along with that--the question of whether an unstapled paper could be saved only scratches the surface. Was it ok if there were liquid paper-corrections? How many of those were too many? (And of course, for the unartful who went too quickly after applying it or who clumsily got it on the rest of the paper, a retype almost certain awaited.) What process did you use to write the whole thing? Type the first draft, despite the errors? Turning in physical copies, often unsurveilled or to a box somewhere, opened up a whole raft of lies and excuses--the paper was damaged, the paper was lost, the paper was destroyed; the paper was shoved under the door, honest! And you couldn't just say "well, print another copy"--it wasn't routine to photocopy a paper before submission (that could get expensive if it was a longer paper--in grad school I was responsible for providing copies of my first-year seminar paper to the entire department faculty which would have been $75 to photocopy or some then-absurd amount, so instead I had to sit in the teeny-tiny windowless carbon-copy room and personally run off 35 copies while my head was reeling from the ink. And so on--a vast array of material practices that interlocked cultural practices that interlocked ways of thinking (drafting was just vastly different before cut-and-paste on a word processor), and all of it will be exceptionally hard to describe in only a few more decades, because a lot of the materially important details will never have been described in an enduring way.
One moment like this for me was learning about “paper rooms” at conferences, where you could go and buy copies of papers to take home! And all of these little frictions and affordances tell us a lot about why publishing mattered, the political economy of academia, the habitus of the professional world, etc--and yes imagine then trying to recapture, say, FDR’s understanding of Japan and of US capabilities!
Yeah, exactly. Honestly, that would be a great book--the intimate materiality of the 20th Century state at some very particular point. I don't know that anyone has really done that.
These are the differences that I was too young to see. Even in high school, the word processor (remember the word processor?) had made it expected that you typed your own paper and caught typos with the spellcheck. The hired typist profession mentioned in the main post was long dead before my college days. In fact, I am not sure if I ever heard of it before.
I used to temp in grad school. To get hired by the temp agency, I had to pass a high words-per-minute test with minimum errors on a typewriter, even though at home I was doing my writing already on a personal computer. (And printing on a dot-matrix printer, another lost technology.) The expectation was that you would be sent out to jobs where you were typing for managers and bosses, or maybe doing data entry. (In the end, I did both.)
Excellent work.