Nietzsche once proposed that what he wrote was indelibly affected by the medium in which he wrote it — that what he came up with freehand, using pen and paper, was fundamentally different than what he composed on a mechanical typewriter. It wasn’t only that it felt different to wield a pen and trace letters across a page than it did to hammer away at clacking metal keys. There was something inherent in the rhythm, in the contrasting speeds and varying momentums, that seemed to alter the creative flow.
In short, the tool the writer used changed the writer’s mind.
Earlier this week, Larry Tesler, a famed computer engineer who was heavily involved in the early days of Silicon Valley in the 1960s, died at the age of 74. Tesler spent his career working at a number of the most high-profile tech companies in the business, including Xerox, Amazon and Yahoo, and was hired by Steve Jobs to work at Apple, where he served as chief scientist and spent more than 15 years. Tesler’s speciality was something called user interface engineering — the design of electronic, mobile or personal computer systems to make them more responsive and intuitive and therefore easier for people to understand and use.
Tesler’s best-known design innovation was the copy-paste feature. Introduced in the early 1980s on Apple’s Lisa and Macintosh computers, the novel idea allowed users to highlight text and replicate it elsewhere, instantly. It was inspired, according to an obituary for Tesler by the BBC, by “the old method of editing in which people would physically cut portions of printed text and glue them elsewhere,” as was done by editors of newspapers. Tesler’s design philosophy was that computers should be easier and more straightforward for the people who use them; he felt that shuffling text around, moving portions from one place to another, would streamline the writing process and improve word processor programs overall.
He was right that copy-paste would make writing on computers easier: If you can no longer remember using word processors in the days before the feature, think back to the early iterations of the iPhone, which shipped without it. As soon as Tesler devised the function, copy-paste became indispensable. At the same time, he could hardly have foreseen the extent of the function’s influence — the way that, once text could be transplanted anywhere at whim, writing on a computer became a fundamentally different creative process than writing any other way.
Drafting this piece, almost without even thinking about it, I’ve copied and pasted a dozen different times
Before copy-paste, using a computer was remarkably similar to using an electric or mechanical typewriter, with the obvious difference that on a computer mistakes can be fixed and text can be deleted. But copy-pasting text had a radical effect on the editing process, allowing changes to the overarching structure of a document to be implemented on the fly, quotes from other documents to be sourced and cited effortlessly, and anything from a unique character to a whole book chapter to be instantaneously relocated. Once you get used to writing this way, it becomes an essential component of the writing process. Drafting this piece, almost without even thinking about it, I’ve copied and pasted a dozen different times.
As Nietzsche intuited about the distinction between pen and paper and typewriters, there are enormous, almost indescribable differences between writing on a computer and writing any other way — due, in large part, to Tesler’s innovation. Though of course it no longer happens often, when I do have occasion to write something without recourse to my laptop, committing the words to a blank piece of paper, that absence of the copy-paste function is deeply and immediately felt. Copy-paste has a seismic effect on the writing process: it changes the rhythm, the flow, of the writing and, like the shift from freehand to typewriter, changes the writer’s mind.
Copyright Postmedia Network Inc., 2020
