Not My Type
Faster text input technologies are set to increase the speed of communication, but are they cramping our ability to write and think deeply?
Paul C Cumming
Christopher Latham Scholes, Senator and newspaper editor, was hunched over his invention in the semi-dark of his primitive Milwaukee machine shop. It was late 1868 and he’d just decided to patent his new device — the device he’d started calling a ‘Type Writer’. If only it would work for more than half a scholarly sentence. Scholes was listening to its steel typebars swing as he stuttered through combinations of common letters — TH…SH…OU… — waiting for the machine’s metal arms to tangle and the entire chassis of the instrument to seize.
Eventually Scholes — with the help of his financial backer’s brother and a gun manufacturer’s mechanic — did fall upon a solution to the machine’s fondness for jamming. The solution was what we now know as the QWERTY keyboard, a keyboard layout that worked with the mechanical limitations of Scholes’ original device by spreading out common combinations of letters. Voila, no more crossing typebars. The QWERTY keyboard design has gifted the written word with 135 years of un-ergonomic typing since its mass production in 1878, and we’ve happily bent ourselves around this arrangement ever since. QWERTY’s the layout that Hemingway would sit down to every morning “and bleed”, the layout that helped Capote produce his “inner music”, that has been at the fingertips of some of the greatest writers of last century (and the start of this one). But new technologies are now arising, technologies designed explicitly for speed and mobility. Technologies that remind us just how old QWERTY really is.
The most recent and popular of these new keyboard designs is called KALQ. Developed by research teams at Scotland’s St. Andrews University, the Max Planck Institute and Montana Tech, KALQ is a keyboard system that has been designed for mobile devices — and quite unlike QWERTY — to complement human movement. It seems somehow fitting that KALQ does this by making use of one our more distinguishing evolutionary features — our opposable thumbs. The KALQ design is comprised of two small key grids (both with the approximate diameter of a thumb), has two space bars, and key placements carefully chosen for efficiency. A far cry from QWERTY’s modus operandi of ‘not-making-the-metal-arms-hit-one-another’, KALQ is a tiny triumph in finger choreography, a complex distillation of bivariate quadratic functions and error correction models. Dr. Per Ola Kristensson, the man most responsible for the development of KALQ, puts it simply when asked about KALQ’s most defining feature:
“Speed is the primary factor.”
KALQ is fast. On a mobile device KALQ is around 34% faster on average than QWERTY. Kristensson honed its efficiency by composing his layout around simultaneous thumb movement, on similar movements that we might have used to shape clay bowls, to peel fruit, and that we now use to text and tweet.
“Economists actually have a term” Kristensson says, “called ‘qwertynomics’ or path dependency, this idea that we’re only stuck with suboptimal interfaces because we’re so used to it, we’re time invested…”
But as the culture of mobile technology continues to cover the globe like weather, our dependence on the QWERTY keyboard seems to be fast disappearing. Modern symbol-based interfaces like Kristensson’s ‘Shapewriter’ and Swype Inc.’s ‘SWYPE’ are wildly popular worldwide, coming in-built with every Google and Android phone respectively, and both descending directly from shorthand — a speed-enhancing technique originating from 12th Century bible replication. KALQ is yet another leap forward in the same direction; a technology that further bends machinery around human movement, that enables us to communicate faster and easier, and now most importantly — wherever we may be. Mobile technology’s omnipresence is now almost complete — it’s reached a point of near-inescapability. In the last three years I’ve been walked into by more people on the street than in the rest of my life combined. More often than not, when someone’s elbow meets my ribs by accident, they’re on their phone. In the US, around 25% of car accidents are text related. We aren’t enamoured with mobile technology, we’re utterly dependent on it. According to recent studies by Jumio and Versapak, the world where 72% of Americans are within 5 feet of their mobile at all times and where 51% of UK residents say they experience ‘extreme tech anxiety’ when separated from their phones isn’t from a straight to video sci-fi film starring Dolph Lundgren . It’s right now; it’s the world that spells the beginning of the end for the QWERTY keyboard. Neil Papworth sent the world’s first SMS twenty years ago, and this year admitted this year that “using a small keyboard on a phone isn’t fun! If you can get away with typing less, people will do it…it’s the need for speed!” QWERTY’s been tolerated for over a century, but is still only truly appropriate and efficient on a desktop or laptop. And today everybody’s mobile; if you’re using anything less than a smartphone, anything without a touch screen or a 5 megapixel camera, then you may as well be fumbling for your pager in the same leather briefcase you keep your minidisc player in. The world is mobile, and the growing success of technologies best suited to this world — technologies like KALQ — are increasingly shaping the way language exists.
And this ‘reshaping’ is very much underway already. Naomi Baron is a Professor of linguistics at American University in Washington. Back in 2005 Baron was already perplexed at some of her students’ reading and research skills. They were bright, certainly not ‘illiterate’, rather just ‘aliterate’. They could read just fine; they just didn’t want to. Or more to the point, they didn’t need to. Baron wrote in the LA Times about how abridgement of texts was “taken to extremes, with micro-novels being sent as text messages on cell phones.” Nicholas Carr, technology expert and author of The Shallows, similarly augmented the oceanic metaphor of ‘surfing the net’, as he tracked his attention span’s steady erosion in the digital age:
“Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.”
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The transmission of information is moving faster than ever before and the quantity of information being moved is of an astronomical volume. Yet the packages of information are growing ever smaller.
What I’d really like to ask ‘Siri’ is: What will happen to the quality of the written word in a world where mobile devices are the fundamental method of communication, and the interfaces we use — like the burgeoning KALQ — are optimised primarily for speed?
Dr. Per Ola Kristensson believes that the written word will survive just fine, that so long as there’s technological cohesion between different communication devices, then something like KALQ can be a complementary technology to something like QWERTY.
“…you don’t explicitly have to change modes, if you want to speak to input text you can do that, if you want to gesture you can do that, if you want to type maybe you can even do that if you have a keyboard in front of you…”
Kristensson’s optimistic about the public’s willingness to “fluently fuse different modalities” and change modality (device) depending on the nature of the message being communicated. But his optimism certainly isn’t universally held. To repeat the words of Neil Papworth, the world’s first texter: “If you can get away with typing less, people will do it.”[sic]
This is precisely Professor Naomi Baron’s fear when asked about KALQ, that as a written language technology designed for short volleys of information, it will “encourage people to believe that the written word (and the thought behind it) doesn’t matter as much as speed and ease of production.” The allure of technologies like KALQ is well justified — they are, as Kristensson describes them, “flexible and fluid systems”, systems that have been meticulously designed to complement human physiology and maximise efficiency.
However these language input technologies are part of a repackaging of the written language, a repackaging of meaningful communication into a series of smaller boxes, where longform, expository prose is in real danger of becoming outmoded in the same way the QWERTY keyboard is. I’m not sure that I want to, for example, investigate the future of written communication as fast as I can — or in the same amount of characters it would take to text a friend an invitation to come over and watch Total Recall. Favouring the optimisation of speed above all else in these new technologies is a direct threat to our continuing ability to truly read and understand, and leads us further down the path of time-friendly ‘power browsing’, quick replies and instant messages.
In the same way that “automobiles discourage walking”, Professor Naomi Baron claims that when it comes to communication and technology, we have a tendency towards the path of least resistance. Nietzsche, after feeding his own ideas through a typewriter, concluded that “writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts”. And our equipment seems, again, on the brink of change. In order to keep substantial writing from being mercilessly condensed by the speed and omnipresence of mobile technology, we have to recognise our natural favouritism towards faster, shorter writing. Particularly in a world that increasingly demands it. Christopher Scholes recalibrated the keyboards of typewriters around the machine’s existing physical limitations, preserving his original design and giving the world 135 years of relatively unquestioned typing. As we rush to make communication ever faster, we should learn, as Scholes did with the typewriter, to work with imperfection and recognise ourselves as creatures essentially prone to choosing the easiest road. Technologies like KALQ are a better physiological match to human beings than QWERTY, and undoubtedly make for more efficient communication in a mobile world. But if we want to preserve engaged and considered writing in more than 160 characters, we’ll have to resist some of mobile technology’s hungry speed and continue to work with what we have. QWERTY may not always be exactly what we want, but if thoughtful long form writing is to survive the mobile age, its certainly closer to what we need.
Background image courtesy of Chaojoker, Wikipedia commons.
