lazer-guided commentaries

I’ve just started The Golden Notebook, by Doris Lessing, and have just found an image (p.68, the description of Anna’s room, which mentions the typewriter and what Anna uses it for) which caused an interesting thought. The way I see typewriters — and mid-twentieth-century room layouts in general, with their rotary telephones and old-fashioned everything — is very different from the way I see computers. Typewriters, rotary telephones, gas stovetops, all these are machines at which one performs some task. Typewriters, of course, are aids in writing, which is a fairly abstract task, but nonetheless well-defined. Computers, on the other hand, don’t really exist at all as separate objects for me: the moment I start thinking about the computer, I cease to see its external form and instead experience it as a separate realm of sorts. It takes a conscious effort to see the computer as a machine, as a tool, as a typewriter, and when I do, it’s novel and interesting, like an alien taste or a poem. The notion of what a computer is good for is so deeply embedded in the way I see the world that it’s as if there’s some bridge between where the (self that sits in a chair and has a physical body) is, and where the (self that interacts with the computer) is. The way I see typewriters doesn’t involve that kind of connection. Perhaps if I used typewriters every day I’d see them differently, perhaps no longer consciously seeing the distinction between the machine and the writing. In fact, perhaps that’s what’s happening with computers: perhaps I am not seeing the distinction between the computer and the computation. Or perhaps I’m seeing interaction with a computer as a conversation, almost as if with another person. One doesn’t converse with typewriters: they don’t talk back.