Toward a New Nostalgia

In The Iron Whim, author Darren Wershler-Henry puts great emphasis on the interplay between writer and machine. For him, the writer’s product is unquestionably intertwined with the mechanism on which he is writing – implying that the same product could not be produced on a different machine. Were Kerouac’s On the Road written using a computer, for example, Wershler-Henry claims a very different product would have emerged.
I would certainly agree that, in writing, the media influences the message – as does the media of any artistic endeavor. However, whereas Wershler-Henry seems to view the demise of the typewriter as an unfortunate end of a nostalgic era, I would contend that the end of the typewriter era is, on net, more positive than negative. I don’t think he would disagree with me, but I would like to take this post to shatter his romantic view of the typewriter.
As a student of economics, I tend to look at everything in terms of opportunity costs. Though the computer replaced Hollywood notion of a penniless writer, hunched over his typewriter, pipe in mouth and scotch in hand, toiling late into the night to finish his manuscript, this image would not have disappeared were it economically viable to keep it in existence. However, with computer technology being so vastly superior to the typewriter, it was only economically feasible that one should replace the other. For those true romantics, use of the typewriter is still an option (just as use of the pencil was still the main option for Thoreau); yet for most writers, the enormous benefits of digitization trump their romantic attraction to their Selectrics.
These new technologies cause us to call into question the direction of causality between the creative process and technological advances. That is to say: have increases in technology created better writing, or has writing actually worsened as technology has become better? Critics abound on both sides of this argument, making this a very difficult question to answer. True, Shakespeare didn’t have even a typewriter to help him with his manuscripts, and he’s considered one of the greatest writers of all time – and Dante and Milton had the same handicap. Likewise, Scott Fitzgerald and Tennessee Williams wrote all of their works without a computer. These days, very few writers even consider the option of not using a computer to aid them in their writing.
It seems, however, that it would be impossible to make an objective judgment of which writers are better – each generation (let alone, each writer) comes up with such diverse material, it would be difficult to judge one in terms of the other. So when judging whether the computer (thus, the decline of typewriter usage) has caused a decline in writing, it must be decided that this is not a fair value judgment. One must simply acknowledge that writing has evolved into something completely new due to changing technology, and accept the beauty of it for what it is.