Millennials and the generation now coming to be known as “gen z” are sometimes referred to as “digital natives.” The usefulness of the term is arguable, as there are many factors other than age that play into whether one grows up with access to computers/devices and thus the online world we are supposedly the natives of, but there are still marked differences in the way many young adults today interact with technology compared to members of previous generations. Generally rhetoric around this concept centers on phones or social media, but today’s readings made me consider it in terms of a foundational aspect of home computing (even typing the phrase sounds so quaint) that I and maybe many of my generation take for granted: word-processing.

“It was like having a chronic pain, a debilitating brain disease, or insufferable stress banished forever. I could begin with what interested me, have fun with it, and continue to have fun until I was finished.” The way Barry B. Longyear describes the advent of word-processing into a life restricted to type-writing resonated with me. The second half of this quote is exactly how I write everything, from academic work to personal essays to fiction—even writing this reading response, I began by transcribing the quote itself, then considered where I wanted to start in framing it, moved slightly up in my Google doc, and began. Doubtless I will pause, rework things, delete others, before I am done. (And here I am, adding and changing even after cutting/pasting from Google docs to WordPress.)

But even though I didn’t have much access to computers or word processors for most of my middle school and high school education (I attended a Waldorf school, whose philosophical underpinnings recommend restricting access to technology, and anyway I am right on the cusp of the age when high school students began regularly submitting their work printed rather than handwritten), I have never felt the crushing weight that Longyear describes in the first half of the above quote. The use of word processing feels second-nature, the idea that you can begin wherever you find the joy and fascination in a written piece obvious. The words on the page appear in straight lines, one after another, yet the idea that composition must be actually linear feels deeply alien to me. When I do write by hand, the pages are always a mess of arrows pointing to blocks at the side of the page, sentences or phrases written sideways to be inserted before other sentences and phrases, stars and symbols leading to the backs of the previous page, whole paragraphs circled and marked so I know to move them later in the piece when I do, inevitably, type it up. I always believed this would be true of me no matter the era, and I’m sure that the linearity of type-writing did not mean that every writer thought linearly—if they had, type-writing would not have been such a terrible burden, as they would have lined their sentences up neatly as they occurred to them and never had to produce more than one draft. However, I wonder to what degree the knowledge that nothing is ever set in stone (on the side of a sphinx, for example, to touch on Robinson) has affected the way ideas occur, the way my brain—and the brains of my contemporaries—sorts through them.